A few months back, we did a list of some of the more horrific moments in Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us Part II. One of which happened to be The Rat King. In a new interview with Gamesradar, Naughty Dog’s Kurt Margenau and Anthony Newman, directors of The Last of Us Part II, revealed the sequence’s inspirations.

Margenau explains that the team took inspiration from Neil Blomkamp’s 2017 short film Zygote for the creature, as well as Playdead’s 2016 title, Inside. “If you look at [Zygote], you can see that there’s a lot of inspiration there. Inside is another one; the way the monster’s arms touch a lot of stuff is just this inherently creepy thing. So we’re aware of things like that, but we have to make it our own and do all the extra work that’s needed to make it feel real.”

The team also took inspiration from God of War with the Rat King’s broken-off Stalker being inspired by the Magni and Modi bossfight during GoW‘s story mission, The Magic Chisel. Newman stated that the similarity between the huge Rat King and this smaller Stalker was like Magni and Modi “where you had these two complimentary enemies – one with a fast weapon and one with a big slow weapon”.

And while they were at it, Bloodborne is yet another inspiration with regards to The Rat King. After you manage to kill it, you still had the Stalker that broke free, though it was much easier to kill at that point. Newman explains that the team drew inspiration from Eileen the crow from Bloodborne for this one. “I loved how in a game with bosses that were 20 stories high, the most challenging and brutal fight of them all was this person who is the exact same size as you. So that was something we were really interested in: how can we make an infected who isn’t massive feel just as deadly?”

The Last of Us Part II is out now on PlayStation 4, with a standalone multiplayer component said to be in the works.