Disorienting analog horror comes to Dead by Daylight
3.12.2024
By Brian Crecente, Contributor
But what happens when a game like Dead by Daylight wants to traipse into the subtle, reflective, sustained fears of analog horror, the unknowable?
A door in your home. But was it always there?
A series of bland corridors in a bland backroom filled with things that may be horrific—if they’re ever discovered.
The muffled sounds of a distant childhood playing softly in a room lit only by the static-filled screen of an old television.
What can start as a sense of confusion or nostalgia grows into disorientation, and finally twists into suspense; suspense without release. The absence of meaning, of a clear idea of what’s happening, leaves space for your imagination to take root—often in its darkest forms.
Analog horror is a relatively new sort of fright born of the found-footage movement made popular by movies like The Blair Witch Project, but then given new life online through YouTube channels and "creepypasta" forums.
As its name implies, it’s marked by low-fidelity visuals, often produced with little to no budget and delivered through channels meant to mimic things like public access TV, security footage, or old VHS tapes. It’s a still-growing subgenre of horror, one with really only one major movie release to mark its creeping expansion into the mainstream: the contentious and increasingly uncomfortable to watch Skinamarink.
Now Dead By Daylight, a video game built on the principles of horror—and one that often leans into the most established and gruesome of scares—is expanding its universe to include the relatively esoteric subgenre.
In Dead By Daylight, players take on the role of either a killer or one of four survivors. Since its release in 2016, developer Behaviour Interactive has been methodically adding to its cast of both, while also expanding the maps upon which killers stalk their potential prey.
On March 12, the game’s latest chapter, All Things Wicked, delivers a new setting, survivor, and killer, all keyed to the analog horror subgenre.
“When we think analog, we think of the medium, the kind of VHS, old school technology,” said David Richard, Senior Creative Director of Dead By Daylight. “That's something that we took inspiration from, but that's not where we stopped in our reflection of what analog is.
“For me, what's fun about it is that it's cryptic, it's unfathomable. It's about subjects that are viscerally scary, but you don't know exactly why. You don't know exactly what's happening, what's going on, but they're all things that are visceral in terms of danger.”
And it was the very nature of analog horror—that it relies so heavily on the unknown and a building sense of dread—that made creating this particular chapter and its ingredients so difficult, Richard said.
“The most challenging for us is that most analog horror are sustained horror, which is at the complete opposite of what we're used to seeing in Dead by Daylight, which is a fast-paced, high-tension type of game. Everything is happening in real time and the action is out of our control.”
The team at Behaviour knew that to successfully tap into this genre, they would have to figure out a way to make their high-intensity action game deliver a sort of tension that lasts—stretching it out until it feels unbearable.
There couldn’t be any jump scares, because there couldn’t be any release of that sense of growing horror.
“There was a lot of convincing to do because not everyone agreed that this was a good idea,” Richard said. “Translating that into asymmetrical multiplayer, where balance is so important, was extremely challenging.”
What they landed on for the killer is the twisted form of a hulking human. He has a protruding stomach that rises to a deformed set of shoulders which bend unnaturally into an elongated neck. The neck has been twisted around so many times that the gray skin forms ridges, like on a screw. The whole thing is topped by a misshapen head punctuated with a jarringly large smile. Spindly arms jut from the body, and tiny hands writhe—sometimes holding the tool of your destruction, like a massive ax.
The design of the character’s unsettling look was inspired by a multitude of things, including the 2022 horror movie Smile, Richard said. But once the team defined the sandbox within which they wanted to create, he said the team tried to forget about all of those references and focus on creating something entirely new.
While the artistry of the creation is unsettling, it isn’t what really taps into the mythos of analog horror. That’s left to The Unknown’s abilities.
The creature gains speed boosts at times when a survivor is injured. They can launch bursts of venom that can weaken survivors. But the best bit is The Unknown’s ability to create hallucinations and instantly move between them, making it nearly impossible to know when a creature is a figment or your true pursuer. The only way a survivor can remove these hallucinations is by standing completely still and staring at it.
“The thing I love most about All Things Wicked is this idea of sustained horror,” Richard said. “You have to, as a player, stop and stare. That’s the intimacy of analog horror, this duel between the camera (or the player in this case) and the monster that’s lurking.”
Killer designer Nicolas Barrière-Kucharski said the team sort of stumbled upon the mechanic while prototyping the character.
“The idea was sort of staring at us in the face,” he said. “It was like, ‘how do you make sustained horror?’ You have to create a window of opportunity, put these characters into a relationship that’s really forced and that is great for the killer, but is really scary for the survivor as they are confronting their fears.”
The All Things Wicked Chapter, which hits today, also brings with it a new setting and new survivor.
Sable Ward comes to the game in search of her missing best friend. She’s searching Greenville Square, trying to find out what happened to her.
Greenville Square, the game’s newest map, includes the square itself as well as a local, surprisingly empty cinema, complete with concessions stand, arcade, and theater room.
Richard said he knew shifting away from the more universally known slasher subgenre of horror to examine analog horror might be surprising, but that ultimately the team is always driven by what players want.
“I want to say analog was kind of a bet, but it wasn’t really,” he said. “We knew our community would be super happy about it. It’s super creepy. It’s super contemporary. Seeing the reactions from (early tests) and the marketing campaign that we’ve done around these characters, I think we will go back to it.”
Dead by Daylight, All Things Wicked, and the rest of the game’s chapters can be found on the Epic Games Store.