So... who is NOT human at the end of "The Thing"(1982)?

I worked on the set of Vampires (1998) where it was filmed in New Mexico. Fresh off the flop that was "Escape from L.A.(1996), Carpenter was just going though the motions. Watching him do his thing (no pun intended) you could tell his heart wasn't in it. He wasn't just his normal pathological asshole self. He was also depressed AF. Just trying to get through filming of it. It was as if he saw "From Dusk Till Dawn"(1996) as got excited by the promise of that movie, like the rest of us. Not to mention that it was heavily inspired by the work of John Carpenter, especially "The Thing." So you can't blame the man for wanting to cash in on that movie a bit. Yet, as the movie produced unfolded, there was this feeling that this movie was hat and not cattle (all cape, and no fangs?) It was derivative, and simply not interesting enough to fuel Carpenter's ambitions. He was coming off one two many bad experiences and flops, like a certain movie he made with proud-to-be-a-sociopath Chevy Chase. But that strangely made him VERY accessible to his fans.

Case in point: he opened up about the ending of "The Thing" at an after-party of sorts with cast and crew (I did some production work on the movie, and if you blink and miss it, you can see me running in a building as a vampire suffering from the sun, a long with a bunch of other extras). At this party, Daniel Baldwin was his standoffish self, playing darts with a couple of other crew members. The late great Maximilian Schell from The "Black Hole"(1979) fame was sitting a table, amused with himself, and he flipped through a scrapbook of sorts that was this portfolio of sorts of the works of John Carpenter. In a deep accent, he remarked out loud to Carpenter standing nearby, "Hmm.... 'John Carpenter's Escape from New York', 'John Carpenter's Starman', John Carpenter's Christine'. My, my John, you like to hear your name, don't you?" He was clearly teasing, but John got visibly annoyed, embarrassed. He bristled, and said something like, "It's the studios, that make me do it. Okay?" and walked away with his bottle of beer. A lot of weed was going through that set, and I'm sure other *ahem*, substances. But a depressed Carpenter, who was now dinged by Schnell, wandered over to us group of crew members and extras and joined the conversation. Maybe to repair his bruised ego a bit? Someone dared to ask him about "The Thing", and he entertained conversation about it for a bit. Very quickly someone asked him about, who was "The Thing" at the end. Remember now, this is before the internet and all that. It was around 1997, at the dawn of the information super highway. So I don't think everyone was as worried about speaking their minds as we are today. And who was "The Thing" at the end of the movie wasn't really a debate back then, not the way it was now. So Carpenter said, "The studio rejected the darker ender. We had to reshoot a few different ways. I wanted something along the lines of Donald Sutherland at the end of the Invasion of Body Snatchers remake. I loved it that a movie could end on a dark note. No hope. No bullshit. We were entering the Reagan years by the time The 'Thing' came around, so optimism and all. Nihilism was a Watergate theme. The studios wanted to get past that. I disagreed. I still saw a lot about America to be unhappy about. Not everyone was feeling riding the wave of hope. I figured there was only one place for the movie left to go. The Thing isn't evil. It's wasn't personal. It was just an animal from space trying to survive like any other animal. They never were going to beat it. So I thought it would be funny for two things to confront each other. Unsure of the other. Until it was clear that they both trying to bullshit each other. And they toast to their victory, and get ready to hibernate until the search party shows up." I spoke up and said, "You mean, they are BOTH not human." Carpenter responded, "That ending is still there if you pay attention. But the studio made me water it down. But I would change it to what they want if they pay me enough money to do another one. But the movie tanked so they really don't want to do another." The conversation moved onto other subjects, but that stayed with me. And the truth is that the ending of the movie IS whatever Carpenter decides it will be. He can change his mind, if the paycheck is big enough. As an ending, I support this clever trick ending that feels like something only M.Night Shyamalan could dream of. If you pay close attention: Mac battles the Blair-Thing. The point of that dog-appendage popping out from Blair's side isn't just to look cool (though it does). In f/x cut from the movie, it starts to go for Mac, in one last effort to survive. That whole iconic f/x sequence was shot in post AFTER Carpenter and f/x artist Rob Bottin begged for more money. So they didn't get everything they wanted. But I imagine in a dream world where Carpenter had more time and money to finish the movie in the way he wanted (it was on paper way more ambitious than what we got) we would've seen the dog-appendage grab Mac just as the Blair-Thing dies in the explosion. Interestingly enough, the horror movie "Night of the Creeps"(1986) by cult filmmaker Fred Dekker has this very similar ending. The anti-hero of that movie, a grizzled detective willing to (also) burn down the world to get his foe, goes to battle with his version of a Blair-Thing, and as that blob of alien flesh explodes, it manages to get him at the very last moment... giving the creature a chance to survive at the end in the movie's nihilistic ending (well, in the director's cut version). So Dekker must have spoken to Carpenter, or at least was cunning enough to figure that out. As the movie has a lot of Carpenter easter eggs and homages there. I digress, but had "The Thing" been allowed to be everyTHING it could be, I'm guessing that much would've been clear... that Mac blows up the monster but NOT BEFORE it makes a mad dash for him. Leaving you wondering AT FIRST if Mac survives. For all the bullshit theories out there about whether Mac is The Thing, if he is it wasn't until just after the battle with Blair at the end. Which fits the ending. The Mac we see at the end is not just oddly subdued. He's a little TOO content with the situation. Then Childs shows up with his bullshit cover story, "I thought I saw Blair, so I followed him, got lost and blah, blah, blah" Yeah right, in those conditions he would have freezed. No Blair got him, and Child hid out until shit blew over. As he tries to bullshit Mac, who was a thing at that point, you can see the Mac-Thing is worried. He's not sure, at first, if Child's is human or not. He is armed with a flamethrower. A Thing could totally blow away another thing if he had to. So at first Mac is cautious. Being coy, trying to figure Childs out. But then notice that Mac DOES figure it out. And he relaxes. However, the Childs' thing still is worried. He's sweating about whether or not Mac is suspicious of him. Even though I'm one of those fans who like to think that a victim of The Thing doesn't fully know if he's a monster, I think it is obvious that an assimilated human knows on some level that it likely infected by that point. As a thing-clone of a person, that person knows they are a monster on a dissociative level, but given that they are a perfect replica of a person, you can be in denial of it (that makes this movie truly horrifying, and cool AF). Again, this movie was heavily influenced by the superior IMAO "Invasion of the Body Snatchers"(1978) from a few years earlier. In any case, as the Childs-thing struggles with what to do about Mac, Mac's gesture of offering him a drink seems to cue the Child-thing into realizing that, "Shit... he's a thing too! Damn, we won." And that finally moment is of Mac chuckling about the irony of it all, as these two docile creatures enjoy a victory toast. But of course, someone could offer Carpenter a boat load of money and it could be whatever you want it to be. Listening, Hollywood? ;)