Transmutations and adaptations

[This text actually started as a review of Return to Silent Hill (2026) but that spiralled into an overview of the first three games and a scene by scene breakdown of a movie I don't care enough about to watch again.]

Between films and games there are many similarities, games pulled from cinema for their entire existence, whether it being just thematically, structurally or directly adapting, the nature of cinema gets easily translated into a gaming format. Within games themselves we can create engaged textual films through machinima practice, reappropriating their function to what is arguably its parent media. With such easy acclimation to a gaming format one would assume that not only can films be games but games can be films too.  

I don't mean in a machinima sense but directly adapted to the screen. While the previous few years have highlighted the potential success that lies dormant in these adaptations with such examples as A Minecraft Movie (2025), Super Mario Bros (2023) and Five Nights at Freddys (2023), historically, generally video game adaptations have failed to capture the minds of audiences and existing fans alike. 

A Minecraft Movie (2026) - CHICKEN JOCKEY

So what is it that differentiates these two intertwined mediums, they share the same methods of storytelling, many have shared formats already seen in successful games/films, their visual language is for all intents and purposes the same. Films and games still maintain that material difference, that of interaction. While I can still touch the screen, experience the sensation of the images by being engaged with my perception of the film I cannot interact with it. 

Not physically I can not actualise myself in the filmic space, only sit, chastised, and fantasise about my potential existence in a world which I am in forced closeness with. A lover which cannot touch, cannot respond. Films play on this, a director is aware of your position, as is the projectionist and the eyes staring out at you from within the screen. 

To play a game is not to be a voyeur like you are in the cinema, you are in control. Your desires are translated on screen. Your hands move through a controller in a slew of unintelligible sentences, translated into code, on to screen becomes your will. 

Cinemas textual relationship with its audience relies on an imagined astral projection, games however provide devices for this to happen, changing this projection from something infallible, impossible to something physical. A convincing bluff. Your mind no longer notices a difference. You become somewhat self-present within the game world, navigating it with your digital self or transmuting your being to another one (such as an in-game character not in your likeness). 

screenshot from Crossroad (2005)

For a player, there becomes a cognitive dissonance between their expectation and the film text in an adaptation. 

A different kind of expectation, not one which comes from marketing or speculation, once which comes from nostalgia, from the memory of a place. The bluff presented by virtual environments from our supposed “meaningful” interactions with them convince us of their reality, of their significance. As such these can be seen as the same as physical spaces in our mind. 

Like visiting your hometown after a long period of time things have changed, this is not an enjoyable experience.

For a player their individual in-game experience is an authentic one, treated as pure fact. As such in adaptation they are affronted with an alternate reality. 

Video game adaptations seem to really only take two routes. Appearing to rely on either being approachable to a new audience like that of PTA’s resident evil or the games ability to exist outside of its virtual world. I’m talking about game-adjacent activities like the games continued existence in other media, fan worlds, youtube, literature and merchandising. 

For games like Minecraft, Mario and Five Nights at Freddys their existence is far beyond that of the in game experiences they offer. These films in my opinion are becoming instead of “game adaptations” moreso just conventional cinema. The films seem less interested in adapting a game or its events and more interested in filling the film with recognisable characters and pleasing a loud minority of a games’ playerbase. Any of the Silent hill films are guilty of this, the inclusion of pyramid head only really makes sense in the painful Return to Silent Hill (2026) as the villain is specific to the character of James Sunderland, who doesn't appear in the other movies. 

"Pyramid head" from Silent Hill 2 (1999)

crazy clickbate "Pyramid head" from Return to Silent Hill (2026)

Their game text(s) and characters have been assimilated into the cultural mainstream and generally speaking the films have more of a relationship to their respective fan cultures instead of the game itself. Becoming less like an adaptation and more like a fan film. As is a surprise to no one, films based on existing properties are more interested in a big opening weekend, or selling off to a streaming service than anything faithful. 

This however, seems to be a recipe for success at least for casual fans. 

Veering far enough away from the “player” experience by not including core storylines or central characters to avoid too harsh of a cognitive dissonance. And targeting more casual enjoyers of the IPs or those obsessed enough to forgo any shortcomings as long as withered bonnie is on screen. 

There is a new Resident Evil reboot/adaptation happening this year, the director has been given full creative freedom and hasn't and will not play any of the games. It will be interesting to see what happens because at that point you might as-well just write your own zombie movie.

I’m not sure what the point of this essay is, or what any solution could be, maybe players to too hard to please, or we should stop doing adaptations at all I guess I was interested in figuring out what made films and games so different and why adaptations fail. 

immersion and objecthood

Sat in the dark, a projector humming in the background, the Brookhaven Hospital section of Silent Hill 3 flickers to life. Sat knelt before the light. I navigate my digital body through the labyrinth, interacting with the game’s controller in a slew of gestures interpreted and actualised through the game's code. Turning the corner towards the southwestern hallway of the hospital, I am attacked, two reanimated corpses have appeared in front of me. As my virtual avatar is hit, I flinch, ducking my arm out of danger, a move mirrored on the screen. I am lost inside of the game, my physical body displaced between physical and digital space. In the virtual space, I am haunting this digital body, unable to materialise my own, I possess another's.

screenshot from "Silent Hill 3 (2003)"

Within video game scholarship, there is this concept of being in “flow” or “self-presence”. These are states of interaction with game texts characterised by relative unawareness, where a player may experience a heightened sense of their physical self being present in the game environment or an increase in their ability to perform gaming actions (such as using a controller or demonstrating technical skill). You become immersed in the game’s environment, and the digital representation of you, of the world, becomes inseparable from your own. I believe these states of presence and flow are representative of our wider relationships with digital texts and our attraction to them.


The “unawareness” described in relation to these states is more an unawareness of one's physical body or action rather than an unawareness of how to play. A player will no longer have to think about their inputs and can solely focus on their digital representation; the gestures required of them in the physical space now appear natural and obvious to them. As a player's desires are more and more accurately actualised on screen (as they learn to better communicate through the controller) thus heightened states of flow and presence are achieved. Like learning a new language, the player no longer needs to “think” but simply “do”.

Tetsuo II: Body Hammer (1982)

The language of physical to digital becomes common, an instant translation, and your physical body becomes attuned to the digital one. Once the language (in this case, the controls or mechanics) of gaming becomes understood, it becomes far easier for one to translate their physical experience into the game, resulting in self-presence and flow.

In her seminal essay Video Haptics and Erotics Laura Marks explores the idea of touch in relation to the screen.

She describes cinema as an ultimately visual experience, but still an exchange between two bodies, responding to the video as another body and the screen as another skin. She argues that video, or images with ‘electronic texture’ (such as video games) have an aspect of “haptic visuality".

“Haptic visuality draws upon other senses; the viewer's body is more obviously involved in the process of seeing than is the case with optical visuality.”

This kind of push-and-pull interaction becomes the exchange, it's this oscillating distance which allows you to fall inside of the haptic image//text.

“In other words, optical representation makes possible a greater distance between the beholder and object that allows the beholder to imaginatively project him/herself into or onto the object.”

Videodrome (1983)

When being a participatory viewer having cinema/visual experiences as physical exchanges, the video as body and the screen as skin, it makes it appropriate to consider touch. How do we touch the screen? How does it touch us, as your eyes skirt across its surface, how does the image feel? Touching, exchanging, lying up against the image in this way, the viewer may give up their own sense of separateness from the image, completely immersed, losing oneself in relation with another which cannot be known.

Marks considers this touch as something erotic, an exchange of subject/objecthood, this loss of separateness from the image allowing you to become an object with the world, the loss of subjecthood itself being erotic.

       You touch a video image with your eyes, but you can become one with its body through the controller

Existenz (1999)

There are some clear parallels which can be drawn from the haptic visuality of film and gaming aesthetics. Marks invokes Antonia Lant’s term “Haptical images” which was used to describe early experimental works that exploit the contrast between visual flatness and depth. Almost all video games do this, utilising the 2D space of the screen to explore the “depth” or 3D space of the game. Within the contrast of these two, in the folds of the strudel, is where we experience touch.

This sense of touch, eroticism, objecthood or immersion is greatly enhanced by gaming aesthetics. Not only do many video games, particularly those on sixth generation consoles, share aesthetic similarities to video’s surface density (a kind of shared electronic texture) but often exploit the visual flatness//depth contrast with HUD’s (heads up displays). Images which are placed right on the surface of the image with helpful information. This image data invites a kind of caressing glance, your eyes sliding across the digital surface, pushing you away some distance before ultimately pulling you back in.

screenshot from "Resident Evil 4 (2005)"

It is more than just a conversation of aesthetics, though; gaming requires direct physical interaction with the text, you are able to actually touch what you are seeing, and impact the actions represented on screen. Influence and change the kind of haptic exchanges you are having. It is the physical artefacts, in other words, the controller, which is the material difference between gaming and watching. If the video is the body and the screen its skin, the controller is the brain. Able to translate your actions to digital code, interpreting your desires and making them manifest in its video body.

When again looking at the “unawareness” of flow or self presence, this conversation with the machine, and the physical exchange of touch between your body and that of the controller//brain, once reaching a state of unawareness, suggests a kind of symbiosis. You no longer need to think about your actions, its almost as if the video//body is preempting your inputs the controller/brain becomes an extension of yourself, shaping your body, hands into a convenient form, shaped by the video//body controller//brain you are now losing that sense of separateness.

Becoming one with the video//body of the game, making its screen//skin react to your caress of its controller//brain. Losing your separateness or subjecthood in this way, is scary erotic even. Projecting yourself onto your virtual avatar inhabiting the vessel of an unknown digital other. You are represented on screen by this virtual body as you hold its brain in your hands, your organic self being transcoded into the digital plane, leaving this world behind.


Plugged into the controller, I continue through the hallway, laying up against the skin of the game. I rest my head upon the screen trying to access an unknowable other, losing myself to this immaterial body.

digging around in mechanistic muck - kittyhorrorshow at the rio

 A curatorial debut by Rosa Marouane (@largershandytattoo) Get Digging was a fresh use of screen one at the Rio in Dalston both showcase and fundraiser. The program consisted of 6 KittyHorrorShow games: Exclusion Zone (2020), Chyrza (2014), Anatomy (2016), Grandmother's Garden (2020), Tenement (2020), and Lethargy Hill (2020); each game was to be screened in its entirety 

Each game was screened with no introduction, context or title card. We are invited into the safety of the dark and violently pulled out again by a different alien landscape. We were watching Rosas gameplay walking us through the events of each game — a pseudo machinima. The game's sound is the most striking difference between this exhibition and the experience of playing on a smaller scale. The crackly, noisy murmurs which make up many of the game's dialogue and ambience gnawed away at the speakers throughout, reverberating through the cinema. The way the sound design forces you to listen, carefully you strain to hear the ghostly voices and whispers in the desert of the 3D landscape you have to focus, lean forward cup your ear. An extreme closeness to something inaccessible. The worlds presented are uncanny reflections of our existence. 

Anatomy (2016) @Kittyhorrorshow

Throughout the program we dug deeper through the pixels, starting with more ethereal environments: allusions to religion, hope, and the existence of another. Both Exclusion Zone and Chyrza allude to otherworldly beings, a civilisation long gone and monolithic structures with unknown motivations. Anatomy brings us down to the dirt, a house, recordings and a tape player. We watch through POV as our protagonist trudges through a dark empty house to collect and play each tape. The voice on the tape instigates a sense of suspense, suggesting houses are not the place of sanctuary we know but instead a mouth waiting to close in around us. Each time the doors swing open on the screen I am looking through my fingers, this is not our world, I must listen hard, gaze into the pixels to understand. The seduction is key in its effectiveness, I am sucked in, holding my hands over my face, I want the protagonist to slow down, and take more care, we don't know what's on the other side. Relentlessly the protagonist goes on without fear, a door opens without invitation, and a chill goes up my back. 

Subsequently, we are ordered into Grandmother's Garden (seemingly an ode to fixed-camera early PlayStation horror, think Resident Evil) to “get digging”. The player character does so, and upon uncovering grotesque worms the game ends, but we fall in. Landing in a place of purgatory Tenement takes us through a landscape littered with spirits. Hard lines separate textures, the expansive cityscape is vague in its form, large towers appear as paper as pyramids and at the edge of the street a sheer drop into nothingness. The longest of the six Tenement wallows in its misfortune, with monotony we talk to each figure we find, waiting patiently for the text to scroll over the screen read and move on. Tenement forces us to sit for a while, be complacent, understand then destroy this expanse we have become accustomed. The final film in the program Lethargy Hill is a further dive into a hellish landscape, seemingly a woodland, we read a story on screen, a bloated, rodent mother, birthing family members to hate, there is no rhyme or reason to its logic, rules don't exist here, a husband made of hair and twigs, a daughter made of spiders. The rodent mother becomes bored with her playthings in gruesome detail we read how they are dispatched the world around us now sinking into a dark deep magenta.

 Lethargy Hill (2020) @kittyhorrorshow

The screen goes blank and we are released back into our world, like moths to a light escaping the dark corners of screen one. 

Each game alluded to an extreme offscreen horror something unknowable, hidden maybe deep inside one's self. Going into much more detail about each game here would only be doing them a disservice, these titles are available for purchase through Kittyhorrorshows icth.io here. KittyHorrorShows games lend themselves well to this exhibition format, lulling the audience in with their aesthetic before releasing waves of discordance, surrealism, and physiological horror across the screen. I would be excited to see more of this in the future, games, and machinima in the cinema removing us the viewer from the computer screen, desk and phone these are usually consumed on. 

Giving the otherness of virtual worlds the space to breathe can only be a good thing…right? 

Please see this link to Rosa’s surgery recovery fundraiser https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-sew-me-back-together?member=32567421&sharetype=teams&utm_campaign=p_na+share-sheet&utm_medium=copy_link&utm_source=customer - archived post from 2024