Kurt Russell's The Thing Had Such Realistic Effects It Caused A Production Headache

Nowadays, it might be easier to spot the human from the constantly adapting and ever-absorbing space beastie that is 1982's "The Thing" in John Carpenter's beloved classic, but back then, it was difficult to tell who was friend and who was foe. The horror master's suspenseful snowbound nightmare had audiences trying to figure out who was who, right up until the glorious ending that still has us, as Kurt Russell's MacReady puts it, waiting and seeing what happens. Imagine, then, what it was like to be one of the stars trying to bring the story to life and struggling to see what the real deal was. In an interview with The Guardian, one of Carpenter's regular go-tos, Keith David, who played Childs, and one of the last remaining survivors of Outpost 31 (possibly), revealed that the special effects used in production looked so realistic, he couldn't tell the difference between the real version and the imitation.

"It was magnificent being around these special effects. It wasn't like today with CGI. The dogs unnerved me, though," David confessed. "One morning, we walked into the studio and there were two dogs sitting there — and they seemed so real." The canines in question were created for the jaw-dropping, limb-snapping sequence that saw the previously hunted-down husky (played by the legendary animal star, Jed) get caught in the act of trying to absorb and imitate other dogs in the kennel. Even now, it remains a gruesome sequence, and one that, according to David, almost led the project to come under fire and face serious accusations.

There have been numerous horror films that have been executed so perfectly that people believed them to be real. In the case of "The Thing" and its stomach-churning handling of dogs turning into aliens, David recalled that Carpenter's masterpiece was initially accused of abusing the animals for the final project. "As I remember it, the dogs looked so realistic we got a notice from the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals to make sure we weren't being cruel to them."

Accusations aimed at horror films weren't anything new at this point, as just two years before, director Ruggero Deodato was accused of murdering his cast following the release of "Cannibal Holocaust," only for him to prove that they were very much alive. While he did escape those accusations, he was fined for animal cruelty after a pig, a spider, a monkey, and a turtle were all killed on camera. Thankfully, in Carpenter's case, no animals were harmed in the making of "The Thing," but it didn't stop David from being freaked out like the rest of us by the final product.

"When I first saw the movie, what really got me was that first morphing transformation when the Thing absorbed the dogs in the kennels and the image of the dog's pink head came out of the goo. I was under my seat." He wasn't the only one, and even now, more than 40 years later, he certainly won't be the last.