10 Black Characters That Refused To Die First

by Ryan Lynch

1. The Thing - Childs (played by Keith David)

Things at an American Antarctic research station have gone all Agatha Christie and now no one knows who to trust. With a deadly shape-shifting alien meandering about, trust is a commodity that's hard to come by. Fast forward through some amazing visual effects and increasing paranoia and the survivors find themselves isolated and hopeless. By the end of the film resident badasses MacReady and Childs are the only ones left.

Director John Carpenter ends the film on an ambiguous note. Were Childs or MacReady really human? Or was one of them merely an intergalactic parasite playing dress up? There has been a long standing debate as to whether Childs was human at the end, and it wasn't until the (pretty, but not spectacularly) awful 2011 prequel that fans were set straight.

The prequel establishes that the alien organism extrudes all artificial implants and appendages like a pacemaker or an earring. At the end of The Thing, Childs can be seen with an earring in his ear.

 
Posted On: 
Contributor
Contributor

Ryan Lynch is a freelance journalist from the United States. He currently lives in Adelaide, Australia and writes for Adelaide-based music magazine Rip It Up. He wishes he could live like Hank Moody, but he watches too much TV and plays too many videogames to be that nonchalant.