Sam Lake, creative director at Remedy Entertainment, recently spoke about getting a quote from essential horror author Stephen King for the original Alan Wake title at a shockingly low price. Alan Wake takes inspiration from Stephen King and other horror writers.
Stephen King has a reputation as someone who is particularly generous with up-and-coming talent within the horror business. He's been running a program for years now that gives film students the rights to produce an adaptation of one of his short stories for only a dollar. Back in the late '00s, Alan Wake was a new name to the horror video game industry coming from a developer that had only done action games up until that point. Sam Lake says King helped them out in an amazing way.
Sam Lake recently spoke to Eurogamer about the interaction with Stephen King. The original Alan Wake opens up by saying, "Stephen King once wrote that 'Nightmares exist outside of logic, and there's little fun to be had in explanations; they're antithetical to the poetry of fear.'" King apparently allowed Remedy to use this quote for just a dollar. Remedy being able to use this quote is extremely beneficial to the game, as it establishes a major inspiration for Alan Wake while also setting up its unexplainable darkness.
The Stephen King quote used at the beginning of the original Alan Wake is from an article penned by King for Entertainment Weekly titled Why Hollywood Can't Do Horror. King's reasoning in the article boils down to the arbitrary need to pull the curtain back on whatever scary entity exists in a given horror film. The author of classics like The Shining and Pet Semetary believes fear needs to remain unexplained in order to be truly scary, something that certainly inspires the story in Alan Wake which is oftentimes disorienting and leaves a lot to the imagination.
The release of Alan Wake 2 is rapidly approaching, and it seems as though Remedy is taking a similar approach in terms of its horror with the upcoming game, delivering terrifying scenarios and surroundings that seem to exist completely outside of explanation. Whether or not any type of explanation will actually come for the things players have seen in the footage for the game thus far will only become known once the game actually hits shelves.
Alan Wake originally released for PC and Xbox 360.
Source: Eurogamer