Please note there are spoilers ahead!
Officially Released
“2 phone calls”
Description: Sander and Edvard discuss how they will transport “the specimen” back to Oslo.
“It’s true”
Description: This is just after Sander tells Kate not to contradict him in front of the others. Carter asks Kate if it’s true they’ve found an alien.
“Come in, over?”
Description: An extension of the existing scenes of Colin radioing for help. During this scene he attempts and fails to contact Outpost 31.
“That’s not Karl”
Description: This scene is straight after Juliette is burned in the kitchen. Kate, Lars and Jonas follow the blood trail out in the corridor and find Karl in mid-transformation in another room. Karl lets out a howl that sounds like it’s lifted from the Bennings scene in carpenter’s movie and then Lars burns him with the flamethrower.
Why was it cut?
Matthijs: “I did shoot Karls death but to be honest it felt a bit like a rip off of Bennings death. Same sort of scream. I wanted to make him partly translucent but it turned out to be very expensive.”
Colin’s Death
Description: Colin is cornered in the radio room by the Edvard Leg Thing and decides to take his fate in to his own hands.
Why was it cut?
Matthijs: “Just to give an update on the deleted Colin scene. This is what was planned but due to money and repetitiveness of another limb scene was skipped. When Colin turns around, he sees Edvard’s leg crawling on to the ledge and transforms into a crazy entity, blocking him to escape to the autopsy lab. We never designed that creatures transformation during filming, figured we would do that in post. We started designing it but it look a little weird and almost comical, seeing a leg crawling up the ledge. We also skipped it because I felt that it pointed too much attention on Colin and we needed to focus on Kate’s/Carters searching the camp. Jonathan Walker put down a great performance but it took very long to make it believable. You are not just cutting your wrists and slide your throat. It slowed the action down and took the story away from Kate and Carter.”
Jonathan Lloyd Walker: “Glad you guys liked the scene! Obviously I was acting on the day with nothing there and somehow the scene on the DVD works without the CGI creature. However, I understand why it got cut for the sake of the build toward the climax on the alien ship. Matthijs, it’s a shame some of the scenes that were shot prior to reshoots didn’t make it onto the DVD, would’ve been fun to see some of those. I think if I were isolated like Colin, amongst strangers or people I had little connection to, I would choose to get out on my own terms rather than be a victim. I see that as a stronger choice. However, Colin was a loner. I have kids. I want to believe that my will to fight to survive is increased in a situation this bizarre by my need to get home to them and keep them safe. So maybe I would have fought harder even if it was futile. I can’t really answer that definitively since people don’t know how they will react in crisis until they are in crisis.”
Two Heads
Description: An extension of the scene where Edvard/Adam-Thing stalks Carter in the kitchen.
Start the Helicopter (Alternate Ending)
Description: An extension of the post-credits sequence with Lars and Matias. It’s basically the same ending but has the titles removed. Lars is also seen grabbing the box of grenades from the shed and taking it to the helicopter. You can clearly see in these scenes that the exteriors were shot in a quarry as they haven’t been fixed in post.
Why was it cut?
Unknown.
Other Known Deleted Scenes
New York Scenes
Description: Kate meets Adam at a cafe in New York. Adam offers Kate the chance to join the expedition to Antarctica. Footage from these scenes are shown in the teaser that Matthijs van Heijningen cut for the New York Comicon in 2010.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CtLHvcwgwgI or watch in much better quality here.
Why was it cut?
Matthijs: “I never liked that scene. Also, it was one of the first scenes we shot. Even her makeup was all wrong, because she shouldn’t have any makeup. It felt wrong on every level. It’s great that you can reshoot stuff and just make it better. It was just a talking scene. I made the mistake to allow too much make up on Mary, she looked very pretty but unbelievable as a scientist. The New York scenes were a bit corny to say the least.”
The Pilot Ending
Description: (from Matthijs’ facebook page): “In the pilot version Kate walks in this room and sees a dead pilot hanging. He was the last pilot alive and Kate sees that he killed himself because his air pipe was cut (basically Colin in space). The back story was that this Alien pilot race collected specimen from different planets and The Thing was one of them, broke free and killed all the Alien species in the ship (pod room). I proposed to the studio a reshoot of a scene where Kate would wonder around in the ship and sees all the carnage caused by The Thing: an exterminated pilot alien race. The Thing, a specimen captured in a pod, broke free and killed the aliens on the ship. Or they killed each other not knowing who is who. The pilot in the pilot room kills himself and crashed the ship on Earth in the hope to stop The Thing. In the version I intended to shoot, the ship was steered by an Alien race and The Thing was a captive that broke free and killed everybody on board. In the dead pilot version, the pilot controlled the ship with tubes stuck in his back, operating the ship through those tubes. The pilot kills himself and crashes the ship on purpose, hoping that it would kill the Thing. Of course it doesn’t, it climbs out and freezes himself. So back to Kate. She sees the dead pilot and Sander, now has taken the form of the pilot (he has the genetics because of his spaceship slaughter fest 100.000 years before), has started up the ship. Sander attacks Kate in pilot form and corners Kate, who pulls her last grenade and threatens to blow them both up. That moment Carter runs in and sees what she is doing and blows up the sander Thing just to convince Kate that he is human. (he basically has no choice because he if fries Kate with his flamethrower everybody would blow up). Little complicated but we filmed this.”
Alec: “Inside, they find mummified remains of aliens that have been killed by the Thing, or killed themselves to avoid being taken by the Thing. While she’s distracted by the mummified Pilot, a living version “awakens” behind her. This is the Thing, first having perfectly replicated Sanders, now replicating the Pilot alien. She torches it before it can really attack.”
There are a number of stills of this scene floating around on the web (they are all included in the galleries below). There’s also behind the scenes footage from ADI’s showreel on youtube and another ADI on set video here and another closer look at the mummified pilot alien here. You’ll see a fleeting glimpse of the scene in the New York Comicon Teaser. As you can see from the vid below, ADI’s Tom Woodruff even set himself on fire to deliver aspects of the scene – I truly hope we one day get to see this in its entirety. There’s also an excellent post on this scene along with original storyboards and other images at Monster Legacy.
Why was it cut?
Matthijs: “Studio didn’t like this (too complicated and till some degree they were right) so we had to lose the back story and replaced the pilot with the Tetris. They thought that the pilot wasn’t scary enough, so we created the Sander Thing the last minute (which shows unfortunately). We needed a lot of money to show the version in space with all the dead aliens. The studio thought it was too expensive and too complicated so we erased that whole back story.
POD CREATURES
Description: In the leadup to the Pilot ending, Kate discovers a number of frozen alien specimens. The back story here is that the original race of aliens that flew the ship had been goin round the galaxy collecting alien specimens and one of those was The Thing that attacked the crew and caused the ship to crash.
Matthijs: The back story was that this Alien pilot race collected specimen from different planets and The Thing was one of them, broke free and killed all the Alien species in the ship (pod room).
Alec (from ADI): We did create 6 or so “Pod Creatures”. These were weird silhouettes meant to show a variety of aliens that had been collected throughout the universe. They were in frozen pods, one of which had burst open from the inside. ADI released a number of great pix of these pod creatures on their facebook page.
Why was it cut? Deleted when the Pilot ending was dropped.
Spaceship Hallway
Description: Kate finds a dead mummified Pilot alien in a corridor in the leadup to the original Pilot ending.
Alec (from ADI): There was a hallway one of the characters walks through, where a mummified Pilot alien was collapsed on the ground. Supposedly killed by the Thing.
Why was it cut? Deleted when the Pilot ending was dropped.
Juliette suspects LARS
Description: Juliette talks to Kate about Lars, suspecting him of being infected instead of Colin.
Kim Bubbs: Originally, we’d done a scene in which Juliette talks to Kate about Lars, suspecting him of being infected instead of Colin. We re-shot the scene shown in the film where I suspect Colin, in January of 2011. The fillings Kate finds on the bathroom floor and the blood in the shower are Juliette’s. Juliette is infected by Griggs. He follows her to the bathroom when she’s sick after seeing Henrik’s autopsy.
Why was it cut? JLW: during re-shoots it became clear to me that Colin was being edited down to become the “red herring” character who Juliette accuses and Kate briefly suspects…until Juliette turns on her. In order to sustain the audience’s suspicion of him Matthijs and the producers clearly felt that any scene that made Colin look emotional or compassionate needed to be cut.
Sander’s speech
Description: Sander’s speech in the rec room on the discovery is actually slightly longer. He talks about how mankind will never be the same thanks to it, mentions religion, identity and culture as prime subjects of change. This additional dialogue is heard in the officially unreleased New York Comic-Con teaser.
Sander Depression
Description: A brief mentioning of Sander suffering from depression and anxiety. A few scenes involve him looking at himself in a mirror and others talking about how his anxiety can go over the top.
McMurdo
Description: After Matias fails to show up at McMurdo to take Kate, Sander and Adam out to Thule Station, they go to Carter’s office to hire him and his crew to fly them there instead. On the wall in Carter’s office is a photo of R.J. MacReady with a hand written note reading “Do not accept rides from this man!”
John Rakich: “We built and filmed a scene of the expedition landing/arriving via a large military plane to the airport at McMurdo. As well we filmed some scenes inside of a plane that would have taken place during the flight there.”
Why was it cut?
Matthijs: “I did a scene with the introduction of Carter, Jameson and Griggs in McMurdo before Kate arrives basically to sell it to the studios that it would work. It explained why they were in Antarctica. Ex vets trying to make a buck in the cold. In other words, it was just a character scene that was quite a challenging scene but they didn’t like it. It just took too long before The Thing was found. And it was all exposition which wasn’t written quite as exciting as I hoped. It was not great so we killed it.”
Colin
Description: Colin arms up with the straight razor. Colin gets paranoid. Colin mourns Karls’s Death. Colin and Peder face off. Colin, Adam and Peder bicker.
Why was it cut?
Jonathan Lloyd Walker: “Colin had a lot of scenes that got cut which showed why he unravelled to the extent that he did. We justified why he became paranoid, why and how he had that razor handily in his pocket…but they didn’t make the final cut of the film. During principal photography Colin had several more scenes and lines in other scenes that established several things about him. You got the sense he was a loner, that the Norwegians didn’t get along with him (except for Karl) and that he didn’t trust them either nor the Americans. There was a scene where he mourned Karl’s death and, when Peder comes to find him in the bunkroom and demands him to help he mistrusts the situation enough to collect his straight razor from his shaving kit, presumably as some futile attempt to have a weapon with which to defend himself. I felt that scene was important since it showed Colin’s growing paranoia and his grief. Later he goes to retrieve the burned corpse from the core shed only to find that Peder has already gotten hold of a flame thrower. They clearly don’t trust each other adding to the tension of their dynamic. There was a scene where we burned the corpses outside in which Colin, Adam and Peder bicker about each other being the creature prior to Kate devising the blood test. We reshot that, during re-shoots, giving more of the lines to Kate and removing the bickering. Also during re-shoots it became clear to me that Colin was being edited down to become the “red herring” character who Juliette accuses and Kate briefly suspects…until Juliette turns on her. In order to sustain the audience’s suspicion of him Matthijs and the producers clearly felt that any scene that made Colin look emotional or compassionate needed to be cut. Sadly once those scenes got eliminated there wasn’t enough there character wise to validate keeping my death scene. Even a snippet of me being shunned and laughed at by the Norwegians when Kate is first introduced at the base (a re-shoot scene itself) was cut. Colin got marginalized because I think I did too good a job of looking suspicious in the scene where Kate confronts the others about finding the fillings in the shower! Damn. Having said all that I loved working on the project. I would have loved for all of Colin’s scenes to have made the cut but I fully understand the reasoning for their removal. Still, I would like to see them just to see them and maybe one day they will surface.”
Kate in Helicopter
Description: The official trailer features a quick shot of Kate looking out the window of the helicopter on their way to thule station. This footage is not featured in the movie at all. It could an an alternate take or perhaps part of an extended scene in the helicopter that was cut from the final version. There’s a still below:
Lars finds his dog
Description: Lars discovers the remains of his dog in the kennel and almost starts to cry.
Jørgen: “I miss the scene where Lars finds his dog killed. It is a small scene, but adds an extra dimension to Lars. He is crying silently over losing his dog – a man’s best friend.”
Why was it cut?
Matthijs: It was well acted but it made Lars a bit too sentimental.
Lars is a klutz
Description: (from this interview with Eric Heisserer) “Lars had a number of moments where he was just a klutz. He was a butterfingers. He dropped things. And it gave you the sense that this guy is going to be “Thinged” right away. He’s a red shirt, he’s not gonna last. And the surprise is that he makes it all the way to the end. He’s one of the two guys who makes it all the way to the helicopter. And when you watch Carpenter’s version you realize he’s the one who drops the grenade and blows himself up, because he’s the klutz. I don’t think much of that managed to make it to the end…”
Peder Chain Smoking
Description (from this interview with Eric Heisserer): “Peder was a chain smoker; it helped identify him a bit from the other Norwegians. Lars didn’t like the smell of the cigarettes. Later, in the second half of the movie, when everyone is on edge, someone mentions they haven’t seen Peder smoke a cigarette all day. There’s a tense scene that plays out there, with Peder trying to shift the focus off of him and others getting more suspicious.”
Why was it cut?
Heisserer: “There is probably an hour of extra scene work from the various Norwegians, as well as a lot of great little character-centric moments with Carter and his crew, all of which just didn’t work with test audiences or had to be cut for other reasons.”
Jonas’ photographs
Description (from this interview with Eric Heisserer): “There’s Jonas, who was a family man, who put up photos of his wife and kids in his bunk, tons of photos of his family out in the city, at an amusement park, in a throng of people. Reminders of the world beyond Antarctica. Much later, we’d designed a great wordless scene of Jonas staring at these photos intently. Just staring for a long beat. And you couldn’t tell if he was thinking he’d never get home to see his family again, or, maybe, he was a Thing, staring at those photos thinking, “Look at that big, populated world out there.”
Why was it cut?
Heisserer: “There is probably an hour of extra scene work from the various Norwegians, as well as a lot of great little character-centric moments with Carter and his crew, all of which just didn’t work with test audiences or had to be cut for other reasons.”
Scenes that were never filmed
Exploration of the Spaceship
Description: Kate, Sander, Adam & Edvard explore the spaceship just after they arrive at the ice cave for the first time.
Why was it cut?
Matthijs: This was interesting. Up to production it was scheduled to shoot inside the ship but I realised that the exploration of the ship became far more of “a find” than the creature in the ice. It would have taken the momentum away from The Thing. It was like “WOW a spaceship” and by the way we found a specimen. In that time we had our old story intact were there would be more dead Aliens lying around in the ship. So The Thing in the ice was not unique.
Jameson’s original death
Description: Matthijs: “At one point I wanted Jameson to flee the Edvard attack to get Kerosene for the flamethrower. He never returns and Carter and Kate find Jameson’s head behind a doorway begging for help (they could only see his face) and then it turns out he was like Norris head, just a head with spider legs, trying to lure Kate and Carter in (he was attacked by splitface).”
Why was it cut?
Matthijs: “Was too expensive. Real shame. Would have been a proper tribute to Norris.”
HELICOPTER CRASH
Description: Matthijs: “…in an earlier draft we had the whole fight inside the helicopter and learn how they manage to blow up Griggs/Olav Thing during and after the crash.”
Why was it cut?
Matthijs: “It became too much of an action movie and it was really expensive.”
PREGNANT THING
Description: Matthijs: “In one of early, early scripts we had a pregnant woman and her baby was also infected but it was too much a copy of the pregnancy in Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead. There was a couple and she uses her pregnancy as an excuse to leave the camp.”
Why was it cut?
Matthijs: ” It was just a very bad idea.”