#SURVIVAL HORROR PS1 HIDDEN GEMS MOVIE#
Criminally underrated, this movie is truly the stuff of nightmares, channeling the same unnerving dream logic of things like The Twilight Zone and Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds at their very best. Vanishing on 7 th Street is a 2010 film directed by Brad Anderson that stars Hayden Christensen, Thandiwe Newton, and John Leguizamo. Game logic things like the time-altering effects of a save and repeat protagonist deaths are already pretty unnerving, and it’d be interesting to explore these elements in a place like the film’s foreboding New Hampshire town of Hobb’s End. Horror games are ripe for this kind of treatment. ‘Meta-horror’ is a pretty pretentious phrase, but it’s the only one that fits here, as the movie smartly deconstructs concepts like cosmic horror, reality-altering forces, and the effects of belief to tell a twisting story-within-a-story. Partly, this is down to Carpenter’s skills as a screen director, but it’s also because of the movie’s clever overarching narrative. Whilst trying to make a Lovecraft adaptation is not without its dangers, In the Mouth of Madness is a cut above the rest. Lovecraft, the movie tells the story of John Trent (played by Sam Neill), an insurance investigator hired to track down a missing author whose pulp horror novels have been known to have an unusual effect on readers.
The film was Carpenter’s third and final installment of his ‘apocalypse trilogy’, consisting of this film, The Thing and 1987’s Prince of Darkness.
In the Mouth of Madness is a 1994 film directed by the legend of horror John Carpenter. Okay, enough psychological films about an ensemble cast getting killed in an isolated locale. Want to know what we mean? You’ll just have to watch the film to find out. But without giving too much away, it’s the film’s twist that’s the real draw here. An empty cruise liner is the perfect setting for a tense game of cat-and-mouse, with multiple narrow corridors to ramp up the sense of claustrophobia. Much like Identity, there’s so much about Triangle’s setup that would make it a good horror game. Salvation seems to come when they manage to board an abandoned ghost ship, until they encounter a mysterious killer intent on picking them off one by one. Several friends on a yachting holiday get caught out by a freak storm, casting them adrift and leaving them way off course. Triangle is a British-Australian thriller released in 2009. It’s the sort of thing that would make a great Telltale-like game or detective experience, with multiple endings depending on the player’s choices and discoveries. It’s got an isolated environment, a tight cast, a mysterious premise, and a tense guessing game as you try to work out which person’s next for the chopping block. Identity would work as a horror game for the same reason it works as a horror film. However, it soon becomes clear that something even weirder than homicide is going on here. After circumstance brings ten people together to a motel, someone or something starts bumping them off one by one. The setup is classic murder mystery stuff with a twist. Identity is a 2003 psychological thriller starring John Cusack (who starred in the equally good Stephen King adaptation 1408), Ray Liotta, Amanda Peet, Alfred Molina, Clea DuVall, and Rebecca De Mornay. IdentityĪ group of strangers, a stormy night, an empty motel in the middle of nowhere. Rather than listing the classics that everyone knows about, we’ve instead gone slightly off the beaten track to focus on some hidden gems that may have slipped under the radar. In the spirit of speculation, then, we’ve selected five frightening films that we think would make for compelling horror game experiences. Whilst the Resident Evil films absolutely stunk (especially so considering what happened to one of the film’s stuntwomen), the first Silent Hill movie was surprisingly faithful to the source material, and 2005’s Doom makes for something of a guilty viewing pleasure. And hey, it’s even worked the other way around. 2002’s videogame sequel to The Thingwas a solid entry into the survival horror genre, for example, whilst 2014’s Alien: Isolation met with critical and commercial success.
Whilst the history of films-to-games adaptations (and vice versa) has, let’s face it, generally been pretty rough, there are a few gems out there that have shown that making the jump to other forms of media doesn’t have to stink. Have you ever gotten to the end of watching a horror film and thought to yourself, “Hey, that’d make a great videogame!”? 5 Obscure Horror Films that Would Make Great Video Games