A new The House of the Dead movie is in the works with Paul W.S. Anderson of Resident Evil fame set to direct. The movie will adapt Sega’s classic on-rails zombie shooter game of the same name that’s graced pretty much every arcade worth going to and has come to consoles, too, with multiple games stemming from the first The House of the Dead hit that was released in 1996. Other names such as Jeremy Bolt as an executive producer are attached to the movie, but it doesn’t yet have any confirmed cast members nor does it have a release window.
News of the new The House of the Dead movie came from Deadline which confirmed that Anderson and Bolt would be working on The House of the Dead with Story Kitchen’s Dmitri M. Johnson, Mike Goldberg and Dan Jevons. Timothy I. Stevenson serving as executive producers. Sega’s Toru Nakahara, a producer who worked on several different Sonic the Hedgehog adaptations including the 2020 Sonic the Hedgehog movie, its sequels, and the Knuckles TV show, will also be on board as an executive producer.
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While there is of course some narrative behind the House of the Dead series to guide the reasoning behind why you’re fighting all these zombies in the first place, most people probably just see it as a shooty arcade game. The new House of the Dead movie will have to come up with some story to tie it all together as well, but it sure sounds like Anderson is looking to capitalize on the action of the games with an “extreme haunted house” approach to the horror movie.
“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,” Anderson told Deadline. “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.”
Bolt also talked about the design of these zombies from the original House of the Dead game and its sequels to give some insights into how things might work in the movie. He mentioned that the original game’s director, Takashi Oda, never really referred to these horrors as “zombies” and instead called them “creatures.” They’re fast, they’re smart, and some variants of them are much more grotesque than the archetypal zombie most games feature.
“Resident Evil for example, was very clearly based upon the Romero Zombie movies. House of the Dead is something different,” he said. “These are more like weaponized mutations, these incredible steroid-ed up figures that have chainsaws embedded into their limbs.”
Speaking of Resident Evil, that’s the franchise that The House of the Dead director Anderson is known for. He directed most of the live-action Resident Evil movies starring Milla Jovovich and was also known for the 1995 Mortal Kombat movie, the relatively new Monster Hunter movie, and Event Horizon. Some of those movies have certainly been received better than others, so we’ll see eventually which side The House of the Dead falls on.
The House of the Dead movie should be in production by mid-to-late-2025, according to the report.
