by a blood test. Since its release, many theories have been developed to attempt to answer the film's ambiguous ending shared by MacReady and Childs. Several suggest that Childs was infected, citing Dean Cundey's statement that he deliberately provided a subtle illumination to the eyes of uninfected characters, something absent from Childs. Similarly, others have noted a lack of visible breath from the character in the frigid air. While both aspects are present in MacReady, their absence in Childs has been explained as a technical issue with the filming. During production, Carpenter considered having MacReady be infected, and an alternate ending showed MacReady having been rescued and definitively tested as uninfected. Russell has said that analyzing the scene for clues is "missing the point". He continued, "[Carpenter] and I worked on the ending of that movie together a long time. We were both bringing the audience right back to square one. At the end of the day, that was the position these people were in. They just didn't know anything... They didn't know if they knew who they were... I love that, over the years, that movie has gotten its due because people were able to get past the horrificness of the monster... to see what the movie was about, which was paranoia." However, Carpenter has teased, "Now, I do know, in the end, who the Thing is, but I cannot tell you." Legacy Critical reassessment In the years following its release, critics and fans have reevaluated The Thing as a milestone of the horror genre. A prescient review by Peter Nicholls in 1992 called The Thing "a black, memorable film [that] may yet be seen as a classic". It has been called one of the best films directed by Carpenter. John Kenneth Muir called it "Carpenter's most accomplished and underrated directorial effort", and critic Matt Zoller Seitz said it "is one of the greatest and most elegantly constructed B-movies ever made". Trace Thurman described it as one of the best films ever, and in 2008, Empire magazine selected it as one of The 500 Greatest Movies of All Time, at number 289, calling it "a peerless masterpiece of relentless suspense, retina-wrecking visual excess and outright, nihilistic terror". It is now considered to be one of the greatest horror films ever made, and a classic of the genre. Several publications have called it one of the best films of 1982,