Blumhouse is making a live-action film out of Amanda the Adventurer, the viral indie horror game about a glitching children's VHS show, and I am already regretting every late night I spent with it in 2022. The news came out of New York Comic Con, where Dread Central was in the room to report it, and the moment I saw the headline I put my coffee down and read it twice.
I do not scare easily at films any more. Years of this job will do that to you. Games are a different story, and this one got under my skin in a way I still think about when the house is quiet and the telly goes to standby with that little click.
What Is Amanda the Adventurer, If You Missed It
If horror games are not your usual territory, fair enough, here is the short version. Amanda the Adventurer is an indie horror game that went properly viral in 2022, mostly through people filming their own reactions to it. The setup is simple: you are going through a stack of old VHS tapes left behind by a relative, and each one is an episode of a cheaply animated children's show called Amanda the Adventurer.
Advertisement
Amanda is meant to be a bright, friendly cartoon host, the sort of thing that would have been on in the background of someone's childhood. Except the tapes do not behave the way a kids' show should. Amanda starts talking directly to you rather than to the children on screen. The picture glitches at the wrong moments. The quizzes you are asked to answer along the way start feeling less like a game and more like you are being tested for something, and you are never quite sure by what.
It is the format that makes it work. Found footage horror lives on the gap between what you are watching and what you are meant to be watching, and a children's programme is about as safe a format as exists, which is exactly why it is so unsettling when it stops behaving like one.
What Dread Central Actually Confirmed at NYCC
Here is the part I want to be careful with, because I have already seen three different versions of this news floating about online and I would rather give you the real one. Dread Central reports that Blumhouse is adapting Amanda the Adventurer into a live-action feature film, with the news breaking at New York Comic Con. That is the confirmed fact, straight from the panel, and I am not going to sit here and invent a director, a cast or a release date on top of it, because nobody has one yet. Go and read Dread Central's own report for the full detail of how it was announced. I will update this if anything firmer lands.
What we do know is who is doing the adapting, and that tells you something on its own. Blumhouse is the studio behind the Five Nights at Freddy's film, which took a format that plenty of people assumed could not survive the jump to a cinema screen and turned it into one of the better video game adaptations of the last few years. They clearly have an appetite for exactly this kind of project: a game with a built in audience, a strong visual hook, and a fanbase who will turn up opening weekend purely to see whether the film gets it right.
Why I Am Both Excited and A Bit Nervous About This
The honest answer is that Amanda the Adventurer is a harder adaptation than it looks. Half of what makes the game work is that you are in control of the pause button, going through the tapes at your own pace, with your own sense of dread building because nobody else is choosing when the next glitch happens. Take that control away and hand it to a director, and the whole thing lives or dies on whether they understand why the format scared people in the first place, rather than just borrowing the character design and the jump scares.
Done badly, this is a generic haunted cartoon movie with Amanda's face slapped on the poster. Done well, it could actually lean into the tape format itself: found footage within found footage, an audience watching characters watch tapes the way we once watched someone else's reaction video. That is the version I want. Blumhouse has shown with Five Nights at Freddy's that it is willing to respect what the fans actually loved rather than sanding it down for a wider audience, so I am choosing to be hopeful rather than sceptical, which is not always my default setting with this sort of news.
Either way, I will be first in line, and I will almost certainly still have the lights on in the house while I write about it afterwards. If you played the game back when it first went round everyone's feed, tell me honestly: did it actually get to you, or were you one of the suspiciously calm ones watching everyone else lose their nerve? I want to know which camp you are in before this film lands and ruins both our evenings.
As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. How the links work.