> Hawks - listed here as a producer - actually directed most of the film instead of the credited director, Christian Nyby. In an interview with Peter Bogdanovich for his book, Who the Devil Made It? (Ballantine Books), Hawks commented on the mystery: "Chris Nyby had done an awfully good job as the cutter on Red River [1948] and he'd been a big help to us too, so I let him do it. He wanted to be a director and I had a deal with RKO that allowed me to do that. I was at rehearsals and helped them with the overlapping dialogue - but I thought Chris did a good job." Nevertheless, a few people on the set later claimed that Hawks did much of the daily directing and there are even photos that tend to support this. It's also clear that The Thing shares strong similarities with other Hawks films that deal with group dynamics, particularly in situations where everyone, women included, are working under pressure and are being judged by their performance. Take a look at any Howard Hawks movie, from Only Angels Have Wings (1939) to Air Force (1943) to Hatari! (1962), and it's remarkable how many of his films fit this pattern, including The Thing. As for credited director Christian Nyby, who had previously won an Oscar for his editing of Red River, it would be another six years before he would helm another picture - Hell on Devil's Island (1957).

> Several stories have circulated about some of the various uncredited writers on The Thing. Ben Hecht and William Faulkner are often mentioned as possible contributors, which makes sense since they both worked at various times with Hawks and were around RKO Studios during that time. Another rumor that is almost certainly untrue is that Orson Welles contributed some dialogue to the screenplay.

> The film was based on a story by John W. Campbell, Jr., who was one of the key figures in the development of science fiction: he worked as the editor of Astounding (which later became Analog) for almost four decades and helped launch the careers of Robert Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, and numerous other writers. Interestingly, Campbell's own story "Who Goes There?", first published in 1938 under the pseudonym Don Stuart, was decidedly more paranoid than the 1951 film version of The Thing. For the screenplay, scenarist Charles Lederer actually discarded most of the original story except for the basic premise. He even changed the basic physical nature of the alien (in the story it's a shape-shifter). By the time The Thing was ready for filming, several gruesome sequences had already been trimmed from the script such as a human decapitation scene.