10 Movie Characters Whose Fates Are Never Resolved

7. Nauls - The Thing

John Carpenter's sci-fi horror The Thing is a masterpiece of tightly-wound suspense and grotesque imagery, as a group of American researchers find themselves attacked by a shape-shifting parasite in the remote Antarctic.

The film famously ends with protagonist MacReady (Kurt Russell) and Childs (Keith David) living out their final hours together, each succumbing to the mortal cold while unsure whether or not the other is The Thing.

It's a wonderfully bleak ending, except it entirely glosses over the fact that Nauls (T.K. Carter) literally just disappears from the movie moments before. After Garry (Donald Moffat) is attacked by a Thing-infected Blair (A. Wilford Brimley), we see Nauls head in the same direction, and that's all she wrote.

It's never made clear whether Nauls was assimilated by the Thing or died when MacReady detonated the station.

The movie's home video release did reveal, however, that the original plan was to have Nauls be assimilated, yet due to time and budgetary constraints, the scene was never filmed.

Both the film's novelisation and a comic book meanwhile have Nauls die in different ways - killing himself and being blown up respectively - so there's clearly no single canonical answer here.

It's tough to imagine a scenario where Nauls survived, but who are we to insist that he didn't end up joining Mac and Childs for a chilly, paranoiac swig of booze two minutes after the movie ended?