As a Moments subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy. You Have Been Warned.
He's gonna have a hard time kissing his girlfriend from now on.
While we only got a few hints of the horrors that the Norwegian base had faced in the original The Thing (1982), the prequel shows just how nightmarish it was for them...
- The "Original" form of the Thing is essentially a man-sized arthropod. Unique among all it's other variations, it appears to function like a "normal" animal with a regular mouth, stomach, and womb-like area where it produces the imitation. Immediately it's already quite freaky because it's a massive, carnivorous bug, but as we see after it awakens it's also extremely fast and loud. This version of the creature serves to frighten you a bit before the real horror of the Thing's imitation abilities becomes apparent.
- The Split-Face scene. It is incredibly disturbing, and the fear of the victim is very horrifying to see.
- The durability of the Split-Face thing is amazing too. After being burned for a very long time, the cellular activity was still active enough to infect the Americans in the next film.
- The infection of Jonas right after is just as bad, if not worse. He's helping drag the unconscious Edvard into the rec room, when all of a sudden, Edvard's arm detaches from his body as a centipede with a tentacled mouth, and starts crawling up it's victim's arm. The fact that you can hear his muffled screams as the Thing latches onto his face does not help. Even worse, just before Kate burns him, you can start to see one of the thing's tentacles push through his cheek and one of his eyes. And when the Edvard-Adam Thing appears again, the two faces are unnaturally merged together, like they're trying to pull apart, and seem to be frozen in a scream.
- Knowing that this was how the Split-Face Thing originated, the Thingtopsy scene from the original film - as if it weren't creepy enough - becomes a bit more disturbing: the reason why Dr. Copper found so many "normal" organs inside the creature is that those were Adam's still-unassimilated innards he was handling.
- The way the Split-Face looks at Adam is terrifying, like the idea to absorb him just popped into it's head and then acted on it immediately. We see Adam attempt to get away, but between his injury and just how damn fast the monster is, there's nothing he can do.
- The Helicopter scene. One would think it's the one who was splattered with blood would be the Thing. However, we look up, and then we see his partners face crack in half, realistically.
- Try to imagine the horror and dread of Olav who saw that knowing he was doomed. Because the Griggs-Thing wasted no time unloading a heap of tentacles to absorb him.
- The Helicopter scene is a perfect microcosm of the pure horror of The Thing. Olav can barely react before the creature starts going to work on him, and even if he could it's a helicopter. There's nowhere to run, and nowhere to hide. It's another reminder that once a Thing wants you, there's nothing you can do to stop it.
- The scene where Kate realizes that the woman standing right behind her (between Kate and the door) is the Thing.
- The sounds the humanoid Things make are terrifying. They are almost totally alien yet still have just enough of a human quality to them to remind you that this was once a human being (or several).
- Consider this. The Thing can take the form of any life form it comes into contact with. It's very likely that if it was released into a populated area it would bring about the end of the world as we know it. You know that thing we see burst from the ice block it was contained in? It hasn't been confirmed whether that in fact it was its true form. One could make the theory that the form we saw was that of the Thing's last victim prior to crash landing on Earth.
- The Sander-Thing finally gives us a look at what happens when a Thing has time to transform into something combat-ready. While it doesn't have the same standard of horror as the rest of the Things, the other things become more horrifying in hindsight, since most of them are either A)Immobile and/or B) weak, being more Last Stand type combat forms than true fighters. The Thing in the Climax is humanoid, with none of it's limbs being malformed as much, and it is a hulking beast, but more uniform and streamlined than the other Things. If all the Things had been able to achieve a form like that, the heroes probably wouldn't have stood a chance.
- Not just that, but, it doesn't attack Kate straight away, it simply walks past her whilst staring at her to activate the ship, basically wordlessly stating to her that it has all the time in the world to assimilate her.
- The cut Alien pilot that brought the Thing to Earth is pretty scary by itself. It's a very inhuman design that looks absolutely nothing like anything on Earth. It's also huge and looks a little similar to the Thing's original form that it took before crash landing, which has some disturbing implications.
