Paul W.S. Anderson is writing and directing a live-action movie based on Sega's House of the Dead series, Deadline has reported.
British director Anderson has a long history with video game-inspired movies. He directed the first Mortal Kombat film in the '90s before moving on to the Resident Evil series, which ran from 2002 to 2016 and starred his wife, Milla Jovovich. Jovovich would also star in Anderson's 2020 Monster Hunter movie.
Anderson tells Deadline that he's been following the franchise for a while:
I’ve loved the video game since the ’90s. Back then I was a big player of video games in arcades, which is how I happened upon Mortal Kombat. And pretty much at the same time, I was also playing a lot of House of the Dead. It’s a title I’ve always loved. The IP has grown in strength, and now it’s really cross-generational. I was one of the original players, but now I have teenage kids who also play. That is the real attraction for me, that you’ve got a cross-generational piece of IP.
Anderson reveals that the film will take its story from the third HotD outing. "If you know the mythology that is all about family conflict, amidst the action and scares," he says. "It’s about a woman, Lisa Rogan, who’s attempting to rescue her father. And it’s also about Daniel Curien, who’s the son of the man who caused this mutant outbreak in the first place and who has to deal with the sins of the father."
Regarding his approach to the film, Anderson says it will be a "full-on terror ride," and the game's light gun setup will be reflected in how he directs the action:
I’m going to make a movie that mirrors that approach and plays out in real time, dragging the audience straight into the action. It’s not going to be kind of lumbered with a whole bunch of back story that might exclude people who know nothing about House of the Dead. Everyone’s going to be on the same page. Everyone’s going to get sucked straight into the action and learn about the characters and the plot, as they have 90 minutes to basically escape the most extreme haunted house you’ve ever been in.
Producer Jeremy Bolt, who has worked with Anderson on many of his video game movies, adds that the monsters in the series aren't technically zombies:
The original director of the video game, Takashi Oda, was very specific and never referred to them as zombies. He called them creatures. Resident Evil for example, was very clearly based upon the Romero Zombie movies. House of the Dead is something different. These are more like weaponized mutations, these incredible steroid-ed up figures that have chainsaws embedded into their limbs. It all has a very Japanese design aesthetic, related to manga and films like Tetsuo: The Iron Man, where you kind of have bits of metal and technology embedded in human mutated flesh. And these creatures are keenly intelligent, another thing that set House of the Dead apart. They’re not just going to come at you slowly lumbering. They’re coming from the sides, they’re coming from the back. They’re trying to trick you. They’re trying to trap you. And the level of intelligence differs. And they’re all being driven on ultimately by Dr. Curien, whose life force and intelligence lives on, almost like AI. The flesh is dead, but the mind lives on in a character called The Wheel of Fate. And he like all of the great villains from House of the Dead and Creatures, they’re all named after Tarot cards. So the Wheel of Fate, Death, the Magician.
Anderson is producing the film with Bolt, Sega’s Toru Nakahara, Story Kitchen’s Dmitri M. Johnson, Mike Goldberg and former games journalist Dan Jevons. Timothy I. Stevenson will be the executive producer on the project.
Nakahara tells Deadline:
Sega was a little skeptical about getting involved in big Hollywood productions, the idea that ‘they’re sharks, they’re going to rip us off.' But I convinced them, and working with Paramount on Sonic changed the dynamic toward our transmedia policies and since then we’ve been actively developing a lot of productions, looking at it as an initiative to expand the whole Sega brand. I got to know Paul and Jeremy, they’re legends in terms of zombie movies, and Dmitri at Story Kitchen. They have a rare understanding of video games, and how to bring them to the screen. We want to add a cool zombie movie to the Sega transmedia basket.
Production is expected to begin by mid- to late-2025.
This isn't the first time that House of the Dead has been turned into a film. Back in 2003, German director Uwe Boll adapted the series for the big screen with a relatively low $12 million budget, but the result was a critical and commercial failure. A sequel was released in 2006, and didn't even get a cinema release. A third outing was mooted by Mark A. Altman, the scriptwriter behind the first two movies, but it eventually morphed into Dead and Deader, an unrelated zombie movie starring Dean Cain of Superman fame.