Editorials
Examining the Enduring Appeal of Multiplayer Slasher Game ‘Dead By Daylight’
In the summer of 2016, Behaviour Interactive released Dead By Daylight, a game that would become one of the most well-known in the survival-horror genre (arguably taking Evolve‘s formula to the next level). It offered a unique multiplayer gameplay paradigm at the time, and quickly gained a massive following as it added new features and horror icons like Laurie Strode and Michael Meyers to its ranks.
Four years later, Dead By Daylight celebrated its anniversary, boasting bloody balloons and confetti joined by a player-base that is stronger than ever on multiple platforms. As a game that is exclusively multiplayer, having a dedicated fandom is crucial for its success. When looking at SteamCharts, the average amount of players one year after its initial release in June 2017 was about 10,000 players. In the past 30 days, the average amount of players has grown to about 46,000. The question is: what is making Dead By Daylight stand out to have such a strong fanbase? The answer lies deeper in the gameplay and not simply the faces representing it.
When comparing Dead By Daylight to other well-known multiplayer games in survival-horror, there is a clear schism of success in its favor. The most obvious comparison would be to Gun Media’s Friday The 13th: The Game, which follows the same asymmetrical multiplayer gameplay format as Dead By Daylight. Although Friday The 13th: The Game ended up facing legal obstacles that would later hinder its success, it still never quite reached the level of success of Dead By Daylight, even during its prime. This is interesting to consider based on the fact that it seemed to follow the winning formula: Friday The 13th: The Game had fun, cooperative gameplay, was multi-platform, and featured one of the most iconic faces of horror with Jason Voorhees.
This leads to the point that Dead By Daylight’s success can’t simply be attributed to the horror conglomerate it has formed with faces like Ghostface from Scream, Freddy Krueger, and Michael Myers. Sure, there’s no other game you can play where you assume the role of Stranger Things’ Steve Harrington as he’s being chased by Silent Hill’s Pyramid Head. But there’s something deeper in the gameplay of Dead By Daylight that has made it so tangible for players to return to even after years of playing.
Whether or not players are aware of it, Dead By Daylight is constantly presenting micro-choices in almost every facet of the game. At the title menu, you are presented with a major choice: do you play as a survivor, or a killer? From there, the series of micro-choices begins. Who do you play as? What offering will you sacrifice? What item and add-ons will you bring into the trial? Will you select any challenges that you want to try and complete during the trials? What perks will you use? What type of play-style will you approach your next trial with?
When listed in that way, the number of choices can appear overwhelming. However, the unique thing about Dead By Daylight is that, not only are many of these choices made subconsciously, but they aren’t always necessary either. A player can be just as successful without an item or perk as another using the best items and rarest perks. From the beginning, the game can be completely tailored to the player’s level of investment and desire.
This extends into the gameplay itself in even more complex ways. Trials in Dead By Daylight can be intensely long or frustratingly short, but they are always fast-paced. As soon as the trial begins, it’s a countdown of when the last generator will be completed and who manages to stay alive. This fast-paced action leads to even more micro-choices, and these choices allow the player to craft the playstyle that works best for them.
As a survivor, you can decide whether you want to be an altruistic team-member, or abandon your team-members if they seem to be weighing you down. You can decide whether or not you want to run or hide from the killer; and if you do hide, you get to decide whether you use a locker to hide or if you try to use the map to your advantage. As a killer, you can decide whether you want to play aggressively or surreptitiously. You can hook your survivors or bait others as one is injured on the ground. You can carefully hinder objectives and place traps, or go full-on slasher and chase survivors down during the entire match.
Next time you play a match of Dead By Daylight, or you watch a stream of a trial, keep a tally of just how many micro-choices appear. Even if the objectives remain the same, Dead By Daylight is anything but linear.
As you consciously and subconsciously make your own micro-choices, every other player in the trial is doing the same, coalescing into a truly unique experience every time. This element of choice is what’s vital to the success of Dead By Daylight. It commands the attention of the player while still allowing for a true survival-horror experience, which is why the presence of so many horror icons in its roster works so well. In addition to this, a solid matchmaking and ranking system will progressively land each player in matches with allies and killers on similar skill levels.
As the horror genre continues to evolve, and the debate of whether big-name games like Resident Evil should be more reliant on action or survival, Dead By Daylight manages to fall in the middle. It also presents us with the question: is extensive player-choice the direction that survival-horror should take? Dead By Daylight’s versatility to fans of survival-horror, as well as casual and hardcore crowds, is the reason why The Entity will continue to ensnare more players for years to come.
Horror was thriving so well in the 1980s that movies like Pen Densham’s The Kiss (1988) would understandably get lost in the shuffle, only to then gain their fans later on in life. Even still, this one Canadian-American curio has had a more challenging time than others, as far as contemporary reevaluations go, which is very likely due to the movie’s limited availability—at least as of this write-up.
However, the scarceness of The Kiss, while a bit annoying, makes it like catnip for ‘80s horror completists everywhere. Hopefully, a lot of them will walk away satisfied after watching this hidden gem.
Even though The Kiss was intended as the first of several horror collaborations between Astral Pictures and TriStar, as well as the first feature produced by Densham, Richard B. Lewis and John Watson’s Trilogy Entertainment Group, it ended up being the only one produced from that former union. Once the movie was released, TriStar’s distribution jitters—they opted for a regional rollout—did the $6-million flick no favors. TriStar’s cold feet toward horror releases have been well noted, but The Kiss still did a tad better than Night of the Creeps (1986), another genre outing that flopped due to its regional opening.
Shot in Montreal, but set in Albany, New York, The Kiss—which was still called The Host just a few months before its October premiere—concerns an average middle-class family and their forthcoming situation. The uncanny problem in store for them was, in fact, set in motion some years earlier. As that hot and dusty flashback to the Belgian Congo shows, a familial curse was set upon the two Dunbar sisters well before Meredith Salenger’s teenage character was born.
Meredith Salenger, Nicholas Kilbertus and Mimi Kuzyk in The Kiss
The Kiss, which was based on a story by co-writer Stephen Volk (Ghostwatch) and penned by both Volk and Tom Ropelewski, has the outward appearance of The Stepfather (1987). This movie, though, is anything but a gender-flipped retread of that classic domestic disturber. For starters, The Kiss is far less grounded in reality—that much is clear from its unsettling opening scene. There, a trusting girl (Priscilla Mouzakiotis) is the victim of her own deceptive aunt (Céline Lomez); the movie’s titular act, and the story’s first shock, becomes the means of transferring an ancient evil from one host to another.
In the present day, Salenger’s role of Amy Halloran, a religious schoolgirl, is dealt a harsh blow in life once her mother, Hilary Halloran née Dunbar (Pamela Collyer), suddenly dies in a freak accident. But rather than a complete stranger sweeping the Halloran widower (Nicholas Kilbertus) off his feet some months later, Joanna Pacula’s character is that chosen temptress. Here, Pacula plays the grown-up version of the afflicted girl last seen in the movie’s opener. Since Amy’s mother is insistent about there being no reunion between estranged sisters, and she even contemplates buying a gun shortly before her tragic demise, it’s presumable that Aunt Felice poses a threat to her family.
The Kiss isn’t a movie ever too concerned about its own predictability. The audience is indeed often one step ahead of the story here, but also keep in mind how every one of those steps is loud. Take, for instance, the death of Amy’s mother; the Halloran matriarch goes out in garish, gruesome fashion, as a supernaturally commandeered truck sends Collyer’s character through a store window first, then leaves her one leg short. The directorial enthusiasm truly comes out in horrific moments such as these.
The Kiss is always sure to revel in its characters’ ills and misfortunes. So if the plot doesn’t impress, then its lurid parts should. Amy’s mother’s exit scene was proof of an eager, first-time horror director proving his worth. Then, bestie Heather (Sabrina Boudot) survives to tell the tale of a bizarre escalator mishap that, despite showing relatively less gore, spikes viewers’ empathy meter. The wilder bits of this movie, however, commence with that inevitable hookup between Felice and Amy’s bewitched father; their kitchen coitus is paralleled by Amy’s feverish classroom terror. The outcome there is a disquieting cross-cut of sex magic and a young woman’s menstrual onset plus hallucinations.
Sabrina Boudot in The Kiss
From foam appliances to bladders, that parade of special effects in The Kiss casts its own spell on the audience. Felice’s familiar, a visibly malevolent cat, was realized here with several models, some more articulate than others. Admittedly, the demon cat’s not as convincing as most of the effects here, but accepting that artifice, as opposed to fighting it, will make the whole experience way more enjoyable. As for the makeup used to manifest Felice’s inner villainy, it is more minimal and subtle than one might like; yet the work done to turn Pacula into an antithesis of herself is nonetheless compelling.
The otherworldly perils and dreadful goings-on wouldn’t work half as well as they do in The Kiss without the story’s contrast effect. Finding frights in picturesque, extremely ordinary settings was something that took off in the ‘80s, thanks to that sweeping shift to locales like the suburbs. And Amy’s home, a replica of a real Montreal suburban house, is the ideal battleground for any proper good-versus-evil story. It’s also prime real estate for this movie’s satanic panic-inspired horrors.
Because of their ostensibly similar plots, The Kiss has been compared to The Exorcist (1973). Except in Densham’s movie, the sinister, non-Christian entity targeting a teen girl lies within something less apparent and, perhaps, more devastating upon its exposure. To an outsider, Pacula’s Aunt Felice is too beautiful and unobjectionable to ever suspect of being a monster. More suspicious is how quickly she rips into the fabric of the Halloran home. Felice’s mere presence upsets the “texture of family life,” according to the director.
The demon cat in The Kiss
Taking out Amy’s mother and best friend, and distracting her father, would suggest The Kiss is playing by a different set of rules. It is initially leaving its adolescent target unsupported in a rather grim scenario. In contrast, though, this story offers up a surrogate parent who does her best to fill in the holes of Amy’s eroding home life. Mimi Kuzyk does good work as that family friend and doctor, Brenda, who guides the lost child without also steering her in any one direction; she is naturally skeptical of Amy’s accusations until it’s almost too late to do anything about them. So although The Kiss does an admirable job of undoing the main character’s support system, it never leaves her without a lifeline. This dark movie, in spite of everything that’s transpired, doesn’t deprive itself of light and hope.
The Kiss is a potent mélange of familiar ideas. If not for the director’s surprise flair for horror, though, the movie would have been less effective. What a shame that Pen Densham didn’t continue with the genre. As for Joanna Pacula, she is, too, owed credit as the wicked vixen opposite Meredith Salenger’s pitiable Amy; she never fails to be unsettling in her role. Pacula makes Aunt Felice a sexy yet intimidating character.
For horror that steadily doles out madness and menace, while also delivering a flashy and ghastly conclusion, The Kiss is certain to please. Yes, it’s cheesy all the way, but most favorably, everyone involved plays everything straight. That kind of commitment goes a long way with this movie.
The Kiss
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