10 Deleted Scenes Which Totally Change Classic Films
1. The Thing Definitely Has An Unhappy Ending
John Carpenter didn't play by the usual Hollywood rulebook, which might account for the decade or so he spent out of the directing chair, before his recent return with underwhelming slasher flick The Ward. Before everything went a bit !*$% up, however, Carpenter presided over some of the most entertaining and daring genre flicks to ever come out of tinsel town including - but by no means limited to - anti-establishment sci-fi action movie Escape From New York, a critique of eighties Reaganomics disguised as an alien invasion yarn in They Live, and he actually started the slasher genre in the first place with his early work Halloween.
Perhaps his masterpiece, though, was 1982's The Thing, a remake of the fifties B-movie The Thing From Another World. Well, it's a remake more in name than actual content, since instead of simply updating the plant-based hulking monster than menaces an Alaskan military base he completely changed it, hewing closer to John W Campbell Jr's novella source material. Instead the titular Thing became a shapeshifting alien that could take on the form of any organic matter, creating an incredibly tense horror film where a group of stranded soldiers and scientists, cut off from the outside world by sub-zero temperatures, are slowly infiltrated by a malevolent extraterrestrial who plays on their paranoia and turns them all against each other.
Besides some impressive and/or gross practical special effects (which still hold up today!) and genuine terror you feel whilst watching it, John Carpenter's The Thing is best remembered for its ambiguous ending. The main hook of the movie for the majority of its running time is that you're never sure who's a human and who's an alien impostor, the viewer feeling the same distrust as the characters do about their friends and colleagues. Eventually the group gets whittled down to just Kurt Russell's MacReady and Keith David's Childs, who have managed to capture the monster and blow it up - its only weakness is fire - and their base along with it.
The film ends with the pair of survivors slowly freezing to death in the cold of the Alaskan tundra, but happy that they've managed to contain an alien invasion that could have wiped out all of humanity, had it made it further than their group of doomed character actors. The ambiguity is in whether or not you believe they really are Childs and MacReady, or if they're "things" - an ambiguity totally ruined by a deleted scene from the finale which saw one of the monsters, disguised as a husky, running off into the world to cause havok. Which was apparently too bleak, even for Carpenter.
What other deleted scenes totally change classic films? Share any we missed down in the comments.