DBD's latest killer pays homage to Thai culture, but she's no "tick box"

It's officially October, and while I don't need an excuse to play horror games in summer, there's no better, cozier, spookier time than now to settle into a match of Dead by Daylight. In celebration of the multiplayer game's newest killer, the gorgeously grotesque Krasue, I sit down with DBD creative director Dave Richard to talk a little more about her, why she's the perfect addition to the roster, and what's next for the game.

In case you've not yet seen The Krasue in action, or have never heard of it before, the new Dead by Daylight killer was inspired by Thai folklore. "We have this generally beautiful woman," Richard explains, "always a woman that has made some terrible choices in her life, and then gets cursed. This curse will trap her into roaming the night as the Krasue." This Krasue materializes at night as the woman's disembodied head, her insides dangling listlessly from her neck as she floats across the earth, eternally hunting.

"When women become the Krasue, they hunt the living," Richard continues. "They eat trash, corpses, dead animals, anything, and they are never satiated, so they always need to hunt." Perfect for a killer in The Entity's Realm, then, but that's not all that struck the team about the Krasue.

"The juxtaposition [between beauty and violence] was really, really interesting to us. When we first pitched the monster in some user research, we presented it as a duality, and it struck [a chord] with our focus group. They felt it was going to be awesome to be able to be beautiful, to be able to potentially even approach stealthily, like, approach the survivor, and be able to surprise them. Then they were like, 'I don't even care if this is not a gameplay implication, I just want to be able to be disgusting in their face.' And that's always a great sign of something cool that we should hook ourselves to."

That act of 'being disgusting' refers to The Krasue's power switch, turning her from beautiful singer to deadly killer. On activation, Burong Sukapat rips away her skin, muscles, and skeleton, trading her mortal form for the aforementioned disembodied head.

"We had challenges making the transition work well," Richard concedes. "We absolutely wanted to have these two models. It was important for us to have these two different gameplay [elements] for the two forms that she takes. That transformation needed to be fast, gross, and everything that fits into the metric. That was quite challenging to make. I think the team made something that's absolutely striking. Every chapter we make, every killer we make, we try to go into a place we never were before; to evolve our tech or our expertise.

"We wanted it to be the goriest killer we've ever made," he continues. "Getting that feeling right, making sure the entrails, the organs felt alive, that they move properly, and that they would be really gross was a challenge. The team did a marvelous job, and now we will need to one-up ourselves eventually."

To better suit the two models for The Krasue, she also has two distinct voices, Richard tells me. "[Sukapat] is an opera singer, and then The Krasue is representing the corruption of beauty and of society, so we've worked with two different voice actresses to make these two different parts of the character. That was really, really cool."

In human form you'll hear Sukapat, singing, courtesy of Thai opera singer Dr. Organ Prawang. Not only does she have the most suitable name for someone in the music industry, but she also has a PhD. For the killer model, though, the team wanted something far less typically beautiful (but beautiful nonetheless), so they worked with death metal singer Roxana B.L. Thanks to her talents with myriad vocal techniques, Roxana established herself as a creature voice specialist and vocal stunt performer alongside her career as death metal band Your Last Wish's frontwoman. What a cast.

As Richard tells me, there are infinite possibilities for Dead by Daylight, with an entire world of folklore, characters, and horror to work from. So how did Behaviour land upon The Krasue at all? As it turns out, the team was inspired by its fans. "We built our game to be diverse and to include a lot of different people from all over the world. Horror has always been a concept that's global for us. Because Dead by Daylight is quite popular in Thailand, we were like, 'South Asian culture has some very, very interesting monsters.' We have some colleagues here internally who shared with us some of these monsters. There's a lot of them, but the Krasue is definitely one that's most recognized, it's ultra popular. It's not just in Thailand.

"And its design with, you know, the core, the floating head with the entrails, is so striking that we're like, okay, if we're going to do something for our Thai community that will fit Dead by Daylight, this is it. This is the monster we need to make."

Another huge community of DBD players resides in Brazil, and we've seen this region represented so far in the twins, Renato and Thalita. Of course, when asked if the team has any other locations in mind for sourcing future characters, Richard couldn't give a precise answer, but the vague response is yes. "Oh, yeah, for sure," Richard says excitedly, "We want to go all over the world with Dead by Daylight. And that's because it's not to tick a box. It's because they're genuinely interesting, all of these different cultures, and all of the different horror stories that they have."

"I actually have a map of the world where we're like, 'Yay! We finally have a chapter here!' And the cool thing is that it doesn't matter from which community or which culture you come, these horror stories are going to be interesting and they will scare you, because as human beings we all have the same kind of fears. I can't go into specifics, because we don't talk about the future, but, yes, there's definitely some other places we want to visit."

Sadly, Richard turns me down when I ask for a photo of this map, so we can only imagine the shadowy secrets that it holds.