7 Killer Video Games Inspired By Horror Films

4. Dead Space - Event Horizon

Visceral's deep space nightmare shared a striking resemblance to many of the factors at play in the 90s film Event Horizon, but indirectly repurposed those structural and tonal elements. While Dead Space did find interesting gameplay hooks to set itself apart, the core settings and premises were undeniably similar. Each story starts with a team of space travellers tracking down an errant signal from a lost ship in low-orbit. The titular Event Horizon is a prototype spacecraft, carrying an inter-dimensional Mass Effect-type warp-drive while Dead Space's Ishimura is also the first of its kind - a celestial mining vessel known as a planet cracker. The main crew for each story has been sent to investigate their respective, long-lost spacecraft, and when they arrive, both appear to be abandoned. Nope. As the nightmarish visions of Laurence Fishburne and friends intensify, it becomes increasingly evident that the Horizon has literally been to Hell and back. Dead Space swaps the devil's door for an alien virus channeled through an ancient relic, dug up by the planet-cracking Ishimura. It mangles and mutates human-beings into sharp-limbed freaks, and these "Necromorphs" come out of the woodwork almost right away. After you and your team are forcefully and almost immediately split up, you spend the majority of the game on your own. Not scary at all. The gargantuan spaceship full of monster people is an apt justification for Dead Space's emphasis on dismemberment action, as is the simple fact that it€™s all part of a video game, but it still manages to ground itself in an ambient tension that draws more thematic cues from horror films than typical sci-fi shooter games... the original does, anyway.