8 Short Deleted Scenes That Almost Ruined Great Movies

2. The Thing Escapes - The Thing

The Deleted Scene: At the end of The Thing, Kurt Russell and Keith David sit in the burning wreck of their Antarctic research station swigging whiskey as the camera bleakly zooms out. The original cut, however, went a bit longer, showing the morning after as a sled dog, one of the titular shape-shifting alien's most favoured forms, runs away from the camp. It lives!

Why It's So Bad: Whether or not Childs (or MacReady) is actually the Thing at the end of the film still hasn't been definitively answered (you can focus on breath or the colour of coats all you want, but it's all very vague), meaning we can still talk about John Carpenter's minor masterpiece thirty years on with the same fervour as when it was released. In one moment this scene destroys all that ambiguity; Childs was the monster and MacReady was torn to shreds. There's still the downbeat implication of the proper ending (the alien won and will soon take over the whole world), but it's delivered without any of the tact.

Another, unreleased scene showed MacReady getting confirmed as a human back on the mainland, which is, if anything, worse.