The Horror of Movies Based on Scary Games

With Halloween just around the corner, we’re seeing stories about horror movies everywhere, and you certainly can’t leave horror games out of the discussion. Zombie games started back with Resident Evil, and with today’s technology you can make a horror game just as scary as a film. 

There have been a ton of Resident Evil movies so far, and even though they’re terrible, they make a ton of money. We still haven’t had a great horror movie based on a scary game yet, much like we haven’t had a great video game movie, period. So Uproxx listed the worst movies based on horror games, and apparently there’s no winners, just “from bad to worst.” 

Uproxx writes that “Silent Hill is easily the best horror video game derived movie ever made, which is to say it’s mediocre as opposed to maddeningly/hilariously awful…But after a promising star, the movie becomes a convoluted mess.” Resident Evil: Apocalypse comes next, which Uproxx called “the best of the RE flicks, if only because it actually makes some effort to reference the Resident Evil games.” 

But the first Resident Evil film which is “a fairly slick, well-assembled movie, but it’s completely heartless and barely resembles its source material…the movie is just dull.” House of the Dead? Uwe Boll’s “most amusingly abysmal” movie. Resident Evil: Afterlife? “The overarching storyline is a total useless continuity-laden shmozz.” 

Doom? “The only thing makers of Doom seemed to put any effort into was a a first-person [scene] like the gmaes. Unfortunately this scene only served to underline the fact that Doom’s effects were actually less impressive than the visuals of the recently released Doom 3…A dark, dreary, dull, D-grade Aliens clone.” And on and on…

So we’re throwing down the gauntlet again. Hollywood is trying very hard to get a good video game movie made. It would also be great to have a really scary horror movie based on a game, not to mention it would be awesome to see a real master of horror, someone who really knows the genre like a George Romero or a Guillermo Del Toro, adapt one too.