Horror games have been around for a while, from jump scares to disturbing the player. And for a few years now, some have been gaining popular notoriety.
There are all kinds of horror games, and a good few are beloved. Often, when games gain significant popularity, new kinds of merchandise and adaptations follow quickly.
Certain reworks have been received much more positively and are considered real adaptations. Others, despite their efforts, have still been declared ridiculously offensive to the original game.
For a long time, video game adaptations have been jokes. Most TV adaptations have been painfully bad movies—slapstick parodies that can’t even take themselves seriously. But recently, people have begun using different approaches to adapt horror games into TV shows and movies, pairing the same worlds with new stories.
The first season of “The Last of Us” TV adaptation came out in March 2023 and was widely well-received. It follows hardened Joel Miller and fourteen-year-old Ellie Williams in a zombie-ridden post-apocalyptic world.
Many fans were excited to see their favorite characters, and those who had never played the game flocked to the show for the intriguing story and interesting world-building. Rebecca Nicholson, a writer for the Guardian, described it as “a phenomenal blend of horror and heart.”
Things went downhill fast when season 2 was released in May 2025. Fans quickly began pointing out flaws in the writing and the rampant mischaracterization in the newest season.
The biggest pitfall was misunderstanding how the second game was meant to be paced, and how the characters were portrayed. The show’s creators took characters that people knew and loved and changed them entirely, from de-escalating a tense story to feminizing characters living through a post-apocalyptic world. That being said, the adaptation format is undeniably difficult, since they are translating an interactive story into a non-interactive one while keeping all the elements that made it distinctive.
One of the biggest problems in adapting horror games into a different medium is carrying over the characters. Staying true to a clean-cut story that has already been told is difficult and frankly unoriginal. People may be excited to see their favorite characters and scenes acted out, but it gets old fast. Seeing the same story recycled, spit out, and made slightly worse is boring. Many people turned off their TV after finishing the second season of “The Last of Us” and wondered why it was adapted at all.
Resident Evil was released in theaters in September 2026, taking a different approach. Resident Evil movies have an infamous past, often regarded as the “Sharknado” of horror action movies, meaning they are ridiculous.
The 2026 release of “Resident Evil” was not perfect, but people liked it. It was well received because it embraced originality over recreating an existing premise. “Resident Evil” follows Bryan Hodukavich during a modernized Raccoon City outbreak. The movie includes delightful references to the actual gameplay of Resident Evil, like Bryan learning shooting mechanics while also pointing out the hilarious nature of some of the combat. When Bryan is in the sewer, a different kind of mutated monster begins to form, and rather than fighting it as a Resident Evil game might require, he rapidly exits the sewer and moves on, declaring his refusal to discover what that monster was. Other small references, such as health spray (a classic Resident Evil healing item), are seen throughout the movie.
In both of these adaptations, there were points of success and failure, and we can expect that going forward. Still, it’s important to make these types of movies and shows to create something at least slightly new. It creates new perspectives, themes, and stories for people to consume, ponder, and enjoy.