Dead Island 2

Lore & Background

Dead Island 2 was announced in 2014 but endured a lengthy development with several changes in the studios attached to the project. The developer of the original game, Techland, started the project in 2012, though Deep Silver disagreed with its creative vision and instead tasked Yager Development, the developer of Spec Ops: The Line (2012), to develop the sequel. The size of the project and its focus on online multiplayer proved challenging for a small team. Yager was removed in 2015 and replaced the following year by Sumo Digital, which was then replaced by Dambuster, an internal studio of Deep Silver, in 2018. Despite not being an island, Los Angeles was chosen as the game's setting due to its diverse locations and culture, which fit with the overall motif of the franchise.

The game's world is divided into 10 different open zones that players can freely explore, with fast travel points unlocked as they progress. Instead of a skill tree, Dead Island 2 uses a deck-building system called the Skill Deck, which sorts cards into four categories: Abilities, Survivor, Slayer, and Numen. The game introduces the FLESH system (Fully Locational Evisceration System for Humanoids), a procedurally generated dismemberment system that creates weapon-appropriate wounds on zombies, allowing players to break their skin, bones, and internal organs. Weapons are divided into four categories with different combat focuses, such as headhunting weapons that deal devastating head damage and maiming weapons that tear limbs.

The plot follows six immune individuals, dubbed Slayers, who board an evacuation flight out of Los Angeles but are shot down by the military after an infected person boards the plane. They discover their immunity and work with CDC doctor Reuben Reed to synthesize a cure, eventually learning that Reed was responsible for the city-wide outbreak. The Slayers encounter Lola Konradt, who reveals that they are part of a new species of humans called Numen, who can assimilate the infection and gain extraordinary abilities.

Reader's Guide

Dead Island 2 received generally positive reviews from critics, who praised its visuals, setting, and gameplay, though its story and combat received criticisms. The game sold more than 3 million units by May 2024, surpassing Deep Silver's expectations and becoming its fastest-selling game. It was nominated for Best Action Game at The Game Awards 2023. Dambuster Studios released two downloadable content packs for the game. A sequel titled Dead Island 3 is set to be released in 2028. The game's significance lies in its eventual release after a famously troubled development cycle spanning nearly a decade and multiple studio changes, as well as its commercial success. The FLESH dismemberment system was a notable technical achievement, allowing for detailed, procedural damage to zombie models. The shift from a large open world to 10 distinct open zones represented a design change from its predecessor, and the deck-building skill system replaced the traditional skill tree of previous games in the series.

Did You Know?

• Dead Island 2 was announced in 2014 but went through three different developers before release: Techland, Yager Development, Sumo Digital, and finally Dambuster Studios.
• The game's FLESH system (Fully Locational Evisceration System for Humanoids) procedurally generates weapon-appropriate wounds on zombies, including damage to skin, bones, and internal organs.
• Despite the franchise name, the game is set in Los Angeles, chosen for its diverse locations and culture, not on an island.

Naming a Genre: The Etymology of Folk Horror

The phrase folk horror has a surprisingly layered origin story spanning nearly five decades. The earliest traceable use of the compound appeared not in film criticism but in John Fowles' 1965 novel The Magus, where it described a physical object—an African corn-doll figure made of black rag strips—rather than a cinematic category. The term crossed into film discourse in 1970 when reviewer Rod Cooper used it in the magazine Kine Weekly while covering the production of a picture that would eventually be released as The Blood on Satan's Claw. Director Piers Haggard himself embraced the label in a 2004 retrospective interview with Fangoria, explaining that his story about wood-dwelling superstition felt like a natural fit for the countryside imagery he grew up with on a farm. He specifically distinguished his work from the campy Hammer-style horror of the prior decade. The phrase truly entered mainstream awareness, however, when writer and actor Mark Gatiss featured it prominently in the second episode of his 2010 BBC series A History of Horror, singling out three British productions as the genre's defining pillars.

Literary Foundations: From Gothic Revival to Modern Folk Horror

The intellectual soil from which folk horror grew stretches back to ancient traditions surrounding death, the afterlife, and embodied evil. During the Renaissance, the Catholic Church's broad denunciation of folk belief effectively suppressed its literary expression, pushing writers toward neoclassical restraint. Even Shakespeare's Macbeth and Hamlet, which wove Medieval folklore into their narratives, drew criticism from editors like Samuel Johnson and Lewis Theobald for their corrupt classical sensibility. The first deliberate revival came with Gothic fiction, a movement that sociologist Robert Miles links to the eighteenth-century birth of nostalgia as a cultural force. Horace Walpole's 1764 novel The Castle of Otranto, initially disguised as a translated Italian medieval romance, proved instantly popular despite critical disdain. By the turn of the twentieth century, the evolutionary frameworks of E. B. Tylor and James Frazer, alongside Margaret Murray's witch-cult hypothesis, gave writers like M. R. James, Algernon Blackwood, and Arthur Machen a scholarly vocabulary for embedding pagan survivals into fiction. Later, Shirley Jackson's 1948 short story The Lottery was hailed as perhaps the most consequential North American text in the tradition, cementing the idea that rural communities could harbor terrifying irrational rituals.

The Unholy Trinity and Early Cinematic Precursors

Three British productions from the late 1960s and early 1970s are widely regarded as the foundational pillars of folk horror on screen. Michael Reeves' Witchfinder General (1968), Piers Haggard's The Blood on Satan's Claw (1971), and Robin Hardy's The Wicker Man (1973) share little in the way of plot or style, yet British Film Institute writer Adam Scovell groups them as an Unholy Trinity united by a nihilistic tone, a deep emphasis on landscape, and the way that countryside geography serves to isolate both communities and individuals. Before this trio, the genre's DNA was already visible in earlier works. Horror historian Darryl Jones points to Jacques Tourneur's 1957 Night of the Demon, adapted from M. R. James's Casting the Runes, as a clear foreshadowing, with its isolated rural setting and villagers steeped in supernatural belief. Scovell also identifies the 1952 Finnish horror film The White Reindeer, in which a lonely bride undergoes a vampiric transformation into a reindeer, as an early example. These precursors established the template: a rural world governed by its own ancient logic, where the outsider's rationality is no shield against the weight of inherited belief.

Cultural Currents and the Modern Resurgence

The rise of folk horror in the late 1960s did not occur in a cultural vacuum. Matthew Sweet, in his Archive on 4 documentary Black Aquarius, connects the genre's emergence to the counterculture movement of that era, which he terms a second great wave of pop occultism that saturated film and television with folkloric and ritualistic imagery. Adam Scovell similarly attributes the genre's timing to the influence of New Age movements, suggesting that a generation questioning institutional authority was particularly receptive to stories where rural communities operated under their own ancient codes. The core appeal of folk horror, as distinct from straightforward supernatural horror, lies in its focus on human belief and action rather than on ghosts or monsters. The narrative engine is typically the collision between a naive outsider and a community whose superstitions, pagan rituals, and sacrifices feel terrifyingly real. In recent years, The Witch (2015) and Midsommar (2019) have reignited global interest in the subgenre, while Southeast Asian cinema has long maintained its own rich tradition of folk horror storytelling, demonstrating that the genre's roots in local folklore and communal fear are far from exclusively British.