Interview - Feardemic CEO Says He Wants To Make “Horror What Disneyland Is To Families”

thegamer.com:

Scott Millard has been appointed the new CEO of Feardemic, a subsidiary of The Medium developer Bloober Team, and he has a singular goal in mind—making “horror what Disneyland is to families.” I sat down with Millard to speak about how he plans to achieve this goal and why he’s so focused on the genre of horror.

“We often think of the ‘80s as the golden age of horror with movies like Halloween and characters like Freddy Kreuger, but looking at the stats right now, the film industry is saying that horror makes up 12.9 percent of all their product, which is the highest it’s ever been,” Millard tells me. “And in the games industry, if you look at what’s been presented in the past month or so in Summer Games Fest, almost 25 to 30 percent of all those games have a narrative style or story that would be consistent with the literary definition of horror. It’s a really rich palette and there’s never been anyone that’s tried to capture that whole space and say, ‘Look, this isn’t just a simple narrative style, it’s worthy of its own dedicated category.’”

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Millard’s mention of old slasher flicks isn’t too surprising given that films have long been the benchmark for games. We’ve seen it time and time again in recent years with so many developers trying to capture a ‘cinematic’ feel, but Millard wants to carve out new stories in new worlds, rather than leaning into existing ones. “Blair Witch was such a successful game for Bloober Team and we’re really interested in these licenses at some stage, but what we’re focused on at the moment is mainly third-party games from third-party, smaller, independent studios with new and interesting ideas. Most