How Behaviour Interactive rooted Dead by Daylight in a horror tradition spanning centuries

GLHF speaks to Behaviour Interactive and PhD in literature Laura Westengard about Dead by Daylight's deep horror roots and enduring legacy

Behaviour Interactive

In the mid-1760s, an English aristocrat published The Castle of Otranto, widely recognized as the first gothic novel. In the mid-2010s, a French-Canadian composer put kitchen knives on his piano strings to see if he could scare himself with the resulting sound. He did, and Dead by Daylight, one of the most popular multiplayer games, found its main theme – and its voice. 

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The thread connecting these seemingly disparate events is stronger than you might initially think. I spoke with composer Michel April; sound designer Frédéric Poirier; Behaviour’s head of partnerships Mathieu Côté; and senior creative director Dave Richard about the game’s enduring appeal. I also spoke with Laura Westengard, professor of literature, gothicism, and trauma studies at the City University of New York about how that appeal is closely intertwined with horror traditions stretching back to the 1760s and how Behavior evolved them in a way that speaks to modern audiences on an intimate level. 

“People love to be scared” is an easy answer often tossed out when someone asks why horror is popular. It tells us next to nothing about why people actually love feeling scared, though, so I asked Westengard for some insight. Westengard points to psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud and his influential theories about the way people relate to fear and horror.    

“One thing [Freud] said was that horrifying and uncanny feelings that people have and gravitate towards come about because something that ought to have remained a secret has come to light,” Westengard says. “So that creepy feeling we get [...]  A lot of that, he said, comes about because something that we thought was familiar and knowable, like our grandparents or our family home, becomes strange.”

Tfw you realize something's gone very wrong / Behaviour Interactive

That effect often has ties to a person’s emotional state or life circumstances at the time as well. Carrying on Westengard’s example, the eerie change in your grandparents’ home could have emotional ties to a change in your relationship with them, if they died or became ill, for example. Westengard uses the 2014 film The Babadook as another, similar example and says that underneath the monster tale, it’s a story about repressed grief breaking into a widow’s life.

The experience doesn’t have to be profound to have a lasting effect, though, nor does the fear have to be particularly scary. Westengard says anything unfamiliar, unexpected, or out of the ordinary can spark a sense of the uncanny. That’s what Côté and Richard aim for in Dead by Daylight, and they say it’s one of the most challenging parts of working on the game.

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Provoking strong emotion helps guide Behaviour’s approach to adding a new killer or realm. Richard says the team takes stories and folklore, picks out themes that interest them, and try to figure out what that theme looks like through a horror lens – “what would be scary or depressing or disgusting, or what would make you feel out of this theme.”

The difficult part about that, as Westengard says, is that very little can shock or surprise modern audiences the ways it could 200 years ago. The grotesque and otherworldly seem less shocking and distant now, so horror tends to focus on traits people can relate to, such as fluidity of identity, living as an outcast on the edges of society, or just plain sex appeal. The practice isn’t exactly new, though it’s taken different forms over the centuries.

Take vampires, a monster that, despite having changed little over nearly 300 years, people have perceived in wildly different ways. The vampire in John Polidori’s 1819 short story The Vampyre represents fears of social and moral decline. Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s 1816 poem Christabel subverts the theme in a different by giving its female antagonist Geraldine hypnotic, vampiric qualities that threaten to upend the supposed sanctity of the home and marriage. Over half a century later, at a time when nice, respectable people maintained their emotions under tight control, Bram Stoker’s Dracula showed people what it looked like when they gave into their base instincts. 

As if clowns weren't terrifying enough already / Behaviour Interactive

Readers might have been shocked – some critics deemed Christabel immoral and obscene upon the poem's publication – but they were also attracted and intrigued. That concept might not be new but Westengard says changes in social structures make it easier for writers and readers, or players, in DbD’s case, to let these traits be defining features. For example, AMC’s Interview with the Vampire is more open with its homoeroticism and sexual fluidity in ways that older vampire storiers could only hint at. That openness helps give horror a broad reach that makes people from all backgrounds feel welcome.

Côté and Richard say making Dead by Daylight a haven for everyone is part of their design philosophy now, but they tell me they were surprised to see how many people from marginalized backgrounds felt attracted to Dead by Daylight initially.

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“[Survivors] need to be very relatable, because the closer they are to real people, the closer they are to you, the more you'll identify with them,” Côté says. “And when they are put in danger, the reactions that you will have will be more visceral, more personal and intense. And it goes back to our concern over creating something that has representation and equality. Diversity in our game is important. As creators of content, we have a responsibility to try to represent society in a way that we would like it to be." 

“What we aim for is that no matter what there is a part of these stories that are relatable [...] for inclusivity or representation, but also for being able to understand the horror that these characters live or cause,” Richard adds.

The amount of work involved in bringing new killers and chapters to DbD means these events only happen every few months, though. When the actions players take in each match remain the same each time, every season, across several years, it’s hard to maintain a sense of tension and surprise. Côté says the chaos inherent in a Dead by Daylight match is what helps keep people interested, by making each round unpredictable. 

Castlevania's Dracula might not be as sexy as most, but he speaks to a desire for power and status / Behaviour Interactive/Konami

Creating that chaos was a happy accident that resulted from one of Behaviour’s first rules for Dead by Daylight, and the one Côté says the team will never break. The game has no proximity chat. You can’t speak to your teammates, and the killer can’t taunt or torment you. You’re alone, despite being together, and Côté says it sparks this uneasy feeling where you never know what might happen. The killer’s behavior isn’t even part of it. You know they want to kill you. What keeps people off balance is how their allies behave. Your ally could help you. They might sacrifice you to the killer so they can get away. They might even ignore you entirely. 

April follows a similar strategy of provoking unexpected reactions when composing Dead by Daylight’s music. He tells me his goal is scaring himself, and if it’s enough to send a shiver down his spine or create a slight tingle on the back of his neck, he’s convinced it’ll do the same for others as well. April says he often starts by taking classical music, something orderly and familiar, and introducing something unexpected, such as putting kitchen knives on the strings of his piano. 

“When I do the themes for the killer, it can be chaotic at some point, but there's always something that is written like a classical piece of music, even though there's rhythm change or tempo change,” April says. “I'm very careful to keep it really kind of cerebral in a way – and never play in a major chord.”

In music theory, major chords typically correspond with lighter emotions, while minor chords are lower and create more emotional tension.

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April tells me he’s experimented with methods most musicians would rightly consider illegal, just to capture a specific sound, including placing knives on his piano strings to make unpredictable, otherworldly noise. He hit a piano with a hammer once, but that wasn’t enough.Then he removed everything except the necessary pieces from the inside and filled it with recording devices. That finally produced the sound he wanted. 

Puts strumming on the old banjo in a new perspective / Behaviour Interactive

Most of these concepts about fear and how people relate to it hold true for horror in any medium, but what makes Dead by Daylight a more influential experience is that the player interacts directly with it and feels emotions more strongly as a result. 

“Horror convinces your brain that [this moment is] really happening, and that is really immediate and present, and you're really experiencing it,” Westengard says. “That's part of the appeal of horror, and something like Dead by Daylight allows you to interact with these killers and horror tropes in a way that’s really special.”

“Psychologically, a figure like Dracula, for example, has totally entranced people in his own right, because he represents the dark side of ourselves, but unleashed without restraint,” Westengard continues. “We can indulge in our primal desires [in a game] in a way that we don't usually get to give in to them as a character like Dracula does.”

Those emotions don’t have to be specifically violent, either. Just as something mundane such as a door opening to a different room can provoke a sense of the uncanny, the subversive act of embodying a figure of chaos and doing things you shouldn’t can help channel darker emotions generally and even teach people new things about themselves.

“People want the sense of expansion and awakening [of horror], like being snapped into consciousness by a jump scare,” Westengard says. “We want all of those feelings, because they push us out of our complacency.”

Côté says he was surprised to find how true that was during Dead by Daylight’s earliest demos. He worried Behaviour might have matchmaking issues with everyone wanting to play as a cool slasher in a multiplayer game – and the lineup for survivors ended up being much longer as “players wanted to feel scared being up against this real human [killer].”

Côté says some players told him The Huntress' lullaby, taken from an Eastern European folktale, reminds them of their mothers and aunties who used to sing it to them, not the kind of association you'd expect from a horror game / Behaviour Interactive

April says he experiences similar emotional tension while scoring the game and its trailers.

“Working with all the ominous music gets into my soul, and after I work on Dead by Daylight for a full day, I have to go upstairs and play a super nice melody just to even things up,” he says. “These dark emotions are part of an emotional state that we can all relate to,” April continues. “Nothing [in life] is all bubbly and light and fun, and experiencing [that in music] challenges you to confront those emotions. And it’s kind of a soothing experience.”

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The Behaviour team discovered an unexpected example of how it can be soothing not just when players feel in control, but when they’re at their most vulnerable.

“One of the early, very revealing moments was at PAX the year after [Dead by Daylight] launched, and I met some people from a group called Stack Up, who work with veterans in the United States Army and deal with PTSD,” Côté tells me. “They were telling me that they use video games to connect with people and to stay in touch and to have activities, but [they use] Dead by Daylight specifically because it allowed them [to have] a moment when they can put themselves in a situation where they're threatened or they're under stress. [...] And it was very therapeutic for a lot of them, which would never have occurred to me, but it was very real for them.”

Video games make having these intimately personal experiences easier than, say, reading a book, and that’s even more true for Dead by Daylight.W estengard considers Dead by Daylight and the way people interact with it as an evolution of the idea that an author puts work out and has no control over the way people interpret and use it from then on. People take established horror figures such as Pinhead or Jason and build their own personal stories around them in ways they can’t do with just a movie. 

Dead by Daylight’s strong ties with horror and its gothic roots go deeper than blood, fear, and slashers. It speaks to an important part of the human experience and engages with it in ways only a video game can. It lets people create their own stories around some of horror’s most iconic figures and make them part of their lives in ways that would otherwise be impossible. Few multiplayer games have the lasting power of Dead by Daylight, but given its legacy and connection to the deepest, most intimate parts of our souls, perhaps that’s to be expected.