John Carpenter’s ‘The Thing’ is One Big Metaphor for Chess (Theory)

By JonathanBarkan on April 21, 2016

Some horror movies end with a question so big, they never fade away, instead becoming a mystery that the community will go above and beyond to try and solve. Horror is a big culprit of leaving us on a cliffhanger with questions unanswered. After all, sequels have to be made, right?

One of the big horror endings is John Carpenter’s The Thing, which leaves us observing the tense back-and-forth between Kurt Russell’s MacReady and Keith David’s Childs. Viewers have been trying to figure out if either one of them was a “thing” even since the movie first hit theaters and the topic still resonates with people.

YouTuber Zombater has created an interesting fan theory that takes a scene from the movie, one in which MacReady is playing chess against a computer, and used that as the foundation for an interesting take on the film’s ending. It posits that MacReady is free from the alien biological threat but that Childs may very well be the “thing” in human form.

Check it out above and let us know your thoughts on the ending to The Thing!