Horror game Dead By Daylight is getting sucked into the games adaptation abyss

After years of toiling in the “anime and Tomb Raider movies only” darkness, video games are finally having their moment in the Hollywood sun, as PlayStation adaptation The Last Of Us makes big, critically friendly waves at HBO, and Nintendo prepares to throw its entire animated might behind the Super Mario Bros. movie. Video game adaptations are respectable now, and, more importantly, respectably profitable. And you know what that means, folks: Strip mine time ahoy!

Hence news today from Variety, which reports that Blumhouse and Atomic Monster have just scooped up the film rights to horror game Dead By Daylight, Behaviour Interactive’s attempt to bring the rhythms of any number of slasher-adjacent horror movies to the world of online multiplayer gaming. Which is a bit ironic, since a portion—not all, but certainly a portion—of Dead By Daylight’s appeal comes from the fact that it aggressively licenses horror brands to bring their iconic killers and survivors into the realm of the malevolent Entity; this is the game where Jigsaw from Saw or Freddy Kreuger can stalk and kill Laurie Strode or Stranger Things’ Steve Harrington, after all.

But, to be fair, Dead By Daylight does have its own crew of original killers and heroes for Blumhouse and Atomic Monster to pull from, with the murderers all carrying names like “The Trapper,” “The Clown,” or “The Spirit,” the better to give you a reasonable guess as to which sub-sections of the Wal-Mart of horror they’ve been gently shoplifted from. What we’re angling at here is the fact that the interesting thing about Dead By Daylight is the way it imports the structures and characters of standard horror experiences into a video game world; on first blush, it’s not immediately apparent what value is produced by re-exporting those old tropes right back into the movies they were snagged from.

Atomic Monster’s James Wan, and Blumhouse’s Jason Blum, both issued statements tonight celebrating the news. “We’re big fans of the game at Atomic Monster,” Wan said in a press release, “And are thrilled to be teaming up with Blumhouse to bring this frighteningly visceral world to the big screen.”