There are few things scarier than that moment in a horror movie where you realize the characters have lost track of one of their friends. It starts with the question of when they were seen last, then there’s a frantic search, and inevitably one of them finds a body that’s been unceremoniously dispatched by an unseen villain.
But what’s even scarier than watching that happen is having it happen to you, the sensation a hit first-person survival game attempted to simulate. Now, the effort to bring the feel of a horror movie into a video game is going full circle with a movie adaptation by some of the genre’s most trusted names.
Deadline reports horror game Phasmophobia is being adapted into a feature film by Blumhouse, the studio behind horror smash hits like Get Out, Split, and The Black Phone. Atomic Monster, the production company founded by The Conjuring and Malignant’s James Wan, is also producing.
In 2020’s Phasmophobia — named for a persistent fear of ghosts — you and up to three friends play as paranormal investigators scoping out a haunted house and trying to survive the wrath of evil spirits. The tension between completing your objectives and simply surviving made for compelling gameplay, especially since players could use speech recognition to interact with the ghosts as they tried to puzzle out just what sort of supernatural threat they were dealing with.
That could make for a fun enough ghost story, but if the aim is to adapt the movie as faithfully as possible, then Phasmophobia could be adapted into a found footage film that replicates the game’s first-person perspective with a handheld camera in the style of The Blair Witch Project. Blumhouse has had massive success with that subgenre ever since 2007’s Paranormal Activity, and while we may all be a little tired of it, this is the sort of title that could bring it back.
Video games have proven to be a reliable source for horror movies recently, with Five Nights at Freddy’s and Until Dawn proving there’s an audience for these works. Phasmophobia having been a Twitch and YouTube darling could help it find an audience too, while its unique, immersive premise could help shape it into something truly chilling.
