How Keith David Felt About John Carpenter's The Thing Ending

John Carpenter's 1982 horror film "The Thing" was truly ahead of its time, bombing at the box office when it went head-to-head with the far more optimistic alien movie "E.T.", alienating audiences who couldn't handle its suffocating depiction of paranoia among the ranks of an Antarctic research station. Now, forty years later, "The Thing" is recognized not just as one of John Carpenter's best films, but as one of the best horror movies of all time, period.

While the consensus has turned on "The Thing," there is still one thing that no one can agree on: does the Thing survive at the end of the film? In its daring final sequence, Kurt Russell's MacReady burns down the station in a desperate attempt to put the Thing on ice so that it can't infect the whole planet. As he sits down in the smoldering ruins of the station, Keith David's Childs approaches, having disappeared before the climactic showdown. MacReady and Childs eye each other cautiously, neither trusting the other is actually human, but both are too tired and worn down to do anything about it.

It's a bracing and bleak ending that willfully denies giving the audience any feeling of catharsis they might have been hoping for after the previous 100 minutes of dread and terror, leaving the audience with more questions than answers. Is Childs the Thing? Is MacReady actually the Thing? Are neither of them the Thing and they're doomed to die in the cold, distrusting one another? If you polled a million fans about what this ending means, you'd get a million different answers.

Even Keith David, who was right there in the snow with Carpenter and Kurt Russell at the end of "The Thing," is still reflecting over its ending, and what it means not just for the "The Thing," but film history writ large.

Looking back on the moment in an interview with The Guardian, Keith David talked about how the experience on set was "eye-opening," and how his feelings towards the film's ending have evolved over the years:

"What I didn't think at the time, and wasn't thinking about until later, was how, traditionally, the Black man is not the guy who lasts to the end. This was one of the first movies where the Black guy lasts to the final scene. I don't think I'm the only brother who's ever survived in a horror or sci-fi movie, but I'm certainly one of the few. It was great foresight on John's part."

"The Thing" was Keith David's first film role ever, and getting to play such a pivotal part in a totemic film that defies genre conventions is a rare honor, and helped to propel David to one of Hollywood's hardest working actors, with over 400 acting and voice roles over the past 40 years. Over that time, David has head a lot of theories from fans about the ending, and he shared his own thoughts as well:

"I hear lots of theories about the final sequence. We played it various ways; as if I was the Thing, as if it was MacReady, and as if it was neither of us. People wonder why there's no breath coming out of my mouth in the cold after the station burns down, and say it had to be me. But I say that if I'm downstage of the fire you wouldn't see steam coming from my mouth because there's too much heat. That's how I explain it, but it's your movie, your experience. The Thing is whoever you think it is."

In our modern age of paranoia, fueled by the internet and perceived enemies all around the globe, the admission that "the Thing is whoever you think it is" rings eerily. If only we could do a blood test to uncover the monsters hiding among us.