With Halloween on the horizon, we look at the most horrific videogame/horror movie tie-ins ever made

At the time that videogame popularity was fast gaining momentum in the US, the horror film genre was also starting to come into its own. The late-Seventies saw four films kick-start a gory offshoot of the horror genre. The movies were (chronologically): The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Black Christmas, When A Stranger Calls and Halloween, and all would usher in the genus of the ‘slasher film’.

Horror film picture distributor Wizard Video, having seen the popularity and fast growth of videogames in North America, had ambitions on entering the game space and deduced that the best way to do that would be to publish two Atari 2600 games based on the most popular horror films of the time: Halloween and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. But when the games’ virtual blood-letting saw them shunned by retailers, what should have been a recipe for success instead saw the company spiral into a pit of debt, and eventually led
to its fracture.

Quite an unusual departure for its time, perhaps even a videogame first (though we’d argue there’s a strong case for Mario in Donkey Kong), Wizard’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre found gamers playing the unusual role of villain. Playing the character of chainsaw-wielding maniac Leatherface, the game’s premise involves helping the aforementioned psycho slaughter female tourists before the fuel in his chainsaw dries up. Disability aids, fences and cow skulls were strewn across the ground in order to scupper his massacre, and it was your job to steer him around the obstructing debris and help him to maximise his kill count.

Feeling thrown together, shamefully rushed and suffering from heinous bouts of flickering and dire collision detection, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was widely regarded as a videogame monstrosity on its release, with its dreadful graphics being of particular note (Leatherface in particular looks like a green front-door key with comedian Frank Sidebottom’s face stuck on it).

Domark's adaptation of Friday The 13th.

While equally dull and repetitive, Wizard’s Halloween at least seemed to be having a good stab at rendering Carpenter’s seminal horror picture. Placing 2600 owners into the shoes of babysitter Laurie Strode, Halloween’s gameplay involved escaping from sociopath Michael Myers and dragging terrified kids into the safety of dark panic rooms. Set inside a peculiar two-tiered Day-Glo house, the game employed strange special effects trickery – like having Michael appear out of thin air (just like in the film), having the lights of the house blackout, forcing you to fumble about in the dark, and the comical beheading of your character when Myers caught up with you. Ironically, it was Halloween’s comical gore and general obscurity that has since helped to raise the game’s profile and make it a popular cartridge among Atari 2600 collectors.

Director Sam Raimi is probably best known for his work on the Spider-Man film franchise, but the auteur began his lucrative film career with a short Super 8 horror film he shot with long-time friend Bruce Campbell. Raimi made the short film, titled Within The Woods, with the intention of raising enough money to shoot a feature-length horror film. As luck would have it, his film caught the eye of a film critic, and Raimi was handed a reputed budget of $125,000 to stretch and reshoot his picture. He then set about tweaking his script, Campbell was recast in the lead role and the film was renamed The Evil Dead.

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