Director Will Byles Explains The Connections Between The Quarry And Until Dawn - Exclusive
Since the horror-themed video game "Until Dawn" became a worldwide smash hit after its release in 2015, writer-director Will Byles was faced with the gargantuan task of topping its success with game's follow-up. Seven years later, Byles is back in the writer and director's chair with "The Quarry," which like "Until Dawn," is rooted in an interactive horror story. But with the release of the new game, Byles is well aware that there will be comparisons to "Until Dawn," but in a way, that was the point. In short, he wanted to recreate the same sort of thrills and chills that players got with "Until Dawn," but under the guise of a totally different story.
"For part of 'The Quarry,' we wanted it to be completely new, but for part of it, we wanted it to be exactly the same [as 'Until Dawn']," Byles explained to Looper in an exclusive interview. "With something like 'The Quarry,' we're not really reinventing the wheel. There are technology advancements for the rendering and the capturing stuff, but the real thing we wanted to do is to entertain people."
One thing "The Quarry" is not is a sequel to "Until Dawn." While "Until Dawn" game followed a harrowing night for a group of young adults as they tried to survive the horrors atop Blackwood Mountain, "The Quarry" finds nine camp counselors fighting for survival in the remote woods of upstate New York. It's there where they not only encounter the demented Hackett family but are subject to a curse that will turn each of them into werewolves.
Ultimately, as Game Informer described, "The Quarry" is "a spiritual successor" to "Until Dawn," and Byles was happy to describe how the games are connected.
Byles said Until Dawn and The Quarry share a lightness of tone
To craft "The Quarry," Will Byles said he and his collaborators kept tabs on players' comments about "Until Dawn," keying in on what they liked and what they didn't like. "The number of endings, for instance, in 'Until Dawn,' was always a little bit of a criticized area. We thought, 'Let's go to town' [with 'The Quarry']."
Perhaps the most important aspect of "Until Dawn" that Byles wanted to maintain with "The Quarry" was the tone of the game. "'Until Dawn' has a lightness to it. I don't mean it's comedy. It's not that. It's that it doesn't take itself very seriously," Byles observed. "It's very much a teen horror story in the context of it being slightly self-referential. It knows what it is."
As such, Byles said, "The Quarry" is reminiscent of such movies as the "Scream" and "Evil Dead" movies as well as a beloved TV series about the Winchester brothers. "We wanted to try and keep that lightness and keep that humor there for 'The Quarry,'" Byles said. "In fact, we wanted to push it a little bit further, more along the lines of the TV series 'Supernatural' rather than the movie 'Hostel' or something like that, because again, it's not comedy, but [there are] little one-liners every now and again, and that was a big part of it."
Sometimes, though, the humor comes from something a bit heavier than one-liners. "When one guy gets his arm chopped off by a chainsaw by another guy ... it is an absolutely ridiculous way to deal with somebody's injury, but it's straight out of the 'Evil Dead' playbook," Byles enthused. "It's stupid and funny and horrible, but you can go along with it because that's the journey we wanted to take you on."
Starring Ted Raimi, Siobhan Williams, David Arquette, Lin Shaye, and Lance Henriksen, "The Quarry" is new in stores and available online from Supermassive Games and 2K Games.