Outlast 2 Series X

[Kayleen Dauteuil]

Outlastis an American survival reality competition television series. All eight episodes of the first season premiered on March 10, 2023, on Netflix.[1] It is produced by Aggregate Films and Nomad Entertainment, with Mike Odair serving as the showrunner, and Jason Bateman, Grant Kahler, Michael Costigan, Emma Ho, and Odair serving as executive producers.[2] In May 2023, the series was renewed for a second season.[3]

The series places 16 players, split into four teams, in the Alaskan wilderness, where they must survive off the land with meager supplies. The players, described as "lone wolf" survivalists,[1][4] must work in teams and are not allowed to play the game on their own. Players can leave the game by firing a flare gun, and the last team remaining wins one million dollars.[5]

16 players are dropped into the Alaskan wilderness and split into four teams. In order to earn a $1 million prize, they will attempt to outlast each other. There are no rules, and no end date, the only guidelines are that only one team will win, and contestants need to be part of a team to win. In order to leave, contestants either self-eliminate, or are removed for medical reasons. Once only two teams remain, the teams engage in a race/hike in order to win.[7][8]

The Outlast game franchise, developed by Red Barrels Studios, redefined the meaning of fear and horror in video games. We had a chance to interview Samuel Laflamme, the composer of score for both installments of the series.

Samuel Laflamme: There is some difference, first the scale is not the same. For a film, you need to create a world for a story told in 2 hours. TV shows give you much more time of storytelling to let you present your ideas, and developing them. Video games need you to understand the interactivity of the nature of this medium. But at the end of the day, I still compose music! I mean in those three kinds of format, I still need to think about creating music for something. I need to think about the characters, the story, the right emotion I need to reach and explore.

Samuel Laflamme: To me it is always about music. Story and music! Music to me is (it may be a sound) audio used to reveal emotion. When I think of creating a sound or recording an instrument, it has to be used to create an audio imagery that tells something that resonates with an emotion. This leads you to feel the story I want you to experience.

Samuel Laflamme: A lot of meetings! I am a strong believer of communication between the whole creative team on a project. Not only the audio director, but all the people involved in the story line. On a movie, I have to understand what is the vision of the director, and then speak with the audio designer how we will communicate this vision with audio/music. On a video game, I will try to talk with the artistic director, game developer, audio director, producer to understand the main vision of the project. Then I will be able to conceptualise the music I will create.

gamemusic.net: For the first Outlast, you used chamber music ensemble to make the player scared and let him suffer. For the second installment, you changed the concept entirely and used completely different instruments and composing techniques. What was the main reason for that?

gamemusic.net: As a composer, what is more exciting: experimenting with sound matter like in one of my favorite parts of Outlast soundtrack, Swarm Ambience, or making something funnier and simpler, like your score for Tiny Brains?

Samuel Laflamme: I do music because I am a fan of cinema. I come from that art form, and the music is the most natural way to me to express a story. If I see an image, I instantly hear music. So, all the best film composers were my first influences. When I was young, I had great time to compose music in the style of John Williams, James Horner, Hans Zimmer, Danny Elfman. My first love story with a film score was Batman (scored by Danny Elfman). It was a true revelation of the power of merging music with images.

Samuel Laflamme: Absolutely! Architecture and photography are both my favourite kind of art. My godfather is an architect and we both love speaking about differences and links between art forms. The rhythm is an interesting element, in music and in architecture. Also, I see all the music I do in my head, like colours, forms, spaces, depth of field etc. I do photography to give me ideas about how to transpose all those notions into musical concepts.

Samuel Laflamme: I think so. For a while, the issue in video game was the technology. Nowadays, companies like Oats Studio use video game technologies (Unity) to create short movies. I feel that technologies will merge the different media soon. At the end, people will always want to live an experience. And I think the line between movies and video games will be so thin at one point that this will create a new art form. Think about cinema, it was probably created at the beginning to shoot a theatre play, and then the editing came after so it became a different art form.

Jill Ashock, the breakout contestant on Netflix's rugged survival competition Outlast, knows that many people who watched her take matters into her own hands in the series will label her the villain of the show. But Jill, a "40-something-year-old mom slash grandma of four," is unapologetic. "No matter what I'm doing, you're gonna get 110% of me. And if that 110% is too much for you, ooh, it might not be likable," Jill told TV Guide, the day before Outlast premiered on Netflix.

As the mastermind of Alpha team, one of the four squads of four competitors whose goal was to survive as long as possible in the wilderness of Alaska with nothing but basic tools and their wits, Jill was directly involved in the most shocking moment of Outlast's first season, and one of the most memorable standoffs in reality television.

Depending on your viewpoint, it was either an act of extreme cruelty or a fair play according to the series' incredibly lax rules. As Outlast's credits explain, the only listed rule is that competitors must be in a team to win, a mandate placed in order to drum up television-friendly drama from individuals used to working alone.

"This wasn't some fantasy land where all rules just disappeared," Javier, who was confronted by Jill and saw his raft destroyed by Amber, wrote to TV Guide via email from Thailand, where he's receiving massage leg therapy. "Jill and Amber most definitely manipulated the situation to their benefit. Assault is illegal. Theft is illegal."

"I thought it would have done the whole experiment a huge disservice to change the rules mid-game, you know. Again, did we set a precedent that's unfair? I still don't think so. Because I do think that's part of the game," he said. "If people were behaving badly or not treating each other with respect, I didn't feel it was my or the producers' place to change how people played."

Perhaps emboldened by the success of Justin's mission and seeing easy prey, or maybe just because she didn't like Javier, Jill next set her sights on Bravo camp, as Javier was the lone remaining member of that team. But Javier saw it coming and took action.

"I could tell that Justin, Jill, and Amber were terrible people when Brian and I first encountered them along the river bank in front of their campsite as we were hiking towards the crab pots," Javier wrote to TV Guide. "They actually suggested stealing all the crab pots to make things more difficult for the other teams. Immediately after that encounter I warned [then Bravo teammate] Brian that they would likely be stealing our things next." To make that more difficult, Javier took action. "I wrapped up our little shack with fishing nets to confuse Jill and Amber when they came in for an attack and that's exactly what happened. Jill got frustrated by the nets and she wasn't able to steal my personal items and sleeping bag before I caught up to her at my campsite."

It was a moment that brought the game to a halt. As Delta looked on from across the river, Javier raced to his camp to protect his gear from Jill, while Amber beelined for Javier's raft. Jill and Javier had at it, with Javier calling Jill "weak" and a "cheater," claiming she couldn't win the game how it was meant to be played so she resorted to dangerous bullying tactics. Then Javier heard Dawn call out, "The bitch [Amber] is going for your raft!" and Javier knew he was in a tough situation.

"We literally were not prepared for how emotional everyone would get," Kahler said when asked about his reaction to Jill and Amber approaching Javier's camp. "I honestly was as surprised as you probably were as a viewer because we had no idea."

As Jill sees it, ousting Javier by any means necessary was about saving her team; since Bravo and Alpha shared a side of the river, Javier's presence strained resources and kept game away. Jill says she gave Javier the option to stay in the competition by abandoning his camp and heading to the other side of the river to join Charlie, which she knew was a long shot due to her alliance with Charlie. Not wanting to leave anything for Jill and Amber, Javier made the decision to burn his camp to the ground, in a statement that was as much about playing the game as it was about what he thought of Jill and Amber.

"At the end of the day, you can kind of see like his emotions definitely took a toll on him as well and he torched [his] entire camp," Jill said. "Out of, you know, despisement (sic) to us. But he went home and we didn't."

"I was also hoping to learn from my teammates and gain new outdoor skills but that unfortunately didn't occur when the crazies started stealing from us," he wrote. "There was no question in my mind that I wasn't going to do anything unethical or immoral by attacking people. But I would have definitely eaten insects and gotten extremely creative finding food, staying warm and I would have likely outlasted everyone else."

Jill also thinks she would have won, had the game continued to be a game about outlasting other players instead of ending on a footrace to a destination. (The strong Charlie team, who largely avoided confrontation, ended up winning.)

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