Paul W.S. Anderson Tackles Sega Game; See Concept Art

EXCLUSIVE: Paul W.S. Anderson will write and direct The House of the Dead, an action-packed feature based on the legacy Sega franchise.

Anderson will produce alongside his partner Jeremy Bolt, Sega’s Toru Nakahara will produce along with Story Kitchen’s Dmitri M. Johnson, Mike Goldberg and Dan Jevons. Timothy I. Stevenson will be executive producer.

Anderson and Bolt have brought several game franchises to the screen successfully, including Mortal Kombat, the Resident Evil franchise, and most recently Monster Hunter.

The House of the Dead debuted in 1996 as an ‘on-rails shooter’ game, fast-paced action/horror with a groundbreaking zombie premise. That included the innovation of giving its undead villains the ability to run, something that inspired films from Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead remake and Marc Forster-directed World War Z. It was The House of the Dead that first evolved the flesh-eaters from the lumbering stumblers that George Romero brought to life in his movies.

In the arcade game, players take on the role of AMS agents, a government agency tasked with thwarting the conspiracies of organizations that threaten the world. The title comes from the bureau they work for, because their life expectancies are brief.

“I’ve loved the video game since the nineties,” Anderson told Deadline. “Back then I was a big player of video games in arcades, which is how I happened upon Mortal Kombat.. And pretty much at the same time, I was also playing a lot of House of the Dead. It’s a title I’ve always loved. The IP has grown in strength, and now it’s really cross-generational. I was one of the original players, but now I have teenage kids who also play. That is the real attraction for me, that you’ve got a cross-generational piece of IP. We’re going to base the movie on House of the Dead three, and if you know the mythology that is all about family conflict, amidst the action and scares. It’s about a woman, Lisa Rogan, who’s attempting to rescue her father. And it’s also about Daniel Curien, who’s the son of the man who caused this mutant outbreak in the first place and who has to deal with the sins of the father.

“My approach will be to reflect what this hyper-immersive, kinetic video game is, which is why Zack Snyder took these creatures and made them fast moving,” Anderson said. “This is a full-on terror ride. It’s different than what we did with Resident Evil, where there were lots of traps and puzzles and things to be figured out. House of the Dead is at heart a light rail shooter game, so it drags you straight into the middle of the action. I’m going to make a movie that mirrors that approach and plays out in real time, dragging the audience straight into the action. 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. 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.”

The haunted house is an abandoned research facility where these creatures were hatched, before, as Anderson quipped, “the inmates took over the asylum.” The filmmakers say these inmates are way more capable killers than zombies.

“The original director of the video game, Takashi Oda, was very specific and never referred to them as zombies,” Bolt said. “He called them creatures. Resident Evil for example, was very clearly based upon the Romero Zombie movies. House of the Dead is something different. These are more like weaponized mutations, these incredible steroid-ed up figures that have chainsaws embedded into their limbs. It all has a very Japanese design aesthetic, related to manga and films like Tetsuo: The Iron Man, where you kind of have bits of metal and technology embedded in human mutated flesh. And these creatures are keenly intelligent, another thing that set House of the Dead apart. They’re not just going to come at you slowly lumbering. They’re coming from the sides, they’re coming from the back. They’re trying to trick you. They’re trying to trap you. And the level of intelligence differs. And they’re all being driven on ultimately by Dr. Curien, whose life force and intelligence lives on, almost like AI. The flesh is dead, but the mind lives on in a character called The Wheel of Fate. And he like all of the great villains from House of the Dead and Creatures, they’re all named after Tarot cards. So the Wheel of Fate, Death, the Magician.”

Sega’s Toru Nakahara is the Japan-based game maker’s Head of Production Movies/TV. He was a Hollywood lawyer brought in by Sega to be the gatekeeper of its properties back when many game-to-film transfers were not very good. Sega helped turn that around with the Sonic the Hedgehog film franchise, and they have numerous others percolating. The company has been protective of The House of the Dead, and this is a next big step for them.

“Sega was a little skeptical about getting involved in big Hollywood productions, the idea that ‘they’re sharks, they’re going to rip us off,’” Nakahara said. “But I convinced them, and working with Paramount on Sonic changed the dynamic toward our transmedia policies and since then we’ve been actively developing a lot of productions, looking at it as an initiative to expand the whole Sega brand. I got to know Paul and Jeremy, they’re legends in terms of zombie movies, and Dmitri at Story Kitchen. They have a rare understanding of video games, and how to bring them to the screen. We want to add a cool zombie movie to the Sega transmedia basket.”

They will pitch the project immediately, with plans to be in production by mid- to late-2025. Anderson is repped by Ken Kamins at Key Creatives & Alexander Lea at Wiggin, Bolt by Alexander Lea at Wiggin LLP, and Story Kitchen by WME and Pryor Cashman. Toru Nakahara negotiated on behalf of Sega.