Its a great way to take the temperature of a viewer, especially a very young or very seasoned audience. To see if they latch onto the premise, can follow what happening, and if they can categorize the moments that work from the ones that dont from the ones that they just kinda like the idea of & separate the movie from maybe why they wanted it to be. The Thing is much bigger than the sum of its parts. Its rarely directly scary. A handful of shots make you jump, but the paranoia of whos it & what would happen if she escaped.... thats the lasting love. So yeah.
But you know on one hand, you got the head falling off and walking away which looks better than Alien tbh and on the other hand you got the guys chest opening up into teeth which is a really cool idea and highly amusing in the way they executed it and has the fear effect but honestly the special effect didnt look good. And then theres guy they burn who acted the part so damn well, but the tentacle hands did not really work out on film. So thats very divisive & honestly this a must-watch & research for any aspiring film-person. But yeah theres tons of things like that. The big debut of Wilford Brimleys monster form at the end is a prime example. The floorboards coming up looked amazing, but again.... when we see its body it just didnt really look all that great in many shots. But the idea of it is fantastic & the execution was so memorable that it sticks and people still think about that monster even though it doesnt really look that believable. Another cool facet is the fact that The Thing monster is an imitation. So, even when it looks subpar.... there can be this kinda meta or alien element that makes the puppets effective perhaps especially when they look terrible.
The dog kennel scene is a perfect example of the movies DNA. You can barely see it because its dark, and thats scary, and were worried the dogs will come for us but they dont and they set up the dog at the beginning of the movie and then when we get to dissect the dogs corpse it is basically just a lump of trash and the dialogue during the dissection is amazing & memorable and of course whats really dangerous about the dog is the tentacles. Then, I mean.... the design with all the mixed up faces & teeth & stuff became a huge inspiration for designers everywhere. Its a lot of happy accidents too. I could write a whole thing on The Thing lol. The prequel is very interesting as well. What they did left an impression with the audience in more ways than one, but itll never have the same reputation.
This whole post is excellent and pretty objectively correct. I've read interviews with Stan Winston in which he says that a lot of the reason for the disjointed special effects was because the original team couldn't get the scale of the models quite right, so they had to use forced perspective camera work which showed the flaws that would be invisible under normal circumstances.
