John Carpenter, the world-renowned horror director, has revealed in a new interview with AVClub that he'd love to adapt Dead Space, saying that it would "make a real great movie". Carpenter also discussed his love for video games, including some of his favorite titles of the past year.
During the interview, Carpenter expressed how he is currently enjoying Fallout 76, along with Borderlands and Horizon: Forbidden West, and gave high praise for the exceptional and mind-blowing design of the latter. The director expressed how he enjoys clever and engaging design in video games, especially scenarios where the player can approach them differently. He also made it clear that he is not fond of games with repetitive structures, and Assassin's Creed: Origins was brought up as an example of that repetitiveness.
The director also revealed that he hates games where you have to die over and over, and wants the characters to survive and learn. In 'The Thing', it wasn't about who lived and who died, but the psychological and continuous struggle of the living who lost their ability to trust and feel safe, as any one of them could turn into the thing. For Carpenter, a story is not about the penalty you receive when you do something wrong, but instead about the things you have to face as you live, and in the case of 'The Thing', it was paranoia.
When asked about the game he wants to adapt into a movie, he was quick to name Dead Space, as it is pretty much 'The Thing' in video game form. Grotesque manifestations and aberrant deformities of human corpses that mutated through an extraterrestrial infection, in addition to various schizophrenic and paranoid symptoms that the main character have to go through while surviving alone on the spaceship.
Carpenter also mentioned Dead Space 3 as his favorite entry, even though it had a bit more action than the rest of the series, and wants developers to continue creating more great games, since he likes playing a lot of them and finds them less stressful than making movies.