With the upcoming release of the Blair Witch
video game, we thought it was time to take a look at other relatively untapped horror movie franchises ripe for a video game adaptation. Let’s sink our fangs in.
IT
The beauty of IT – both the movies and the original Stephen King novel – is that it lends itself to a video game that could essentially be whatever you wanted it to be. After all, Pennywise is a murderous clown who prays on your worst nightmares; he could take the form of any nasty thing a developer could conjure up. Lepers, werewolves, and a murderous statue of Paul Bunyan are only the beginning. Just as long as the final boss isn’t a giant spider.
A Nightmare on Elm Street
There was a Nightmare on Elm Street game made for the NES back in ‘89, but it’s been thirty years since then, so let’s look at what an update could look like. Like many of the games on this list, Nightmare on Elm Street would lend itself to a horror simulator genre – that particular type of horror where familiar video game mechanics are stripped away and you’re basically running from a single enemy the entire time. However, the fun comes from the fact that Freddy is a playful kind of evil and one that could take many forms throughout the game; including, of course, pepperoni pizza. The sleep meter in the original, which is always draining and can be refilled with cups of coffee, should definitely return, through.
Child’s Play
The Child’s Play franchise has never been made into a video game – the closest it came to a reality was a failed Kickstarter campaign in 2012 (developers TikGames raised $585 which was $924,415 off their goal). But there is real potential for something fun here. Maybe a Five Night’s at Freddy’s knock-off set inside a giant toy store. Or a co-op adventure where you and a buddy play as Chucky and Tiffany knocking off groups of annoying teens. Or maybe you take on the role of Chucky in the reboot and your goal is to activate all the Chuckys in the world and start a giant Chucky army. The point is, yes, Chucky, we wanna play.
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
The last time The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was adapted into a video game was for the Atari in 1982, so once again, there’s more or less a clean slate here. Though survival horror is the obvious choice, there’s also an argument to be made that a Texas Chainsaw Massacre video game could be an interactive story in the same vein as Until Dawn or the Dark Pictures Anthology…basically, anything Supermassive Games has put out. Could you and a group of ragtag buddies survive Leatherface, his family, and each other?
A Quiet Place
A Quiet Place has such a great hook behind it – don’t make any noise or you’ll die – that it feels like a no brainer for a video game. A tactical strategy game where in every level, you and your family have to make your way to a safe place while avoiding noise-making obstacles, or a pure survival horror game where you have to scavenge for resources to help make your way through an environment without making a noise. Throw in the fact that you have to keep a crying baby quiet, and you’ve got yourself a challenge!
Night of the Living Dead
There’s been no shortage of zombie games, but what about a proper homage to the granddaddy of undead cinema, the very prototype of the survival horror genre? Whether it’s a beat-by-beat interactive adaptation of the original film, or a looser interpretation, a game set in the universe of George Romero’s zombie classic could be something special, as long as it kept the gritty black and white and eerie low-budget simplicity of the original.
Maximum Overdrive
In Stephen King’s disaster of a directorial debut (and last time directing anything) a green asteroid causes all the machines on earth to go crazy and try to kill everyone, and while it’s not a great film, it’s certainly a crazy premise that would translate well to a game. Fight off bloodthirsty lawnmowers and soda machines, ignore the taunts of a rude ATM, and take down massive bosses in the forms of possessed steamrollers and mack trucks. If not a full-blown game, this could make one hell of a GTA mod.
The Shining
We got a glimpse of what a gamified version of the Overlook hotel might be like in Ready Player One, and while it took even more liberties with the source material than Kubrick did with Stephen King’s original novel, there’s certainly potential to be mined from this infamous locale — whether it’s series of interactive horror vignettes a la What Remains of Edith Finch, a macabre hotel management sim, or a racing game where you’ve gotta ride a Bigwheel down twisting hallways, dodging well-dressed apparations.
Thanks for watching! What horror movie would you like to see turned into a video game? Leave your suggestions in the comments. For more on Blair Witch, check out the official gameplay trailer, and for everything else, keep it locked to IGN.Lucy O’Brien is Executive Editor of Features at IGN. Follow her on Twitter. Max Scoville is a host and producer at IGN, you can find him on Twitter @MaxScoville.
