While some are looking at Detective Pikachu and the possible success of Sonic the Hedgehog as proof video game movies have finally arrived, there have been successful ones for years. Looking beyond the Resident Evil series of movies, there was also 2006’s Silent Hill, based on the popular horror video game and directed by Christophe Gans. The movie made $100M and launched an eventual sequel, 2012’s Silent Hill: Revelation, a critical failure with an entirely new creative team.
Now Gans says he’s planning his comeback to Silent Hill, along with another horror film project, Fatal Frame, which is based on the Project Zero video game series. He tells French site Allocine…
“I am working on the adaptation of the video game Project Zero (aka Fatal Frame). The film will take place in Japan. I especially don’t want to uproot the game from its Japanese haunted house setting, and we’re also working on a new Silent Hill. The Silent Hill project will always be anchored in this atmosphere of a small American town, ravaged by Puritanism. I think it’s time to make a new one.”
Gans was deeply invested in the first Silent Hill movie, which is why it was so surprising when he didn’t return for the sequel years later. It was probably for the better. Fatal Frame, which centers on characters that use a powerful camera which traps and pacifies spirits, has been targeted for adaptation for nearly two decades, with Steven Spielberg involved in the script with John Rogers. There hasn’t been any news on it since 2014, however, and it’s unclear who is involved other than Gans.
We haven’t seen much from Gans since Silent Hill. He skipped out on the sequel so he could direct the 2014 French adaptation of Beauty and the Beast (starring Lea Seydoux and Vincent Cassel), and that’s pretty much been it. He first came to the attention of American audiences with the 2001 historical action flick, Brotherhood of the Wolf.
