Now that the scariest parts of Silent Hill: Revelation 3D are proving to be the grisly reviews and box-office results, it' s a good time to look at a handful of choice video games that have much greater potential than the Konami franchise to be blockbuster horror movies. In at least two of the examples I cite below, along with the pros and cons of adapting them, the film industry apparently agrees — or did at one point — that the game titles would translate well to the big screen. Actually making the movies adaptations of the games has not worked so well.
5. BioShock
In 2009, BioShock looked like it was destined to be a movie. Pirates of the Caribbean franchise master Gore Verbinski was slated to direct the visually stunning game in which a plane-crash survivor in 1960 finds himself in the underwater Art Deco-style city of Rapture and its mutated inhabitants to survive. When the project ran into budget issues, Verbinski turned over the director's reins to 28 Weeks Later filmmaker Juan Carlos Fresnadillo and agreed to serve as a producer. Last May, however, Fresnadillo told Playlist he was no longer involved and that the project was on hold because Universal Studios and the game's creator couldn't agree on a budget or whether the project should have an R rating or a PG-13, which would attract a broader audience. With the much-delayed third game of the franchise, BioShock Infinite due out in February 2013, and set, this time, in a floating sky-city called Columbia, it's time to revive this project.
Pros: BioShock is beautiful. Simply seeing the steampunk city of Rapture on the big screen would be worth the ticket. With more than 4 million copies of the game sold and a plot that a) is better than most fantasy/horror movies and b) has actually driven the argument of videogames as art, it's remarkable that it's not already a movie.
Cons: Video games inevitably lose their interactive components when they're adapted into feature films, but these elements are so integral to the telling of the story that removing them could prove problematic. Videogame tropes such as highlighted objectives and extended cut-scenes aren’t optional extras in this case: they’re built into the plot the same way your heart is built in to you.
4. Left 4 Dead
Pros: Valve’s multiplayer masterpiece — and its sequel, Left 4 Dead 2 — are the most viciously fun co-operative games ever made. Four very different characters must team up to survive the zombie apocalypse, or at least make it a little bit further. In addition to the teamwork element, which would translate well to the big screen, Left 4 Dead has some of the best incidental writing in games. Valve understands that writing dialogue is just as important as writing code, because nobody cares if a character's hair is beautifully rendered when they can't stand to spend the time with him. Added bonus: the game treats each level as a movie, complete with loading screen posters.
Cons: Since there isn't exactly a shortage of zombie projects out there in movie land, the writing and direction have got to be exceptional. Done properly, the combination of white-knuckle action and well-developed characters could make zombie movies exciting again. Maybe Hollywood should give Valve a lot of money and ask it to produce a script.
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.
1. House of the Dead: Overkill
Pros: House of the Dead is an established franchise, and movie producers love established franchises. Even better, unlike its predecessors and other games in the zombie-killing genre, Overkill is quite original. After four fantastic games where the only difference was your weapon (the arcade games series swapped out the standard pistols for big plastic shotguns and machine guns), the House of the Dead creators shook things up with a tongue-in-cheek grindcore comedy inspired by Robert Rodriguez's 2007 Planet Terror. The result is ideal for a movie version: a self-aware buddy comedy blowing the hell out of ugly monsters and sending up monster movie cliches.
Cons: The name is almost irrevocably poisoned thanks to Uwe Boll, whose adaptation of the first House of the Dead did more damage to video game heroes than every final boss put together. But that's not such a big problem anymore. We’re living in a world where movies are rebooted every five years whether they succeed or not. Spider-Man was restarted because the third one sucked. Batman is being rebooted because the third one rocked. Besides, coming back from the dead is what zombie movies are all about.
Luke McKinney loves the real world, but only because it has movies and video games in it. He responds to every tweet.
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