The Thing is a horror franchise built on a single terrifying idea: a shape-shifting alien that perfectly imitates whatever it kills, so no one can be sure who is still human. Its center is John Carpenter's 1982 film, a paranoid Antarctic nightmare that remade the 1951 creature feature The Thing from Another World into something colder and more hopeless, while the 2011 movie circles back as a prequel to that outpost's doom.
The series reaches into games as well. The 2002 third-person shooter continues directly from Carpenter's film, layering trust mechanics onto the squad you command, and its 2024 remaster brings that paranoia to modern hardware. The throughline across film and game is dread of the unknowable: an enemy that wears your friends' faces, set against frozen isolation with no help coming. Decades on, the imitation premise has lost none of its bite.
The The Thing franchise spans 2 games, 3 movies in the CrossBinge catalog.