“I would love to make Dead Space, I’ll tell you that right now. That one is ready made.”

Those are the words spoken by one of cinema’s most respected and most successful horror movie directors, John Carpenter, in an interview with Game Informer [reported by Videogamer]. He’s the man behind the Halloween series, The Fog and The Thing. He’s also had success with nail-biting tension and action in films like Assault on Precinct 13 and Escape From New York.

Carpenter also said, “The first game was more – I guess it was like Alien – but not quite. It was a little different than that.” See, he can even see where it started to go wrong!

He also added, “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.”

With his pedigree (yes, we are ignoring Ghosts of Mars), not to mention Dead Space wouldn’t exist without The Thing, we hope someone important at EA has taken note. The sales of the third Dead Space game may not have been what EA desired, but the cinematic potential is obvious. While the games may have started to lean more towards a more ‘marketable’ action-heavy approach, horror still sells very well at the cinema.

Budget-wary film studios may prefer funding low budget horror movies in recent years, with cheap scares, handheld cameras and lack of anything actually resembling a film making millions at the box office, just look at Paranormal Activity. A Dead Space movie would need a bigger budget thanks to the sci-fi setting. But if they kept it claustrophobic and focused on the tunnels and corridors, it may not cost as much as expected for a space setting.

With no news of an Uncharted movie any time soon, Dead Space may be our next best hope for something not awful that’s tied to a video game. ‘Not awful’ being a standard we’d like these tie-ins to eventually reach on a regular basis. We can work our way up to ‘good’ from there.

In the meantime, check out my feature on movie tie-ins to avoid: Silver Screen Sins: Top 5 Worst Movies Based on Video Games.