The best movies like the Alan Wake games

The long-awaited sequel to the action-horror cult classic Remedy Alan Wake and it is glorious that at last the dark place of the evolution of hell has escaped.

A selection of 13 of the following years after the original; Alan Wake 2 follows both a cult horror writer and a new protagonist in the form of FBI profiler Saga Anderson as they battle the cult’s frenzied murderous machinations and the evil henchmen of Alan’s doppelganger, Mr. Scratch. In addition to hitting on the events of the first game and everything that existed, the release Alan Wake 2 offers a wonderful opportunity to revisit the films and TV shows that inspired the series’ story and characters.

Like Hideo Kojima, Remedy Entertainment creator Sam Lake is an avid and omnivorous lover of books, movies and television, rarely neglecting an opportunity to celebrate the influences behind his work and talk fluently about how it informed the creative process. So with that in mind, we’ve put together a list of some of the best movies and TV shows that either inspired the Alan Wake games or are so strongly similar to them that fans would be reluctant to check them out or revisit them.

Let’s go inside!

---

Hannibal

Year: 2013-2015
showrunner/creator; Bryan Fuller
Send: Hugh Dancy, Mads Mikkelsen, Caroline Dhavernas
Where is it to look; Hulu

Saga Anderson, deuteragonic Alan Wake 2, is a genius criminal profiler much like HannibalGraham’s desire to get into the minds of suspects and subserve connections that can help her in the investigation of ritualistic murders in the surrounding fictional city of Bright Falls, Washington.

In the mouth of Fury

Year: 1994
Director: John Carpenter
Send: Sam Neill, Julie Carmen, Jürgen Prochnow
Where is it to look; Criterion Channel, Tube

Although the authority is not expressly cited; Alan Wake 2 and this movie has a surprising amount in common when viewed in parts. Both Remedy Entertainment’s latest game and In the mouth of Fury centers on investigations into the disappearance of famous writers whose works have taken on a life of their own, blurring the line between fiction and reality as each of the protagonists moves forward in search of answers that may or may not be lost in the process. Both also delight in surprising their audiences with scenes of fourth-wall breaking heavily inspired by HP Lovecraft’s cosmic horror.

lost

Year: 2004-2010
Showrunners/creators: Jeffrey Lieber, JJ Abrams, Damon Lindelof
Send: Naveen Andrews, Emilie de Ravin, Matthew Fox
Where is it to look; Hulu

lost was a bona fide cultural phenomenon in the early 2000s, introducing an entire generation of viewers to the joys and frustrations of his particular brand of concept.”mystery box” rich storytelling. It only makes sense, given the time when the game originally came out, that Sam Lake and company would cite the series as the inspiration behind the mystery of Alan Wake University. “They do the best of the spaces,” Lake said of the show. 2010 interview with GamesBeat. “That was something about writing Alan Wake.” lost it also inspired the structure of the original story, which divides each of its stages into six “episodes”.

Remember

Year: 2000
Director: Christopher Nolan
Send: Guy Pearce, Carrie-Anne Moss, Joe Pantoliano
Where is it to look; Prime Video, Pluto TV, Plex

Sam Lake has cited several Christopher Nolan films as influences Alan Wake 2including Remember and Inception. Speaking to IGNLake said,Inception plays the role (in the dreamlike nature of the Dark Place). Trying to understand and remember him, I feel Remember It’s a great detective story trying to understand and piece together what happened. Being a writer himself and not a certain type of writer from a perspective that doesn’t have the full picture. Yes Battle Club I think this is a beautiful genre of horror, urban fiction, and mind-blowing.

seven

Year: 1995
Director: David Fincher
Send: Brad Pitt, Morgan Freeman, Gwyneth Paltrow
Where is it to look; Hulu

When at the middle of the bridge Alan Wake 2Ambitious about detective fiction and its roots in supernatural horror, Lake and lead story designer Molly Maloney have cited this serial killer thriller as one of their biggest inspirations. “When I look at Saga, I see a lot” seven,” Maloney said in an interview with IGN. “He’s a perfect professional, he’s very talented at what he does. Here he is with his partner Alex Casey, trying to solve this increasingly seemingly impossible series of mysteries. I mean, not that it’s funny, but it’s a delightful back-and-forth that really reminded me of Morgan Freeman and Brad Pitt, not unlike.

“seven it’s definitely an example of merging detective fiction with horror,” Lake adds. “See the killer stories overall are often the closest thing to a horror movie while the detective story is so good.”

Silence of the Lamb

Year: 1991
Director: Jonathan Demme
Send: Jodie Foster, Anthony Hopkins, Scott Glenn
Where is it to look; Max

Both Lake and game director Kyle Rowley were quoted directly The silence of the lamb as the main mind behind Saga Anderson. Early in production, the development team sought to create a new protagonist who could serve as the inspiration for Alan Wake and a talented detective and criminal profiler not unlike Jodie Foster’s Clarice Starling.

Taxi Driver

Year: 1976
Director: Martin Scorsese
Send: Robert De Niro, Jodie Foster, Albert Brooks
Where is it to look; They are available to rent on Amazon, Apple, and Vudu

Taxi Driver immediately inspired the look and feel of Alan Wake 2Picture the Dark Place, a malevolent form of mobile dimension where the protagonist has been trapped for over a decade. “I was drawn to America’s pop culture as a kid, and New York was the beating heart of it,” Lake said of horror director Mike Flanagan in a panel discussion at the Tribeca Festival 2023. the look and feel of the nightmarish vision of Dark Place, which also draws inspiration from Alan Wake, into the universe of crime fiction.

True Inquisitor season 1

Year: 2014
showrunner/creator; Nic Pizzolatto
Send: Matthew McConaughey, Woody Harrelson, Michelle Monaghan.
Where is it to look; Max

“One of the first things that came to us when we were thinking about creating the concept of an FBI agent coming with his partner to investigate these murders was one time A true investigatorRowley revealed to IGN. “Some of the motivations between the two detectives there and how they work together to solve that case became something that was very compelling to us. And then obviously just stylistically wise, again he got a lot of the ritualistic elements that we could lean into pretty well.”

The game also shares many similarities in the aesthetic of the series, especially the visuals of Saga with prolific subjects that use double exposure photography that are very similar. A true investigator‘s skill hole titles.

The Twilight Zone

Year: 1959-1964
showrunner/creator; Rod Serling
Where is it to look; Ruler Plus

Authority The Twilight Zone on Alan Wake and Alan Wake 2 is most visible in Night Fountainsset in an analog universe for Serling’s series that features several short episodes that appear at various times throughout the first game. Night Fountains and he is fighting between the bridge Alan Wake and the 2019 script Governmentwith the character of Alan Wake, he wrote several episodes of the series early in his writing career, including a script for an episode called “Over the Darkly Threshold”, which certainly looks at the events of the event. Government.

Twin Peaks / Twin Peaks: Return

Year: 1990-1991 (twin peaks); 2017 (Twin Peaks: Income)
Showrunners/creators: David Lynch, Mark Frost
Send: Kyle MacLachlan, Michael Ontkean, Mädchen Amick
Where is it to look; Ruler Plus (twin peaks); Showtime (Twin Peaks: Income)

Perhaps more than any other work on this list, David Lynch and Mark Frost’s supernatural mystery drama towers above all others as the main influence not only on the Alan Wake series, but on Lake. A fictional Pacific Northwest town inspired straight out of Twin Peaks after Alan Wake’s own The Fall of Light, The Dark Place was heavily inspired by the extradimensional space threshold twin peaks‘ Black Lodge, and even the character of Cynthia Weaver in the original play was directly inspired by Margaret Lanterman, the so-called “Lady Log” in twin peaks. This does not even go into the parallels Alan Wake 2 and Twin Peaks: Incomewhich picks up twenty years after the events of the original series and follows the protagonist’s escape from a sinister alternate plan against his evil doppelganger.

Yes, both Alan Wake and twin peaks feature tons of coffee — with some damn fine cups if you’re looking for the right crowd.