10 Horror Movie Mistakes Left In To Troll You

John Carpenter's The Thing is a film entirely concerned with keeping the viewer in a constant state of anxious unease, and it's a masterpiece in that regard.

It offers up an amusing, accidental eccentricity early on though, and one that's far away from the gloriously gnarly special effects madness that comes later.

One of the film's very first scenes sees MacReady (Kurt Russell) playing chess against a chess computer, and when he loses, he angrily pours his drink inside the machine, dubbing it a "cheating b**ch."

For the casual observer, the scene is supposed to suggest that MacReady is a sore loser and a bit of an impulsive hot-shot, but the chess game is edited in such a way that the computer actually did appear to cheat him out of a fair game.

The computer calls checkmate after making a final move with a black rook, but this is impossible: the previous shot of the chess board showed no way for the black rook to be within a single move of checkmate.

Ultimately, the scene seems to have been edited together by people without much knowledge of chess, or at least little inclination to get the details right. Sorry, chess fans.

And so, from the internal point-of-view of what we see and hear, MacReady was absolutely right to call the computer out for cheating.

It's possible Carpenter and co. simply didn't expect fans to obsess over such details, but either way, it's certainly kept them talking for the last four-ish decades.