Lovingly referred to by its community of killers and survivors as Horror’s Hall of Fame, Dead By Daylight is a massive collection of original monsters and iconic villains that have kept folks using nightlights for decades. The asymmetrical murder fest houses a roster of violent baddies and their victims – from movies to television shows to video games. Freddy Krueger, Ghostface, the Demogorgon, and Pyramid Head all meet under one roof, so it’s clear why developer Behaviour has earned the nickname. With Pinhead on the horizon, I’m free to start crossing my fingers and flooding Behaviour’s frequent fan surveys again with my number one suggestion – add Kayako from Ju-On.
If you put me in charge of picking a movie, I’m taking us straight to the horror section, so it should come as no surprise that Takashi Shimizu’s disturbing and depressing Ju-On series is my favorite. 2002’s Ju-On: The Grudge is my favorite, not to be confused with the American retelling that came in later years. It’s perhaps the best version of something truly terrifying that sticks with you in bed at night. While I can long shake off the unease I feel from killers like Michael Myers, Ju-On’s wrathful Kayako Saeki is still the reason I make sure my feet are covered at night. She’s why I can’t look up into the dark corners of my attic, and why I have a lingering fear of stairs I can’t see the top of.
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I’d wager that for most horror enthusiasts, Kayako – and her equally popular Ring cousin, Sadako – stand out as some of the genre’s most memorable haunts. While I grew up with frights like Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street, there’s something about the nature of Kayako’s twisted tale that truly makes her movies sit with you. And while I think the actual plot threads and scares are what make Shimizu’s work the definitive piece of art that belongs in any “Horror Hall of Fame” as a centerpiece, it’s also just the nature and movement from Kayako that make her feel like an incredible fit for Dead by Daylight.
More than anything else, I’m constantly amazed by Behaviour’s ability to break its own game in the best ways possible and then fix it. That is to say, there are plenty of killers with strange new mechanics that feel like they don’t really fit in or won’t work with the way Dead by Daylight plays, but it somehow always works anyway. It may be a little messy at first, but it does, eventually, work. Killers like Victor and Charlotte Deshayes have been rolled into one, making them some weird duo you swap between in matches. Resident Evil’s expansion introduced Nemesis, and with him came zombies that roam maps attacking survivors. The Demogorgon can use the Upsidedown to warp around quickly. So when I think of Kayako, and how I worry she may not work, I realize it’s a bit of a silly hangup in a game that continues to be so inventive.
When bringing in new antagonists, Behaviour doesn’t really seem to force in its game gimmicks to make everyone work the same way. Instead, we get these neat little murderers that all play differently enough to make them each feel like a unique experience. For original characters, it feels like less of an issue, but for iconic horror villains, I’m not interested in renditions that feel like total strangers to their source material.
Kayako’s unnatural contortions and chilling crawl are the elements that make her seem like an imperfect fit – I don’t know how you add a killer that drags along the floor into Dead by Daylight. But that’s part of the draw, isn’t it? It’s not like Kayako has never stood upright before, but the crawl, the terrifying dragging of her weight, is perhaps one of her most striking and definitive traits. Figuring out how she’d go about pulling herself through windows and around palettes is a winning formula. If you add in her unforgettable, strained gurgle, she becomes someone who makes Dead by Daylight truly scary again.
And then there’s her little boy, Toshio Saeki, who's an important piece of her imagery. Dead by Daylight’s mechanics with Doctor – a killer who spawns hallucinations of himself in front of survivors to give away their position – feel like an easy connecting of the dots. Ju-On’s rich lore built on Japanese myth around vengeful, angry ghosts seems a bit like a perk treasure trove, though I struggle to think of how we’d implement the franchise’s iconic haunted house. I reckon we’d make do with one of the other, lesser-known locations that Kayako terrorizes her victims in.
Behaviour is a brilliant team. They’ve proven that enough with their iterations on Dead by Daylight, so I’ve long abandoned this idea that there could be too tall of an order when it comes to collaboration requests. For the untalented, unknowledgeable person like myself in the world of game dev, I struggle to understand how, conceptually, we could take Ju-On and put it in an asymmetrical horror game, but it’s a request that I bring to more imaginative creatives that means a lot to me. Ju-On feels like such a big cultural setpiece within horror films that I don’t want to keep imagining Dead by Daylight without it. While I know Behaviour must get thousands of requests, it’s Ju-On that stands out as something that’s truly owed a spot.
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