This week sees the premiere of Werewolves Within, a new horror comedy based on the multiplayer Ubisoft game. While video game adaptations don’t have the best track record at the cinema, horror franchises like Resident Evil seem to fare better than others. The genre has a rich history that as yet has not been tapped, so we thought we’d spotlight a bunch of titles that could make for solid flicks.
The Suffering
Warner Brothers owns the rights to this 2004 horror game, so there’s one issue right off the bat. Death Row prisoner Torque is facing the chair for the murder of his ex-wife and kids, a crime he has no memory of. But when Abbot State Penitentiary is rocked by an earthquake that unleashes the ghosts of former inmates and staff, things get extremely ugly. This would be a great hard-boiled action movie, with the psychological underpinnings surrounding the protagonist’s missing history giving it just enough emotional heft to support the carnage.
Obscure
The high school setting of 2005 survival-horror game Obscure makes it stand out in the pack. A group of students at Leafmore High get locked into the building at night and uncover horrific experiments in eternal life being conducted by the principal and the school nurse, who are both over 100 years old. Unfortunately, the procedure is also transforming teachers and students into hideous mutants, but you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs. Big B-movie energy would make this game a fun film.
The Medium
The most recent game on this list, Bloober Team’s Silent Hill-inspired adventure stars Marianne, a psychic in post-communist Poland who has the ability to shift between the normal world and the spirit world. She travels to an abandoned resort that was the location of a horrific massacre and discovers a malevolent spirit that can possess humans and force them to carry out its will. It’s a grim and challenging work that seems like a no-brainer for a movie adaptation, which would have the added bonus of giving some funds to the independent developers.
Outlast
The life of a freelance journalist can be a tough one, especially when you take on assignments like Miles Upshur, the protagonist of Outlast. In the game, he sets out to explore the Mount Massive Asylum, a private hospital in the mountains of Colorado that’s allegedly engaging in human experiments. When he gets there, though, things are way worse than that, as the staff has been slaughtered, the inmates are loose and a ghostly entity called the Walrider is making a serious mess. Great atmosphere, cool backstory, and interesting characters would make Outlast a fine movie.
Dying Light
Zombie movies are a dime a dozen, but a big part of what makes them succeed is unique context. 2015 survival horror game Dying Light puts the undead in a massive, mazelike Middle Eastern city called Harran. Protagonist Kyle Crane needs to use the city to his advantage to keep away from the hordes of the undead, especially after night falls and they become hyper-aggressive and able to run and climb. It’s a solid franchise with a compelling plot arc and interesting antagonists.
Harvester
This 1996 point-and-click adventure game is known for its graphic violence and gore, but behind it all is some remarkably effective psychological stuff. When Steve Mason wakes up in the ordinary midwestern town of Harvest in 1953, things quickly get out of control. As an initiation rite to a mysterious organization called the Lodge, Steve is forced to carry out increasingly cruel and violent acts in service of a greater purpose. A great twist ending would translate brilliantly to the screen.
Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem
Widely regarded as one of the GameCube’s best titles, this Lovecraftian horror adventure put players in control of a variety of characters through history as they attempt to puzzle out the details of the Tome of Eternal Darkness, a bewitched book bound in human skin. A screenwriter would probably have to pare things down a little bit to keep it within a reasonable running time, but there are so many cool ideas in this tale of three malevolent elder gods competing to extend their influence on the Earth that it’s kind of a no-brainer.
Illbleed
Cult game fans worship this utterly bonkers Dreamcast title, which offers up one of the absolute weirdest takes on the survival-horror genre. Set inside a theme park that offers a $100 million reward to anybody who manages to escape it, it’s a cavalcade of surreal scenes, deadly traps, and ludicrous dialogue. You couldn’t play this one straight, but recent hits like Mandy show that there’s definitely a market for a movie that goes balls-out with a wink and a nod, and Illbleed would absolutely shred as something like that.
Condemned: Criminal Origins
Monolith’s unique Xbox 360 title was a first-person shooter without the gunplay, instead requiring you to engage in brutal melee combat as SCU investigator Ethan Thomas, who is trying to track down a serial killer preying on other murderers. Framed for the murder of two cops, he explores the back alleys and skeevy places of his city while he hunts the culprit and uncovers a much deeper darkness underneath it all. A film adaptation was in the works in 2005, with Sons of Anarchy’s Kurt Sutter attached to write the screenplay, but we haven’t heard anything else since then, so it’s probably dead in the water.
The Lurking Horror
Infocom were the undisputed masters of the text adventure, turning their skills to a variety of genres. 1987’s The Lurking Horror takes place on the campus of a large northeastern university, where the player controls a student who has ventured to the computer lab during a snowstorm to finish a report. When a glitch overwrites part of his document, it reveals the Department of Alchemy has been meddling with forces beyond its control and unleashed a panoply of horrors onto the university. Filming this in a retro Stranger Things-esque style would make for a seriously fun flick.
Werewolves Within arrives in theaters on June 25 and on-demand on July 2.
