Can The Thing assimilate a host if they're already dead?

Thank you for sharing. I know next to nothing about the lore. Would you be so kind to provide some context for the picture in question?

I wouldn't call it a "bad movie". I just found the violence and gore ridiculously excessive to the point of being absurd.

But maybe that was the point.

The movie makes plenty sense. You simply over think it and have bad taste

I agree that the film makes it pretty plain that the Thing only seems interested in living tissue as that's all we actually see.

When it assimilates things violently, like the dogs, Windows, and Bennings etc it inflicts some pretty substantial trauma which likely kills the people before being fully assimilated. This could account for the leftover blood and gore all over the place which gets left behind, being possible the leftover biological tissue that was too dead to assimilate. I believe there's a little "window" of time that The Thing could quickly assimilate after killing someone but there is a limit to it, as this leftover blood appears benign. It's good that they cleaned it up anyway, just in case.

I believe Windows was not fully killed by Palmer but was just mortally wounded when he was covered in slime... and the croaking could have been him being assimilated or just trying to breathe in spite of his severe injuries.

I also believe that Blair's computer simulation should not be treated as canon because he likely animated it himself off of guesswork. There wasn't any evidence in the movie that a small particle of The Thing could in fact assimilate anything. Otherwise, MacReady would have been assimilated when the contaminated blood splashes all over him during Palmer's test. I think the creature had to be of a certain mass to attack people or have developed specialized structures in itself, kind of like how a Portuguese Man O War has specialized "stinging cells" within itself, an otherwise unified collection of individual cells rather than an actual animal.

When The Thing is "killed" I think it's really just mimickry and it has to go dormant for a period maybe to instinctively fool people into thinking it is dead as a defense mechanism. Burning it seems to be the only real way to kill it. Otherwise it seems fine running around in the snow and playing dead until it gets eventually thawed out.