Lionsgate and Red Barrels are bringing ‘the Outlast Universe’ to the big screen

If you’ve ever thought to yourself that Outlast would make a good horror flick, you’ll be thrilled to hear that developer Red Barrels has signed a deal with Lionsgate to bring the game series to the big screen.

Roy Lee, whose previous credits include It, Barbarian, Late Night With the Devil, and Strange Darling, is signed to head up the project, while John Thomas Petty, the writer on all the Outlast games, is also working on the screenplay. “Red Barrels has been pushing the limits of horror in games for more than a decade, and expanding the Outlast Universe into film is an incredible opportunity to dive deeper into the characters and killers we love,” Petty said.

“As die-hard fans of horror across every medium, at Red Barrels we are great admirers of Roy Lee’s and Lionsgate’s work,” Red Barrels co-founder and creative director David Chateauneuf said. “Horror movies old and new have had an undeniable impact on our franchise over the years, and to now have the opportunity to work on an Outlast film with true horror legends is a dream, or should I say, nightmare, come true.”

The original Outlast is a pretty good horror game: Not quite up to the terrifying brilliance of the Amnesia games, perhaps but still providing “plenty of effective scares,” as we said in our 2013 review. Outlast 2 offered similar gameplay while taking its themes “into extremely uncomfortable and surprising territory,” and then The Outlast Trials shifted direction into one of the best co-op horror games to come along in a very long time.

It’s good stuff across the board, then, but I do wonder, y’know, why? Horror/gore aficionados may disagree (vehemently, no doubt) but, painting with a broad brush here, Outlast is basically Saw—a point that more than a few people have made on various Reddit threads.

And who owns the rights to Saw? Lionsgate. So, I wonder, why not just make a new Saw movie? And the only answer I can come up with is, they can make a new Saw movie and an Outlast movie, and people who are into that sort of thing will likely go see both. Okay, yeah, I guess that would explain it.