No director has made more video game adaptations than Paul W.S. Anderson. Make of them what you want, but he’s found success with Mortal Kombat and the long-running Resident Evil movies. In 2020 he adapted Capcom’s blockbuster Monster Hunter games into a feature film, as well. Now Anderson is being tasked with bringing Sega’s The House of the Dead horror-shooter games to the big screen.
Deadline reports Anderson will direct The House of the Dead, based on the legacy video game franchise that launched in 1997 as an on-rail lightgun shooter game in which the player battles the undead. The thing that made these games so different is they gave the zombies the ability to run, a feature that was then co-opted by movies such as World War Z and Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead.
The original House of the Dead story centers on AMS agents charged with stopping the insane and disillusioned Dr. Curien from unleashing his armies of undead on an unsuspecting populace. The game’s title comes from the government agency the agents work for as their life expectancies are extremely short.
Anderson says the story will actually be based on House of the Dead 3, which centers on Lisa Rogan as she attempts to rescue her father, one of the agents who survived the first encounter.
“I’ve loved the video game since the ’90s,” Anderson told Deadline. “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. We’re going to base the movie on House of the Dead three, and if you know the mythology that is all about family conflict, amidst the action and scares. 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.
“My approach will be to reflect what this hyper-immersive, kinetic video game is, which is why Zack Snyder took these creatures and made them fast moving,” Anderson said. “This is a full-on terror ride. It’s different than what we did with Resident Evil, where there were lots of traps and puzzles and things to be figured out. House of the Dead is at heart a light rail shooter game, so it drags you straight into the middle of 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.”
All of this talk of family could mean Anderson will look to cast members of his own family. Anderson’s wife, Milla Jojovich, has led most of his video game movies but it’s unclear if she’ll have a role in this one. Their daughter, Ever Anderson, is also an actress who has appeared in Resident Evil: The Final Chapter, played young Natasha in Black Widow, and led Disney’s Peter Pan & Wendy.
Sega is making the most of its vast library of titles, and have already turned Sonic the Hedgehog into a wildly profitable franchise. They also have films in the works based on Shinobi, Streets of Rage, and Eternal Champions, along with Prime Video’s Like a Dragon: Yakuza series.
The House of the Dead begins production in mid-2025 so look for it to arrive in 2026.
