"While The Thing is now regarded as the pinnacle of practical and visual effects, its power comes equally from its oozy tactile quality and disturbing flights of twisted imagination; a dog splits in two, a chest undergoing an autopsy grows fleshy jaws and bites a surgeon’s arms off, a head sprouts spider-legs and toddles off. The Thing became Bottin’s labor of love and it nearly killed him. “I wanted this stuff to come out great,” he remembered. “So I actually lived at Universal for a year and five weeks, without taking a day off. I’d sleep on the sets, in the locker rooms, in the labs. I ended up in hospital at the end of the show.”"