Designer and director Sam Gilmore has turned the Dyatlov Pass incident into a trailer for a PlayStation horror game that never existed. Dead Mountain is a short film styled as a 1998 prototype, complete with chunky low-resolution polygons, crushed bitrate, and loading screens, just in time for Halloween.
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- Dead Mountain (2026) — still from Sam Gilmore’s fake PS1 horror game short. Courtesy of Sam Gilmore.
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- Dead Mountain (2026) — still from Sam Gilmore’s fake PS1 horror game short. Courtesy of Sam Gilmore.
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- Dead Mountain (2026) — still from Sam Gilmore’s fake PS1 horror game short. Courtesy of Sam Gilmore.
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- Dead Mountain (2026) — still from Sam Gilmore’s fake PS1 horror game short. Courtesy of Sam Gilmore.
The real story is chilling enough. In February 1959, nine experienced hikers cut their way out of their own tent on the slopes of Kholat Syakhl, which the Mansi call Dead Mountain, and walked into a night of minus 25 degrees Celsius in their socks. The Soviet inquiry closed the file blaming “a compelling natural force” without saying what it was.
Gilmore, a motion designer and creative director based in the United Kingdom, says the project was inspired by the original Resident Evil and Silent Hill. His thinking was that the hardware limits of the era produced the dread: Silent Hill‘s fog and Resident Evil‘s fixed cameras were technical constraints that became horror art direction. The low-resolution look, he argues, carries a specific mood a photoreal render cannot, because the viewer’s brain fills in the gaps.
The short was built with Blender, Unreal Engine, Mixamo, and After Effects. Gilmore’s project page also includes a making-of film, a synopsis, and stills, all free to use with credit. He has offered to discuss how it was made.
Watch the trailer, the making-of, and see the stills at samgilmore.com/work/deadmountain.
