Who gets infected first in John Carpenter's The Thing?

Amongst the Americans in John Carpenter's The Thing, who was the first to get infected?

Answer

It is very difficult to say with certainty, which is precisely what Carpenter was going for. He didn't want us to know much about who was infected and when it happened.

Certainly, the first Thing we see is the Dog-Thing being chased by the Norwegians in the helicopter. The second Thing we see is the seemingly dead, two-headed monstrosity at the Norwegian camp.

After the Dog-Thing is taken into Outpost 31 by Clark, it would appear that its first victim is the man whose shadow we see on the wall of the room into which the Dog-Thing walks. This shadow wasn't actually from any of the cast members, because Carpenter wanted to leave the audience guessing who the shadow belonged to (the shadow was actually that of stuntman Dick Warlock). However, the producer, Stuart Cohen, explicitly states that it is supposed to be the shadow of Palmer.

THE SHADOW ON THE WALL was intended to be Palmer. At the time of filming David Clennon's silhouette was considered too distinct, a dead giveaway. Cinematographer Dean Cundey tried to soften the edges to diffuse the image, but in the end John used stunt coordinator Dick Warlock to throw everyone off the scent...
- Cohen's blog, "The Original Fan".

However, we don't actually see the Dog-Thing assimilating Palmer, so we really don't know if this is when Palmer is assimilated, but it does seem very likely.

Next, the as-yet undiscovered Dog-Thing is put into the kennel, where it soon attempts to assimilate the other dogs; it probably would have succeeded if it hadn't been discovered by MacReady and then destroyed by Childs' flamethrower. As far as we know, nothing of the Dog-Thing survived the attack with the flamethrower. The only Thing still alive in Outpost 31 at this point was Palmer-Thing.

The first human assimilation we see taking place on screen is Bennings'. He is apparently dead and in the process of being assimilated when Windows walks in and sees the whole thing (no pun intended). Windows runs to get the others, and when they return to the room, Bennings-Thing is gone and the window is broken. They all run outside and find Bennings-Thing, still only partially assimilated, and kill it.

All of this is based on the way events play out on screen. We don't have access to any other information about the timeline of infection, because Carpenter deliberately chose to avoid setting up such a timeline. When he is asked about these kinds of questions, he always says that he just doesn't know - and as far as I can tell, he is being completely honest and candid. He doesn't know, because if anyone knew, it would reduce the effectiveness of the movie's central theme: paranoia and uncertainty. If no one knows when each character was assimilated, the veil of uncertainty can never be lifted, and the movie will never lose its psychological impact.

The only other bit of information I am aware of is a brief and tentative suggestion from the producer, Stuart Cohen. Cohen says that, in his personal opinion, Blair was probably assimilated sometime between the autopsy on the two-headed Thing from the Norwegian camp, and Blair's freak out in the radio room. But we need to remember that even Cohen and Carpenter, who presumably know more about this than anyone else, insist that even they don't know when each character was assimilated.

We can say something with relative certainty: The following characters were not assimilated:

• Clark


• Fuchs (this is made clear in a deleted scene in which Fuchs' body is found impaled with a shovel in the greenhouse).



• Copper (aka Doc)

And these characters were only partially assimilated before they were killed:

• Bennings (he was very close to being completely assimilated, but not quite done)


• Windows (he had just been attacked by Palmer-Thing when MacReady torched him, and although he certainly would have been completely assimilated if MacReady hadn't intervened, the process had just begun when he was killed)

The following characters were definitely assimilated:

• Norris



• Palmer


• Nauls


• Blair


• Garry

The following characters might have been assimilated:

• MacReady (although this seems extremely unlikely, and in fact, almost impossible)


• Childs (the jury is out on this one, but my personal belief is that he, and MacReady, were both humans all the way through the film)

So, in short, the timeline I have just provided is probably the closest we can get to the truth, but we have to keep in mind that there really isn't an absolute "truth". I would imagine that Carpenter would probably agree with my assessment, more or less, but he wouldn't say so as the director, only as a member of the audience. This is just how events seem to play out in the story.