7 Killer Video Games Inspired By Horror Films

Game Over, Man! Game Over!

By James McGrath /

In games, no one can hear you scream €“ not A.I. controlled NPCs, anyway. They aren€™t real. We€™re sure future tech will bring RPGs with dialogue trees that we actually read aloud, or even textless, fully dynamic conversation options. This would put us in the place we need to be, technologically speaking, for NPCs to €œhear us scream,€ so to speak, but we digress€ We only want to scream if it€™s for a good reason, and a horrifying video game is pretty much always an excellent reason. We're not talking about movies based on games. That combination almost never works. Has it ever? Uwe Bolls' atrocities and the progressively laughable Resident Evil series don't exactly set a high bar. The first Silent Hill film might be the exception, and Duncan Jones - writer and director of Moon and Source Code - is heading up the new World of Warcraft movie, so it's not necessarily a zero sum list of game films. When we look at it from the other angle, some of the very best horror games ever were inspired by scary movie classics that did it first. It's important to appreciate how much longer film has had to mature as an artistic medium. For that matter, all of these movies draw inspiration from classic horror literature, and of course, all monster stories are true. Now, all of these games are more action-oriented than the scary movies that inspired them, and they should be €“ they€™re interactive. That said, it surprised us how well the mechanics of some of these games functioned as virtual parallels of what made their filmic inspirations so terrifying. If nothing else, they successfully married the themes, tone, and style of what came before. These are the 7 best scary games spawned from even scarier cinematic classics...