The Thing
The Thing mistake picture

Factual error: When the infected Palmer starts his transformation into the Thing, he has a series of fits and the creature 'falls', or leaps upward onto the ceiling. Watch closely...you can see a piece of paneling also 'fall' upward, when it should have fallen down. (01:23:20)

Factual error: In the kennel scene, MacReady fires at least 7 shots from a pump shotgun. That particular shotgun can only hold 5.

Grumpy Scot

Factual error: At the beginning, MacReady dumps a tumbler of ice and scotch into his computer, which spews a shower of sparks as it shorts out. No electronic device, not even an old 1980s personal computer, sparks like that when shorted out. It simply goes dead.

Charles Austin Miller

Factual error: If you are at or near a pole, aka Antarctica, you either have 24-hour daylight, 24-hour night, or a kind of continual dusk-like condition. You don't have bright day and dark night at the same time.

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Mistakes

Plot hole: It's never explicitly stated or shown that the Thing reproduces with each victim until the movie is nearly over (when Palmer infects Windows). Most viewers figure it out from the context, but it's unclear just when and how the characters themselves have come to this conclusion. This was an inadvertent result of an editing decision and a visual goof: there is a deleted scene in which Blair explains much more directly that the Thing multiplies according to how many victims it takes, and in its place in the final film is a scene containing a computer simulation that director John Carpenter acknowledges was a failed attempt at explaining the organism's life cycle.

TonyPH

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Quotes

Clark: I dunno what the hell's in there, but it's weird and pissed off, whatever it is.

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Trivia

Trivia: Special Effects legend Stan Winston helped design and led the crew that operated the dog-thing, insisting that he was just assisting Rob Bottin on set.

Erik M.

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Questions

Question: Was the huge monster McReady encounters, and subsequently blows up, the actual "default" form of the Thing? After all, the correspondent DVD chapter is titled "The Real Thing". Yes, they do say that the Thing could've imitated millions of different lifeforms, but it must've had a form to begin with.

Answer: At the end, the large creature presented itself as an amalgam of beings it had absorbed-part Blair, part dog, and various other beings with tentacles, insect-like legs, and a worm-like body. I don't believe that we really ever see what its true form is, if it has one.

Erik M.

Answer: In the book, it was vaguely humanoid with blue rubbery skin, a head of writhing tentacles, and 3 glowing red eyes. There is a picture of it in Barlowe's Guide to Extraterrestrials by Wayne Barlowe.

Grumpy Scot

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