John Carpenter Interested in a Dead Space Film?
With a sixty-five year resume spanning the likes of The Thing, Escape From New York, Christine, and the original Halloween, I don’t have to explain to you why director John Carpenter is a silver screen legend.
Carpenter has some crazy range when reviewing his career – films like They Live and Big Trouble in Little China prove just how far out there the filmmaker’s mind goes – but his cinema doctorate is undoubtedly in horror. So as a former twelve-year-old entranced, excited, and terrified by this man’s many instant classics (Prince of Darkness will alter your moral fiber), an internal geek-bomb goes off when I hear John Carpenter is interested in making a Dead Space movie.
A longtime supporter of video games and their unbound potential for storytelling, Carpenter likens the appeal of Visceral Games’ survival horror title to 1979’s Alien (a hit-you-in-the-eye-it’s-so-apparent influence on the games). “The first game was more - I guess it was like Alien - but not quite. It was a little different than that,” says Carpenter.
“I maintain that Dead Space would just make a great movie because you have these people coming onto an abandoned, shut-down space ship and they have to start it up and something’s on board. It’s just great stuff.”
Way back when the first Dead Space game was making waves, a feature film was being optioned with director D.J. Caruso attached. Formerly, Caruso worked on the Shia LaBeouf vehicles, Disturbia and Eagle Eye. That deal eventually lapsed and fans’ dreams of seeing Shia step into Isaac Clarke’s rig – I can’t even finish that sentence; nobody fucking wanted that.
Dead Space has found its gore laden way into just about every avenue of media – comics, novels, animated films, toys – but hasn’t carved a path through Hollywood yet, and Dead Space 3’s less than stellar sales do little to endorse an adaptation. That hasn’t deterred Carpenter, though. “I would love to make Dead Space, I’ll tell you that right now,” he says. “That one is ready-made.”