10 Actors Who Just Disappeared From Movies
4. T.K. Carter - The Thing
In John Carpenter's The Thing, T.K. Carter plays the role of Nauls, the American Antarctic research station's resident cook. Nauls is one of the few surviving characters left deep into the movie's third act, when suddenly, 10 minutes from the end of the film, he walks off and is just... never seen again.
In his final seconds of screen time, Nauls sees a recently assimilated Garry (Donald Moffat) being dragged off by the Blair-Thing, and seemingly goes to investigate. Yet we never hear a scream, a scuffle, or really anything that would suggest he had also been consumed by the Thing.
Audiences likely assumed that Nauls was killed by the Thing somehow, and indeed, the film's original script actually featured a sequence in which Nauls was assimilated by Blair-Thing, after which tentacles exploded out of his body as MacReady (Kurt Russell) watched in horror.
Yet due to time and budgetary constraints, the complex effects sequence couldn't ever be completed, and so only a series of storyboards showing Nauls' intended fate have ever been released.