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| - The Thing was and is a character who has appeared a few times in HHN, who has been in a movie of the same name. It first originated from the novel by John W. Cambell Jr, Who Goes There? It then appeared the 1951 movie adaptation, The Thing from Another World, John Carpenter's 1982 remake, The Thing and the 2011 prequel to John Carpenter's movie, also called The Thing. Whereas the creature's true form in the original short story was more like a blue vegetable, and the creature in the 1951 film was a Frankenstein-esque humanoid, The Thing in the John Carpenter series more closely resembles the protoplyasmic, shape-shifting Shoggoths from a similar short story, H.P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness. The Thing itself has no real shape or form, and is more like a virus colony. Instead, i
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| abstract
| - The Thing was and is a character who has appeared a few times in HHN, who has been in a movie of the same name. It first originated from the novel by John W. Cambell Jr, Who Goes There? It then appeared the 1951 movie adaptation, The Thing from Another World, John Carpenter's 1982 remake, The Thing and the 2011 prequel to John Carpenter's movie, also called The Thing. Whereas the creature's true form in the original short story was more like a blue vegetable, and the creature in the 1951 film was a Frankenstein-esque humanoid, The Thing in the John Carpenter series more closely resembles the protoplyasmic, shape-shifting Shoggoths from a similar short story, H.P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness. The Thing itself has no real shape or form, and is more like a virus colony. Instead, it mimics the physical appearance and mentality of another being it infects, absorbs and assimilates. It can either forcibly add a new creature to it's body mass, infect them directly, or infect them indirectly, such as a single cell invading a host body and taking it over from the inside. This third method is a slow process though, and with the other methods there may be tell tale features of foreign creatures on the being the alien assimilates before the transformation is complete. The fully infected host will be an exact copy of the original, right down to the way they act, think, and even physical ailments such as heart disease. When threatened or exposed, The Thing will turn hostile, creating whatever organs or body parts it needs to escape or attack it's enemies, and it can create anatomical features from any creature it has previously assimilated. This causes paranoia as the people in the novel and the films didn't know who was human or who was a fake. The only way to destroy the Thing is to destroy it completely, down to the last cell, otherwise the pieces of the alien will escape in order to survive. As R. J. Macready (played by Kurt Russel) from John Carpenter's movie discovered, fire is the best way to completely destroy it. The only weakness in the Thing's replication ability is that it cannot replicate foreign, inorganic material, such as metal tooth fillings and bone pins. The Thing arrived on Earth 10,000 years ago when it's spaceship crash-landed in the icy wastes of Antarctica. The creature, at the time resembling a giant anthropod or decapod crustacean, left it's craft for reasons unknown, but ended up freezing solid only a few hundred yards away. Eventually both the alien and it's ship would be buried in ice and snow, and would remain there until discovered by a Norwegian research team, who take the frozen body back with them to their camp. It thaws, escapes, and starts a chain of infections that leads to the destruction of the Norwegian base and nearly every living creature there. An infected sled dog escapes, and is pursued via helicopter by two of the Norwegian survivors. It eventually makes it to an American research station, and the Norwegians are killed attempting to kill the Thing and warn the Americans. Thus begins the events of the 1982 film.
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