Behaviour Interactive‘s creepy trailer has Japanese fans screaming. Which stringy haired horror do YOU think is behind that screen door?

The multiplayer survival horror game Dead by Daylight was released in 2016, providing thrill-seeking gamers with a collaborative experience as fun as it is terrifying. In the game, four players play together… Or three of them do, anyway. The final player is allocated a killer out of a ghoulish rogue’s gallery, and is tasked with picking the other three players off.

While this mechanic is a fresh take on the genre’s traditional ‘run from an AI enemy and try not to die’ tropes, Behaviour Interactive has kept the adrenaline at tip-top levels by releasing bundles of new content over the years. Some of the most exciting bonuses are famous killers from pre-existing franchises: Freddy Krueger of Nightmare on Elm Street is playable, as is the porcine Amanda Young from the Saw franchise. Characters from Halloween and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre also star in the game’s gruesome lineup. Each guest canon also brings a ‘survivor’ character for one of the other three players to choose, like Halloween‘s Laurie Strode, but we all know the villain is the fun part!

Behaviour Interactive is a Canadian company, so it follows that the cast of characters it employs draw from Western culture. A trailer released on August 17 has gotten the gossip mill churning, though – which film franchise is this new update going to feature?

The video is incredibly short, but shows a classic screen door from a low point of view, as if we’re crouched down. It’s hard to ignore the series of bloody slashes across that pristine white screen… But as soon as we focus on them, the door is aggressively forced open and the screen goes black.

While the video on its own gives no indication as to what might be in store, fans immediately started to fizz with excitement. A new stage, themed around a derelict Japanese-style home? Or possibly… A new killer character? A Japanese killer?

▼ Ring antagonist Sadako Yamamura is a hot favorite to be the culprit

https://twitter.com/Yahoo_GYAO/status/627441187037708288

For starters, the screen door is definitely a big give-away. Others noticed that the slashes on the wall look a little like the kanji character 三 or ‘three’, and the gap between the doors is a great place for a ghost to leap out from in any number of J-Horror classics.

“They collaborate with lots of movie franchises, so it must be Sadako.”
“Are you kidding? It’s gotta be Kayako [Saeki, from Ju-On/The Grudge]. She’s way more of a physical attacker than Sadako.”
“If Sadako is going to be the new killer, who would the survivor character be?”
“Sadako is definitely famous, but she can only travel through wells and TVs. If you picked her as your killer it’d be a real challenge to kill anyone.”
“I think it has to be her, though. Foreigners would recognize Sadako, they might not recognize other Japanese horror characters.”

Several commenters argued that the trailer didn’t give quite enough contextual clues to prove a new Japanese killer, especially as screen doors are popular in Korea and China as well. Others brought up the fact that while it would be neat to include a Japanese killer, the types of horror are drastically different – Dead by Daylight’s current stable is chock full of bloodthirsty mass murderers, with even the most homicidal Japanese spirits having a way lower body count.

The prevailing sentiment in the thread was disappointment, but not for the reason you might think: after getting pumped up about the trailer, many fans were disappointed to discover the game won’t be out on the Nintendo Switch for a very long time, if ever. Guess they’ll have to either find a computer capable of running the game or just settle for one of the many exquisitely eerie Japanese horror flicks out there.

Source: Instagram/Dead by Daylight via Hachima Kikou
Featured image: Instagram/Dead by Daylight