Dark Souls: 5 Video Games That Should Be Horror Movies

3. Dead Space

Pros: Dead Space is about as close to a perfect horror movie as you can get: It's Aliens crossed with 28 Days Later featuring a stoic, hard-working everyman as its protagonist.  Sent to investigate a derelict space ship, Isaac Clarke, a confluence of science-fiction masters Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke's names, finds that his engineering skills prove useful against its human crew members who have mutated into horrific monsters called necromorphs. There's plenty in this franchise for a movie: a creepy abandoned spaceship, a lost love, vicious, freakish monsters and a sequel that blurs the boundaries between reality and madness. The zero-gravity scenes of Isaac relieving his praying-mantis like adversaries of their limbs is worth an entire movie budget alone. The extremely creepy trailer, which is reminiscent of the "Creep" clip for The Social Network, could easily be adapted to any movie that results.  Temple Hill, the production company involved with The Twilight Saga and the TV show Revenge was reportedly developing a Dead Space movie with with Disturbia director D.J. Caruso, but there hasn't been any news on the project in years. Perhaps the highly anticipated release of Dead Space 3  on Feb. 5, 2013 will change that.

Cons: Remember Event Horizon?  That 1997 spaceship horror movie didn't do nearly as well as it should have. Then again, if the ridiculous torture-porn Saw franchise could spawn seven movies, two video games, and a reality TV series, the film industry could sustain one more interesting horror movie in space. At least the picture won't take place in an old abandoned shack in the woods.

2. Dark Souls

Pros: Dark Souls is one of the bleakest, most desperate premises in all of video gaming. It provides pure atmosphere: you really do face death at every turn, and your heroic struggle isn’t necessarily to save the world or rescue lost love. You're just trying to stay alive a little bit longer in an utterly doomed world. If a movie could somehow capture that blasted hopelessness, we’d have a dungeons-and-dragons version of The Road.

Cons: The game conveys this aforementioned bleakness by killing you. Repeatedly. And unlike other video games, the price of death is expensive: Dying twice in a row means losing all of the bonuses you've collected to your killer, which means rivals have genuine motivation to teleport into your world and hunt you down. This may be the best example of a story you simply can’t tell in movies. But you could tell a different tale set in the same powerful world.

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