Nightmare26

"If our lives are already written, it would take a courageous man to change the script"-The relationship between horror cinema & video games

Nightmare26

Hosted by staff, post-graduate and final year undergraduate students aligned to the Stage & Screen Faculty of The Northern School of Art, this event will take place in person on the Thursday 2nd April 2026. The theme for this year’s conference will explore the holistic relationship between video games and the horror genre with a focus on development, narrative and player/audience perspectives.

A key series of texts will be the Silent Hill series. Long considered a classic of the medium, the 2024 remake of Silent Hill 2 (and unofficial companion piece Silent Hill: The Short Message), the recent new release Silent Hill f and Christophe Gans’ forthcoming cinema release Return to Silent Hill, demonstrate the reciprocal nature between gaming and cinema.

The conference will broadly look a three key strands:

· The contextual and reciprocal relationship of the horror genre in gaming and cinema

· Narrative and Performative Structure in horror gaming and film

· Recontextualising Mental Health through horror narratives

This conference seeks to align video game developers, film-makers and academics to create a working dialogue across the industry. The themes of this year’s conference will shed light on the navigation of the horror genre between mediums but also how audiences respond to these texts. The conference will aim to develop our understanding of artistic, social and psychological attitudes to the genre across video games and cinema and programme notes will be provided by Blooper Team, the developers behind the remake of Silent Hill 2.

This will be an in-person conference and will be recorded with the stream being made available after the event. There will also be a strong student presence to the conference both organisationally but also as part of the audience of the events, a forward move to de-mystify both academic and professional artistic discussions.

The keynote speaker at the event will be Dan Pinchbeck, one of the UK’s leading games writers/directors and who was the founder of The Chinese Room. His games include Dear Esther (2012), Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture (2015) and the multiple award-winning modern classic Still Wakes the Deep (2024) which combined evocative narrative, body horror and compelling voice performances.

The evening guest will be actor Sandy Batchelor who has an extensive stage, screen and voice acting resume. He, most recently, can been seen in Danny Boyle’s recent hit film 28 Years Later (2025) and was a voice actor on Dan Pinchbeck’s Still Wakes the Deep. He can also be seen in Down Cemetery Road (2025), Rogue Heroes (2025) and The Capture (2022).

The evening event will see the keynote/guest screen a film of their choosing that aligns to the conference strands followed by a live Q&A conducted by Fortean Times columnist Bob Fischer. The film chosen for the evening is John Carpenter's body-horrro classic The Thing (1982). The event will end with a drinks reception where the winners of the Nightmare ’26 illustration prize will be announced.