Movie Endings Explained – John Carpenter’s The Thing (video)

Last Updated on July 31, 2021

Movie endings, they’re usually pretty straight forward right? Everything pays off, the main characters learn something, and our heroes ride off into the sunset. Sometimes though, we don’t get the typical ending from a movie, we get something much more nuanced, complex and open ended. The kind of endings that leave things up in the air for all of us to debate and theorise on until we’re blue in the face. With Movie Endings Explained, we aim to delve into some of the more ambiguous and mysterious endings to films that have left audiences scratching their heads for years, and to attempt to explain them. In most cases, a definitive answer isn’t really there, so we definitely want to hear from YOU on how you interpret the various endings we’ll be discussing with this series.

This time we dive multiple-heads-first into John Carpenter‘s sci-fi horror classic, THE THING. Initially somewhat of a disappointment upon release in 1982, the paranoia wrought movie focused on a group of Antarctic researchers fighting off an assimiliating alien lifeform went on to become a cult favourite. Some films don’t age well, THE THING seems to only get better as time goes on. The last scene of the film between Kurt Russell (ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK, THE HATEFUL EIGHT) and Keith David (THEY LIVE, PLATOON) has been the source of fan debate for decades, were either of the two men really human, or did one of them fall prey to the Thing, mimicked by the mysterious parasite? We delve into the nihilistic ending that John Carpenter left us with and try to find some clues that point to the true answer!

Who do you think is The Thing at the end of the movie, if either of the two men?