Blending reality with fiction in video game horror

Last year’s Alan Wake 2 enhanced its sense of terror with the frequent use of live-action sequences – in cut scenes and jump scares – to blur the line between what is real and what is not. — Remedy Entertainment

It is a video game horror renaissance.

Blumhouse Productions, the movie studio behind Paranormal Activity and The Purge, has started a gaming label. Independent developers are drawing inspiration from the original PlayStation and Nintendo 64 eras for low-fidelity shock value. And major studios are remaking classic titles in the Resident Evil and Silent Hill franchises.

To stand out in an increasingly crowded space, some developers are leaning even more closely to their film inspirations by blending live-action footage with virtual worlds.

Actors who convincingly portray their fear in digital performances can help intensify the feeling for players. Last year’s Alan Wake 2 enhanced its sense of terror with the frequent use of live-action sequences – in cut scenes and jump scares – to blur the line between what is real and what is not.

Current projects that are incorporating live-action footage include Tenebris Somnia, an 8-bit survival horror game in the style of the Nintendo Entertainment System, as well as The Lake House, downloadable content for Alan Wake 2 that releases this week and stars Agent Kiran Estevez, the character portrayed by Janina Gavankar (True Blood).

But incorporating film footage into a video game is intricate, and the small studios behind those projects are reckoning with the many challenges.

“Live-action hasn’t been that common for a long time because of how complicated it is to film,” said Andrés Borghi, a filmmaker and a developer of Tenebris Somnia. He mentioned the mid-1990s games Phantasmagoria and Command & Conquer: Red Alert as some pioneering examples of intertwining live-action into the story.

At one recording session for Tenebris Somnia, it took about an hour for a 30-member crew to film two scenes of a few seconds each – a character walking through a room, and the protagonist becoming increasingly scared by the presence of a monster. It involved several takes, consulting the storyboard and redecorating the space.

“It’s a ton of money to get everything set up, and a ton of time to make very little game, very little movie,” Borghi said.

Borghi directed short films and worked on visual effects for the horror movie When Evil Lurks before deciding to film actors in the flesh for Tenebris Somnia. He was inspired by the small horror game Faith, which blends rotoscope animation with pixel art.

“Everything in pixel art needs to match what we filmed, which is why we opted to prioritise filming and then drawing, instead of the opposite, which is usually harder,” Borghi said. “You’ll never find a location to build a set in with a door exactly where I drew it.”

One of the biggest challenges, Borghi said, has been to maintain the communion between the game and the cut scenes at all times, especially when shooting them out of order and months apart.

Remedy Entertainment, the studio behind Alan Wake 2, learned those lessons during its earlier work on Quantum Break, a 2016 sci-fi game that is part shooter, part TV show.

“We realised in a very painful way that the production models of creating live-action linear content and game content – where the process is very iterative and we keep on coming back and tweaking things – are very different,” said Sam Lake, Remedy’s creative director.

For Alan Wake 2, Remedy decided to approach live action in a modular way. Locations such as the protagonist’s writer’s room and the set for the fictional talk show In Between With Mr. Door are places that recur in the story.

The most laborious shoots took place quite late in production to ensure that filming would not be affected by changes to the script, Lake said. That allowed the team to faithfully recreate in-game locations rather than using a green screen with the virtual environments.

“There’s a magic to it,” Lake said, regarding the decision to opt for a more practical direction. “During performance capture, the actor needs to imagine the situation quite a bit.”

The method of capturing film footage has also evolved for Supermassive Games, the studio working on The Dark Pictures Anthology: Directive 8020, which stars Lashana Lynch (The Woman King). Inspired by films such as The Thing, Event Horizon and the Alien series, players must elude an alien form that can assume the likeness of its prey.

Supermassive has portrayed actors’ likenesses in its games since Until Dawn, a 2015 horror story with branching narrative paths that was remade this month. But by obtaining its own motion-capture suits, Supermassive has streamlined the work, enabling its animators to perform certain tasks without involving third parties.

“We don’t have this process where we’re calling actors back and living to their schedule, which would be tricky for our needs,” said Will Doyle, Directive 8020’s creative director.

Working with actors primarily accustomed to the film industry can require extra tact, developers said.

Doyle said Shawn Ashmore (X-Men) was surprised his character could die in the first act of the studio’s 2019 game The Dark Pictures Anthology: Man Of Medan. And Borghi said he did not want to confuse the actors with too many details about Tenebris Somnia, instead describing what they needed to do in a scene as succinctly as possible.

The game and film industries are continuing to intertwine. The movie Until Dawn is scheduled for release in the spring of 2025, and Remedy is working with the studio Annapurna to develop and produce film, TV and audiovisual projects based on Alan Wake and its 2019 game Control.

During the experiments combining the two mediums, including this year’s Silent Hill: The Short Message, developers must also consider how faithfully to pursue visual realism.

Remedy had many conversations about intentionally avoiding it, Lake said, deliberately placing coloured lights with no visible source to better create the supernatural ambience the studio desired. But some game creators said the focus on graphical fidelity didn’t seem to be diminishing anytime soon.

“I think it gets to the point where it becomes indistinguishable from reality, and that’s a wonderful possibility,” Doyle said. “It’s a scary possibility, you know?” – ©The New York Times Company