Starring Kurt Russell, Wilford Brimley, T.K. Carter, Keith David, Charles Hallahan, Richard Masur, and others round out the cast and the human meal for the title creature. Kurt Russell who worked previously on the movies Elvis and Escape From New York with Carpenter, was the director's first choice to play the lead of helicopter pilot R.J. MacReady, although up until that point, Russell was known for mostly working in Disney films….yeah can you believe that!
The creature and gore effects were produced by makeup legend Rob Bottin who crafted a creature unlike anything ever seen before. In fact the creature itself has many parts of a whole as it is not really just one creature but many split off from that whole. It was his work with on-screen in-camera practical effects that sells the movie's outlandish monster gore effects to the 10th degree. When you see the Thing changing its form it’s scary, nauseating, and oh so cool as the beast transforms before our eyes. No cutaways, nothing hidden in the shadows that you can’t see, no camera cheats of any kind, just all-out creature gore in full view and right in our face. The way only good special effects should be.
Rob Bottin worked with Carpenter on the movie The Fog two years before and so the director knew what the young effects artist was capable of pulling off. The 1951 movie The Thing From Another World had a single creature with a single form since at the time the film's budget and limited special effects of the time could not create the shape-changing creature that the original novella first conceived. But now with Bottin on board as effects wizard, the film could now, at last, bring the book's author’s vision to life.