Dave Matthews is the art lead for FEAR 2, so it's kind of weird that when you Google "FEAR 2 interview", you're going to come across Matthews talking about the game. Not a lead designer, not a producer, but Matthews, the art lead. He explains that he actually wears lots of hats, which is hardly surprising considering the number of high-profile games he's worked on. But it shows. He gives very producer-level answers. He's the kind of guy who can talk at length without making anyone from PR nervous.

But he's also very obviously a horror movie buff. In interviews, he makes a point to tie FEAR 2 to the popular culture that inspired it. Which is mostly why I was interested in talking to him. On the eve of the game's release, I finally caught up with Matthews.

Read the interview after the jump.

Tom Chick: Let me get into some horror movie geek stuff with you. I know from reading other interviews with you that you're a serious horror movie guy. Is that correct?

Dave Matthews: Yep. I do love horror.

TC: Was this from working on FEAR? Was it part of the project, or have you always been into horror?

DM: I've always been into horror. I used to do make-up for little local films. I did make up when I lived down in California for Knotts Berry Farm during Halloween.

TC: Those are awesome. I love Knotts Scary Farm. I love you guys who do those.

DM: I was a street walker for a couple of years - I was there for a couple of seasons - and then the last few seasons I did make-up. I started getting much more into make-up. Now, for every Halloween that rolls around, the year before last I dressed up as Voldemort and I created a latex appliqué, so, yes, needless to say, horror is there and I love that whole aspect. Not even just in films, but in books. I read Poe, Lovecraft.

TC: Just to lay some groundwork, let me ask you about some horror movies. What would you say is the best horror movie you've seen in the last five years? What would you recommend as the definitive?

DM: Wow. That's....That's a tough question. I think maybe The Eye, not the American one. I think The Eye is a good one because it starts to break down your perceptions of the world. Like the little boy who gets bad grades and dives out the window or the old man in the elevator. Those are great for the way they blend the living world and the dead world. The way they portray it.

TC: Have you seen Pulse?

DM: With the shadow images, yes. That reminds me of White Noise. The Michael Keaton movie. There was some crossover between the two.

TC: I haven't seen that. Do you recommend it?

DM: There were some great moments in White Noise. I think the beats are a little far apart, but it was enjoyable. It got a little preachy at the end, but as far as the ride, it was pretty good.

TC: But as far as the definitive horror movie from the last five years, you would lean towards The Eye?

DM: Well for one experience. I think High Tension did a great job of flipping the end. [Spoilers deleted] At the end, it created new questions for the player. I didn't see it coming. So I'll go with High Tension.

TC: Did you see [High Tension director] Alexander Aja's Hills Have Eyes remake?

DM: Yeah. The pacing wasn't as good as the pacing in High Tension.

TC: Did you see Mirrors, the most recent thing he did with Keefer Sutherland?

DM: I haven't but I'm curious too. I'm mildly creeped out by mirrors. I think it was Poltergeist 3 where he's brushing his hair and then he leaves the bathroom and the reflection just watches him leave. When I first heard about Mirrors, I figured it was going to be awesome, but I haven't heard anything about it yet.

TC: It's pretty terrible. Brace yourself.

DM: I think Saw has done some interesting things for creating tension.

TC: Do you know Session 9?

DM: Oh, I love Session 9. I think Session 9's over five years old. I could go on and on about that. There's some interesting gore, but so much of it is theatre of the mind.

TC: Okay, so you're probably like me then. I watch all the horror movies I can get my hands on, and I'm even okay with watching crappy horror movies because sometimes you'll find clever touches.

DM: Sure.

TC: But it seems that in movies, a lot of the scares and monsters, all that stuff tends to be established. So guys like us are really hungry to see new things, to see things done differently.

DM: Sure.

TC: It's also the case I think with horror games. All of the scares, it seems, have been done before. We know them. Those of us who played the...what the heck is the game with the camera...why can't I think of the name of that?

DM: Fatal Frame.

TC: Good god, right. So we've played FEAR, we've played Fatal Frame, we've played Undying, all those. It seems like the traditional scares, we've seen those. A figure moves across a hallway, you turn the corner, and it's not there.

DM: Right.

TC: You lure the player to a dead end, you surprise him when he has to turn around. It seems like games like FEAR and Fatal Frame have used all these established scares. In FEAR 2, did you feel you were able to come up with scares people haven't seen before?

DM: Sure. I mean I think I'd probably expand even a little further. First of all, I'd say that Fatal Frame and FEAR both establish their sense of tension through a Japanese horror thing. But then you have a Dead Space or a Resident Evil, which rely more on the shock factors. So right there, we're already expressing two different senses of tension. In FEAR 2, where we push forward, is we identify that our main tenets are still very Japanese horror influenced. We still have a lot of that presentation of the vengeful ghost, that slow burn about how we build up the tension. But ways we decided to alter some of those payoffs is we looked at more contemporary films that aren't just J-horror. We looked at Saw. We looked at stuff that came out in North America, stuff that's coming out in Western and Eastern Europe, some of the things they've done with Timur [Bekmambetov's] films, Night Watch and Day Watch. There are some great things that we pulled out that we don't necessarily see in Japanese horror. And by bringing those in, you're starting to blend the two together. You get a new flavor. It's not just straight J-horror and it's not just Western influence either. We bounce back and forth between our traditional tenets or horror and some new ones.

TC: Okay, I know about some of these influences you've mentioned [in other interviews]. With Saw, you've mentioned the set up, where the victims wake up in the trap and they've got 30 seconds to put together what's happening to them and to react. That emotional state.

DM: Sure.

TC: Can you talk about how you build that aspect of Saw into a videogame?

DM: One of those ideas is that as a viewer watching Saw, you see what's going on and you're not necessarily aware of the final outcome. But you know whatever that situation is, it's far worse than anything [the protagonists] are currently in. There's that sense of helplessness, that sense of a dark inevitable. We start to build up these characters throughout the game, and as the story progresses, you see how all this toxicity starts to affect them. We're starting to tap into those same vibes. There's this impending doom, but you're not quite sure how it's going to resolve. We start to build up that tension not only through your experience and your empathy with NPCs, but also in other areas that you're exploring. We can try to set that up with very specific visuals that are crafted and composited to evoke an impending doom you're starting to approach.

TC: One of the problems I would think you might have, part of the horror you're talking about, particularly with the Saw references, involves a feeling of helplessness. Yet here we have a shooter where you've got these awesome hard-hitting guns and the bullet time, which is a huge advantage against enemies. How do you reconcile those two, and is that a problem?

DM: This is what comes back to what I think makes FEAR awesome. In the first game, it was the same challenge. You have this incredible arsenal and you're capable of destroying just about every foe in front of you. What's going to cause fear? What's going to cause trepidation? And that's where we started to turn to Japanese horror. The presentation of their vengeful ghost is usually far more innocent. That's how Alma came to be. The idea that nobody wants to lay waste and then you see a little girl in a red dress and you open fire on her. There's something that stops the player from engaging the situation that way, whether it's a moral tier, or whether it's something deeper or more instinctual that prevents you from doing that. I think that's one of the reasons Alma has become so successful as a character, that sense of "I am still helpless against this innocent-ish entity". That's what really works well for us. In FEAR 2, you'll see how we start to play with that. Now that you're starting to see her in a more mature version, you're starting to see how her needs have changed, how she's starting to present herself in the space, how she's starting to interact with people a lot more. Those things lend to how we're maturing the experience.

TC: I certainly get the Day Watch and Night Watch connections. Those definitely lend themselves to videogames aesthetics. But the High Tension connection [you've made in other interviews] I find really curious. What can you cull from High Tension for a videogame?

DM: There's probably about a forty-minute stretch throughout High Tension that there's not a single word spoken. When you think about the overall experience in a game, sound design is tremendous. If you watch High Tension and really listen to the sound design, there are moments with no score, with just a couple of droning sounds that become discordant with each other.

TC: Are you thinking of the massacre in the house or later in the movie?

DM: Right after the massacre, right after she hooks up with Alex and the little boy runs out in the cornfield. From that point forward, there's not a word spoken until...

TC: I guess up through the convenience store, the gas station.

DM: Pretty much. And that's a long amount of time. Yet there's still a tremendous amount of emotion and story being driven throughout that. Just through sound design alone, there are some really cool tenets you can take from High Tension. And we did. If you listen to our sound design, it's really raw and there's some great stuff you can pull from it. Some of the other influences, regardless of how the movie ends, [the lead character is] empowered, but she hasn't quite realized her empowerment yet. Because of that, as you watch it, she's struggling. She knows what she needs to do, but for some reason - and in hindsight you realize it's her own undoing - but at the time, when you experience it, you feel that empowerment, but there's something inhibiting you, something that's greater. The scene in the greenhouse is another example, that's the physicality of her empowerment. But even earlier, when the massacre's going on, the way she cleans her room to make sure there's no trace of her. There are moments of empowerment. Those are other elements we try to tap into in FEAR 2.

TC: A lot of the movies you're talking about now have been horror thrillers. High Tension being a play on the slasher movie, Saw being almost like a videogame puzzle, the Night Watch movies being action. There's a type of horror which some people might write off as torture porn. Alexander Aja has moved into this territory with The Hills Have Eyes remake. But it's definitely not torture porn like the Hostel movies. I'm thinking of Hills Have Eyes, Wolf Creek, even Eden Lake. The point of these movies is to establish a powerful emotional connection to characters in the first half of the movie, and to then brutalize the audience by doing terrible things to those characters in the second half of the movie. Is there something there, and not even necessarily in FEAR, but just as one horror movie/videogame geek to another, is there something there that videogames can do?

DM: I think so. You have to build up such empathy to your characters. For me, putting on my design hat, how do you create an incredible emotional bond very quickly with the main character or with another character that will have that trigger? That would be the big challenge for me. It would be an interesting aspect to explore, to try to figure out a way we can capture that. You're talking about bringing a whole other aspect of horror to a game space.

TC: Yeah, that emotional connection is more difficult for a videogame. In a movie, you can have an actor create that. We're not there with videogames yet. What are some things you can do in videogames, specifically for horror, that you cannot do in movies?

DM: As a player, you're omniscient with the ability to act. In a film, you're omniscient but without the ability to act.

TC: In a movie you want to yell at the lead character, "Don't go in that room" or "Turn the light on". But in a videogame...

DM: Exactly. The victim walks into a room and behind the door is the killer and you see it all. And there's nothing you can do. In a film, that's how they accomplish fear. If we did that exact same thing in a game, you can act on that situation, you actually see the threat and the victim and you're in the space and you can act and exercise that knowledge. It gives you a sense of empowerment. I think we do a really good job in FEAR 2 when we disable that. You see the victim, you see the event, but we dismantle the ability to prevent it. You tap into that helpless feeling. As we progress, that would be an interesting thread to pursue to see how we can push that experience.

TC: Can horror games be played from the perspective of the monster or the ghost? Is this something you guys have ever talked about? Would it de-mystify Alma too much to somehow let her be part of the player's experience?

DM: It's funny you say that. After we shipped FEAR, a lot of the community, in multiplayer, wanted to be able to run around as Alma. We thought about it and it seemed like it would be really fun for a while. All these crazy powers, being able to turn people to goo and all that. But as we thought more, as soon as you do that, you've completely exposed every mystical aspect of her. You've reduced her to mechanics at that point. It's a conscious decision on our side. There's an essence to the monster that as soon as you put it in control of the player, you lose some of that essence. At that point, you become the ultimate badass and what becomes your weakness at that point. But it was on the table. We talked about it.

TC: In some movies, the rules of the monster aren't always important. They can do whatever they want just to be scary. Do you guys talk in those terms? In terms of the rules of what Alma can and can't do?

DM: Oh, sure.

TC: Or is it pretty much open to whatever makes the game the scariest?

DM: No, no. In the first game, she was never allowed to come within a certain proximity of the player. There were rule sets to her behavior. There were rules for when you breached a certain distance to her. Would she disappear, would you find a blood trail, would she lead you into a specific event? These were all parts of our rule sets. It was up to us to figure out through the story arc, and as well as designers and artists, what the result of each rule set was. And then in FEAR 2, we've altered some of those rules. We couldn't come back with the same palette. People would immediately be able to predict it and we'd lose some of what we were shooting for. You mentioned you've played about half-way through now, and so you've seen how she starts to deal with some of your teammates. You're starting to explore what kind of toxic soul she is and the only way we can convey that is getting her a lot closer to compatriots of yours. By doing that we start to set up additional questions. As you continue to play, you see these horrible things happening to people around you, and you wonder why it isn't happening to you. And then that speaks to some of our story arcs.

TC: Can you answer the question whether or not FEAR 2 has a pat or an open ending?

DM: [Laughs]

TC: Just so people know what they're in for.

DM: If you look at the pedigree of Monolith, Monolith creates really visceral and deep universes. We have a tremendous amount of backstory and ideas we've associated with all the characters throughout FEAR and FEAR 2. If the community out there loves what we've done with FEAR 2, there's a great possibility for more story.