(at around 1h 24 mins) Windows' head is drawn entirely into the Palmer-thing's grotesquely altered jaws as he is attacked, whilst his cries of pain remain completely unmuffled.
(at around 1 hour 20 minutes) Although Fuchs has warned them that the alien organism is highly infectious, they don't seem to mind sharing the same knife to draw their blood samples.
(at around 1h 30 mins) When Mac, Garry and Nauls are underground, they divide up and go off alone to different sections to set the charges. They choose to split rather than stay together, even though they know full well that "The Thing" usually attacks a person when they're alone.
MacReady is convinced that every fragment of the creature can operate as a complete organism, and so devises the "blood test" to identify who is The Thing. Although this theory is borne out, and even after he has a shape-shifting specimen held at bay with the flame-thrower, he inexplicably hurls a stick of dynamite onto the burning Thing once it is outdoors, shattering it into numerous smaller fragments, any one of which could potentially be a separate creature.
Although it’s asserted that all physical matter attached to the Thing forms part of the creature, a vast quantity of blood is left behind and appears inert. In the blood test sequence it becomes evident that this blood is just as much a component of the monster as any other tissue: it actually moves toward Palmer as he's mutating in an attempt to flee. For the same reason, when the blood-plasma bags are thrown into a pit to be incinerated, one character handles them with gloved hands and merely shakes off the excess — the gloves ought to have been burned as well.
(at around 1h 22 mins) Although required for the special-effect jump-scare, holding a blood sample in his hand while probing it with a heated wire would have been recklessly dangerous for MacReady, given how infectious the alien is known to be.
Following the opening attack by the Norwegian armed with a rifle, MacReady utters "First goddamn week of winter", which places the date roughly between 20–27 June — the period when winter begins in the Southern Hemisphere. Yet the sun is shining; since the station lies almost entirely within the Antarctic Circle, the sun would not be visible there at that time, and much of the continent is plunged into continuous darkness.
(at around 1h 20 mins) When Windows takes a blood sample from Nauls, it's obvious Nauls' blood ends up on his fingers. If he was that careless with every sample he handled, then — depending on the sequence he used (Nauls being last apart from himself, which suggests he worked right to left with Palmer likely first) — he could have contaminated everyone else still alive apart from MacReady.
Although Blair had already explained during the autopsy how the thing can imitate other life-forms, Bennings still wonders, later when MacReady returns with fragments of the ship, how it could possibly take the form of a dog.
In every exterior shot of the tool shed where Blair is held, the window beside the door is boarded up with the planks laid horizontally; whilst all interior shots of the same shed show that window with the planks fixed vertically.
(at around the seven-minute mark) Norwegian removes the same grenade from the box on two occasions.
(at around 12 minutes) When MacReady and the doctor set off to check the Norwegian base, they say it should only take them about an hour, and it is light when they leave. However, between their departure and MacReady's arrival at the Norwegian base there is a night-time scene at the American base, even though it is daylight again when he gets there.
(at around 1h 12 mins) Childs smashes the door down with an axe, leaving it heavily damaged, but a few scenes later the door is seen intact apart from a single axe hole.
(approximately 1 hour 5 minutes in) When MacReady visits Fuchs's room and Fuchs remarks about them preparing their own food and so forth, there is a beaker of dark brown liquid on his desk. As the lamp flickers, the camera cuts to a close-up of the beaker, which now contains a clear liquid.
(At around the 55-minute mark) While Mac is in the tool shed talking with Blair, the bottle of vodka he drinks from inexplicably rotates 180°. He puts it down with the label facing the camera, but in the subsequent shots the label is suddenly turned the other way round.
(around the five-minute mark) Whilst MacReady is playing "Chess Wizard" he spills his drink into the circuit board, and the liquid contains one large ice cube — strange, since he'd taken three small cubes for his drink that had almost completely melted just before he knocked it over.
(at about 1 hour 13 minutes) As Mac comes out of the supply room with a flare and sticks of dynamite, the TNT he is clutching looks as though it is nearly coming apart and he is holding on to a single stick. In the subsequent shots of Mac the TNT has suddenly been tightly bound with black tape again and he is holding all the sticks.
(at around the 18-minute mark) At the Norwegian base, as Mac and the doctor step into the room with the axe lodged in the door, the door can be seen closing in the background. In the subsequent shot, however, the door is still wide open.
(at around 1h 15 mins) When Dr Copper goes to shock Norris with the defibrillator for the second time, his hands shift position as the camera cuts between angles. As he begins the motion the paddles descend side-by-side onto the man's chest, just as they did previously. The camera cuts to a close-up special-effects shot in which the chest cavity opens like a mouth and swallows Dr Copper's arms. In that shot the paddles appear to come down aligned along Norris' sternum rather than side-by-side as they started.
(at around 1h 20 mins) When MacReady is carrying out the blood test with a heated wire, the characters cut their thumbs and let a few drops of blood into the dishes. However, when he looks down at them, considerably more blood has appeared in some of the dishes.
(around 1 hr 15 mins) As Dr Copper places the defibrillator onto Norris' "chest mouth", in the subsequent shot, when the mouth bites Copper's arms, the defibrillator lead disappears.
Palmer is bound to the settee beside Gary when he is revealed to be a Thing and begins to mutate, with fluids gushing from his swelling head as he thrashes in an attempt to escape. When MacReady later tests Gary's blood, his clothing and skin are impeccably clean when he ought to have been splattered with Palmer/the Thing's fluids.
(at roughly 1h 6 mins) When Fuchs steps outside in pursuit of the mysterious figure beside the laboratory, he already has snow on his knees as he drops to his knees to retrieve Mac's torn clothing.
(at around 23 mins) When MacReady and the doctor find the two-headed body, it's frozen solid. Yet when they unwrap it back at their base, vapours rise from it as though it had only recently been heated to a very high temperature.
(at about 4 minutes) A sign outside the base reads, 'US National Science Institute Station 4'. (at about 1 hour 4 minutes) When MacReady is recording a logbook of events, he signs off, "RJ MacReady, helicopter pilot, US Outpost, Number 31."
(at around 1h 15 mins) When the Norris-Thing's chest bursts open, Dr. Copper's chewed-off arms and the defibrillator paddles that were "swallowed" by the chest ought to tumble out as the newly formed Thing springs upwards.
(at about 1 hr 23 mins) When one of the characters morphs into the thing, he is hurled up onto the ceiling, causing a ceiling panel to come apart — yet in the following shot the panel appears unscathed.
(at about 28 minutes) The hole the dog has chewed in the chain-link fence changes size between shots, occasionally appearing smaller.
(at approximately 53 minutes) While Blair is wrecking the radio room he drops the axe onto the floor and fires his pistol. When the others rush at him with a table, he suddenly has the axe back in his hands and strikes the table with it.
(at roughly the four-minute mark) The front section of the rifle the Norwegian uses at the start differs from the rifle shown when he is viewed from the front.
(at around 1h 17 mins) When the "Head Bug" is shown attempting to escape, the facial features it still possesses are turned away from the group as it crawls towards the door. Yet in the very next shot, just before Mac torches it, the creature has abruptly stopped moving and is now facing into the room.
(at roughly 1 hour 11 minutes) When Nauls is allowed back inside and the others question him, there are several continuity errors regarding where Palmer is standing and how he is holding the flamethrower.
(at around the 52-minute mark) When MacReady goes to inspect the helicopter after seeing Blair, he is wearing a protective hood. After hearing the gunshot and running out of the helicopter, the hood is missing.
During the scene in which Blair smashes the radio and is then subdued by MacReady, Childs, Fuchs and Copper, Windows collapses to the floor after his ordeal. A person in a green jacket is briefly glimpsed hurrying to aid Windows, yet no one in that shot was wearing that colour & style of jacket.
During the kennel scene when the Dog-Thing is revealed, Bennings goes over to Childs and tells him, "Mac wants the Flamethrower", then adds, "That's what he said". In reality, MacReady had only told Bennings to "Go get Childs" — he never mentioned why or said anything about taking a flamethrower.
(at around 8 mins) When the helicopter explodes there are almost no fragments nearby. Later, as the fire is being put out, many small burnt pieces are scattered around it. The entire main rotor blade is also missing, even though it was on the helicopter immediately after the explosion. The rotor blade may have been burnt away, since it is made of composite material rather than metal.
(at approximately the 12-minute mark) As the men gather around the dead Norwegian, Fuchs can be seen among them and Palmer is present, offering Copper a lift. In the very next scene Copper walks towards the helicopter wreckage, telling Mac to get his kit on, while Fuchs and Palmer are already standing by the wreckage in their snow parkas.
When the Dog-Thing attacks the dogs, it sprays one dog in the face with its slime, causing the animal to look away and step backwards. A cutaway shot of the Dog-Thing appears, and the same shot is then repeated from a slightly different angle, implying two separate cameras were used.
After a fuse blows in the Laboratory, Fuchs steps outside and kneels in the snow to inspect the clothing on the ground. Immediately before he kneels, snow is already visible clinging to the knees of his trousers from an earlier take.
(at about 1 h 23 min) As Palmer mauls Windows, a fleeting shot reveals a man in a dark green T-shirt holding him aloft; he was most likely a special-effects puppeteer.
(at about 15 minutes) As the camera sweeps through the deserted camp, immediately after Bennings summons Nauls over the intercom, a shadow appears beside the blood-storage area.
(around 1 hour 15 minutes in) When the creature emerges from Norris's chest, there is a wide shot with Mac in the foreground, and a crew member's hand can be seen moving in the ceiling air ducts.
(around the 15-minute mark) Immediately after Bennings shouts over the intercom for the music to be turned down — a request Nauls in the kitchen ignores — the next shot slowly tracks from right to left across the empty medical room. The dolly's turning wheels and a man in a light-blue shirt pushing it are visible in the reflections on the top and bottom panes of the stainless-steel and glass medical cabinet.
(at about 39 minutes) As Norris and Mac climb down into the crater and are walking towards the open hatch in the centre, a person's head and arm briefly appear at the far right-hand side of the screen, then vanish.
(at about 1 hr 30 mins) As the men descend the stairs into the generator room, Nauls and Garry go down a second flight while Mac raises a flare. A crew member’s shadow is cast on the floor holding a boom microphone — the silhouette even shifts as they walk away from the camera.
(at about the ten-minute mark) On the "first day of winter" (21 June) locations south of the Antarctic Circle experience no daylight.
The sheer abundance of pistols, shotguns, automatic firearms, flamethrowers and explosives is utterly absurd for an Antarctic research station. It's not a military base, so there is no sensible justification for them to maintain such an extensive stockpile.
(at about 8 minutes) The overwhelming majority of Norwegians are taught English from an early age, and consequently most speak it fluently or at least have a basic command of English vocabulary. In reality, it's virtually impossible that there would be a language barrier between the Norwegians and the Americans as shown at the beginning.
Flamethrowers would be of little use in Antarctica, particularly outdoors. Petrol (even in the form of napalm) has too high a freezing point to be expelled from a tank without solidifying. While there might be heating torches in use, these would more likely burn LNG (liquefied natural gas) rather than napalm. They also would not project flames as far as a flamethrower.
(at about 44 minutes in) MacReady says "It's forty below outside." That would be an astonishingly mild winter day for the Antarctic interior, where winter temperatures are nearer to −80 °F (−62 °C).
During many interior scenes, flamethrowers were employed, setting sizable blazes alight that the characters then extinguished. The rooms where those fires had raged were left filled with thick, choking, blinding smoke, yet once the flames were put out the spaces invariably appear entirely smoke-free.
The narrative is set on the first day of winter — the winter solstice, which in Antarctica falls in June. At that time of year the continent would normally be in polar night with no hours of daylight, yet the film's first half is shown in bright daylight.
(at roughly 52 minutes into the film) After wrecking the radio room, Blair fires seven rounds from a six-shot revolver. The first shot is fired while MacReady is outside examining the damaged helicopter; the second round strikes the door frame as MacReady runs back in. The third shot is aimed at Childs when he distracts Blair, then four shots follow in quick succession, and Blair finally hurls the "empty" gun towards the doorway.
The UFO lies roughly 60 feet beneath the ice and was purportedly buried for about 100,000 years, yet the creature that crawled out of it was found only a few feet below the ice surface. The heat generated during the craft's atmospheric entry and from its engines would have melted the ice, but the being escaped before it sank into the 'melt-hole'.
Between the moment Fuchs speaks to Mac about Blair's notes — calling the snowcat 'the Thiokol' (another manufacturer) — the badge and model markings change: at first it is a Skidozer 301, with the model name between the headlights, then it appears as a 302, with the Bombardier lettering between the headlights and the model number lower down on the left-hand side (screen right). When they later take Blair out to be locked up, the snowcat is again a 301. (The blue model-plate is visible between the headlights, not the black-on-yellow Bombardier lettering of the 302.)
This is not an error. The film shows on several occasions that more than one snowcat is being used — in a number of wide shots of the camp the different vehicles can be seen.
(at around 8 mins) When Garry shoots the rifle-wielding Norwegian in the eye, the Norwegian's goggles remain on his face. The edit cuts to Garry, then back to the Norwegian as he topples forward. The goggles are still in place during the fall but come off on impact with the ground. The shot is so brief that it appears he wasn't wearing goggles as he fell, yet a frame-by-frame inspection shows this is not a continuity error.
MacReady states "I think it rips through your clothes when it takes you over." but the film never clarifies how a newly 'born' duplicate replaces the victim’s torn garments. If the human personnel had destroyed every item of clothing in the base except what they were wearing, any fresh mimic would be immediately obvious. Alternatively, if clothing is actually part of the mimic-tissue, that would imply a duplicate couldn’t remove any article of clothing — or if it could, whatever it took off would itself be 'alive', which in turn suggests that any supposedly inanimate object in the base might be a Thing.
The alien dog appears to have run from the Norwegian science station to the American station. Considering that helicopters, rather than snowcats, are used to cover the distance between the two, it's likely they were 75-100 miles apart. It is unlikely the dog could have made it that far merely as a "dog"; furthermore, the much faster helicopter would have been able to land ahead of it and wait.
Although setting the creatures alight might destroy the outer cells of the form they were imitating, it would do nothing to eliminate the cells located within the body’s interior. In fact, the body would act as an "insulator", protecting those inner cells from the excessive heat. Doc would have realised that and would have mentioned it.
(at around 48 minutes) When the group are burning the bodies of Bennings, the dog-like creature and the two-headed human, Blair is deliberately absent from the scene for narrative reasons. However, Clark is also noticeably missing.
Windows, mauled and killed by the Palmer-Thing, begins to undergo a change a few minutes later. Yet Dr Copper — whose arms were chewed off by the Norris-Thing and who subsequently dies — shows no sign of infection, even hours afterwards.
"Even if Blair had specialised "alien" knowledge, it is ludicrous to think he had the time to dig out an underground tunnel beneath the shack and half-construct a spacecraft in the couple of days he was confined there. Especially since MacReady or one of the others would have been checking on him constantly, bringing food and so forth. The rest of the team appear surprised that the ground under the shack's floor was hollow, so it clearly wasn't there beforehand. It also seems highly implausible that Blair could have obtained so much equipment and parts (allegedly from the helicopter) to build the ship without anybody detecting him."
Characters wearing spectacles move from the bitter cold outdoors into what appears to be a cosy warmth inside the buildings, yet their spectacles do not mist up.
Around the eight-minute mark, when the Norwegian is firing at the American scientists, you can see that Childs has already leapt into the snow in earlier takes.
(about 25 minutes into the film) When Blair carries out the post-mortem on the burnt creature, he pulls out the internal organs as if they were simply lying loose inside its body.
At about the 18-minute mark, as they examine the ice block at the Norwegian base, several icicles can be seen swaying.
The infected Palmer attacks Windows, hurling Windows's bloodstained corpse against a ceiling light and then onto a shelf. As Windows hits the wooden shelf, the top board springs back as though it were made of rubber.
When Copper and MacReady visit the Norwegian base, they find the ice block in which the Thing was originally encased. It is evident that this block is composed of smaller blocks separated by vertical grooves — a formation that would not have been produced by natural forces over a hundred thousand years.
(at approximately 32 minutes) The alien Norwegian dog, confined with the American dogs, begins to mutate as it attacks them. When the crew investigate the commotion and first see the transformed dog, they launch a counter-attack and the creature scrambles up to the cage's ceiling. All the while, amid barking and people shouting, the sound of a rope or chain pulley being operated to hoist the creature can be heard.
As Windows passes MacReady his blood sample, the wound on his forehead is a dark red, streaked with clotted blood. As the camera cuts between MacReady heating the wire and a worried Windows, the wound takes on a pinker hue and appears partly healed.
At about 39 minutes, as MacReady and Norris approach the hole in the ice beside the spaceship, Norris's head is partly obscured by a visible matte line during the dissolve into the establishing shot.
During the blood-testing sequence, as the Palmer-Thing attacks Windows, it sinks its teeth into his head and hoists him clear off the floor. It is readily apparent that Windows' body is a lightweight dummy.
