10 Horror Movies and the Games to Play if You Loved Them
It’s October and that can mean only one thing: Pumpkin Spice Lattes!!
Oh wait, two things: Pumpkin Spice Lattes and horror movies!
That’s right, it’s that time of year when you not only can, but should be watching horror movies every … single … night. And then spending every day playing horror video games.
Last year, I wrote up a list of ten scary video games and 20 amazing horror flicks to watch after playing them (नए टैब में खुलता है). This year, I’m flipping the idea around.
Below you’ll find 10 fantastic horror movies and the games you should check out if you liked them. As a happy coincidence, the games are also all currently on sale!
Loved I Am Legend? Play Dying Light 2 and Dying Light: The Beast
In 2007’s I Am Legend, Will Smith plays U.S. Army virologist Lt. Col. Robert Neville, who also happens to be the last man alive in New York City. He spends his days searching for supplies in the city and trying to find a cure for the outbreak that killed 90 percent of humanity and turned most of the rest into zombie vampires.
Dying Light 2 Stay Human takes place about 20 years after the original game and has you playing as Aiden Caldwell, an infected survivor looking for his sister. You spend your days parkouring across the rooftops of its open world and then running from zombies that grow in strength and hunt at night.
Kyle Crane, the star of the original Dying Light, returns in Dying Light: The Beast, now with a mix of Volatile and human DNA and the ability to temporarily tap into a monstrous side. After 13 years as a test subject, he spends the game hunting through Castor Woods for his captors and a mysterious creature.
Loved Zombieland? Play Dead Island 2
One of my favorite zombie movies of all time, Zombieland is part road-trip dark comedy, part rule-setting, wisecracking horror. The 2009 flick teams up Jesse Eisenberg, Woody Harrelson, Emma Stone, and Abigail Breslin for a trip across a zombie-infested America that wraps up gloriously at an L.A. amusement park.
Unlike the tragic underpinnings of the original Dead Island, Dead Island 2 is as darkly comedic as Zombieland. Crashing (literally) in L.A., you play one of six Slayers fighting your way through the city’s most famous settings, from Venice Beach to the mansions of Bel-Air and the studio lots of Hollywood. Fortunately, the tonal shift didn’t change the franchise’s detailed gore and makeshift weapons. Play alone or with two friends online.
Loved Shutter Island? Play Outlast, Outlast 2, and The Outlast Trials
Shutter Island delivers a thrilling ride with few jump scares and little traditional horror. Instead, Martin Scorsese’s 2010 movie follows a U.S. marshal investigating a disappearance from an island asylum on a mind-bending journey that leaves you wanting to watch it again to see what you missed.
While none of the Outlast games has you playing as law enforcement, the first two share that investigative streak. In the original Outlast, you play an investigative journalist; in Outlast 2, a cameraman working alongside his journalist wife. Both are armed with nothing more than a camcorder that happens to have night vision. The first has you tiptoeing through an asylum, while the second involves a doomsday cult.
The Outlast Trials is a prequel that delves into the experiments, first-hand, that ultimately led to the first two games. Unlike the others, it’s built for co-op with up to four players.
Loved Aliens? Play Killing Floor 3
The famously actiony sequel to Alien takes place nearly 60 years after the original movie with Ellen Ripley recruited to help investigate a colony that’s gone silent on the same planet where her crew first found the creature. Things go about as well as you’d expect for a movie featuring the Colonial Marine quip “Game over, man. Game over!” This is action-horror siege at its best.
Killing Floor 3 is very siegey as well. It’s 2091, and you’re part of the last line of defense against megacorp Horzine’s army of genetically engineered “zeds.” As a member of Nightfall, you’re tasked with surviving escalating waves of enemies, earning cash, unlocking skills, and building out your arsenal. While there’s a single-player mode, Killing Floor 3 is best enjoyed with up to six players. Hopefully none of them will need to mutter “game over.”
Loved Sinister? Play The Casting of Frank Stone
Featuring some of the creepiest found footage in modern horror, 2012’s Sinister stars Ethan Hawke as true-crime writer Ellison Oswalt, who moves his family into a house where the previous occupants were murdered. As he begins to investigate the crime using a box of old Super 8 home movies, things start to unravel.
The Casting of Frank Stone also hinges on old film, in this case a homemade horror movie shot in 1980 that captures something unthinkable. When the lost footage resurfaces decades later, it kicks off a cinematic, choice-driven horror story from the makers of Until Dawn.
Loved The Babadook? Play Luto
The Babadook is certainly one of the great horror movies of the 2010s. The 2014 film focuses on the crushing grief of a widow and how that pain and suffering somehow comes to life through the pages of a pop-up book called Mister Babadook. It’s both a terrifying monster movie and a stark examination of grief and depression.
Luto is a first-person psychological horror game about someone trapped in a house that reshapes itself into a surreal, haunting labyrinth. Inspired by the cult-classic PS4 demo P.T., it too is a story about loss, anxiety, and depression.
Loved Midsommar? Play Silent Hill f and Silent Hill 2
There are a lot of ways to interpret the Swedish-set horror of 2019’s Midsommar, but at its core it’s clearly about relationships and identity. Dani follows her boyfriend to a Swedish commune to witness a midsummer festival, and the community slowly reshapes who she is. Whether she finds herself or loses herself is open to interpretation.
The same theme is buried in both Silent Hill 2 and Silent Hill f.
Silent Hill 2 is about the end of a marriage and how it shaped the protagonist over time. In it, James comes to Silent Hill because of a letter from his wife, who has been dead for years. The town forces him to face who he is, an internal journey that becomes external and horrific.
Silent Hill f is driven by the fear of what marriage will do to you, centering on the social pressure on women in 1960s Japan to become obedient wives at the cost of their own identities. You play Hinako Shimizu, a high school student being pushed into an arranged marriage, fighting to survive her rural hometown after it’s enveloped by fog and monstrous blood-red flowers.
Loved The Cell? Play The Evil Within and The Evil Within 2
Jennifer Lopez’ sometimes forgotten gem from 2000, The Cell is about a child psychologist who uses experimental tech to enter the minds of comatose patients. She’s asked to go into the mind of a comatose serial killer to find his last victim before that victim dies. The surreal, nightmarish visuals of what she finds there will haunt you.
In The Evil Within, Detective Sebastian Castellanos is pulled into a twisted world of bending reality after responding to a mass murder at Beacon Mental Hospital. The survival horror game plunges you deep into a killer’s living nightmare.
The sequel has Castellanos plugging back into the mind-linked world of the first game to hunt for his daughter, this time inside Union, an idyllic small town slowly collapsing into horror. Along the way, he has to survive a murderous artist and a fanatical preacher.
Loved Annihilation? Play Darkwood
Annihilation is a wonderful piece of weird fiction and cosmic horror by Jeff VanderMeer, turned into a gripping 2018 movie by director Alex Garland. Natalie Portman plays a biologist who joins an all-female expedition into the Shimmer, a mysterious zone spreading along the Southern U.S. coast. Inside, she finds all life mutating and murderous.
Darkwood is a top-down survival horror game set in a remote Eastern Bloc forest that grew overnight and trapped everyone inside. You spend your days scavenging, crafting, and trading with survivors, and your nights hiding in your home, trying to survive whatever hidden horrors are stalking the night.
Loved The Witch? Play 1666: Amsterdam
The Witch centers on a Puritan family in 1630s New England that is banished from its colony and forced to settle alone at the edge of a mysterious dark forest. Over time, the family begins to believe that their eldest daughter is to blame for the disappearance of their newborn son. Robert Eggers’ 2015 debut film is every bit as meticulous a slow burn as anything he’s created since.
1666: Amsterdam is still in Early Access, but the bones of the game and its deeper story are already well defined. From Assassin’s Creed creator Patrice Désilets, it takes place in 17th-century Amsterdam. You play Noa Brooklyn, the Collector, who uses witchcraft to unmask entities called the Originals and confront them in their true form. It’s a dark, third-person narrative action-adventure all about finding the evil that lives beneath the mask of mundanity.








