Art director Rikard Ryberg explains why Alone in the Dark's horror is "grounded" in realism

Early on we drew inspiration for the overall tone and mysticism from the movie Angel Heart from 1987. It has this gritty low key southern gothic tone going which we believed would be a good fit for our game. We also took a lot of southern gothic inspiration from True Detective season 1 as well.
Noir films have inspired us in terms of using heavy volumetrics and strong contrasts.
Lovecraft's novels have been of big inspiration especially when it comes to some of the weirder architectural designs we have. Not horror movies, but we were also inspired by Wes Andersson's visual style and eccentricity to some degree which you mostly can see in the interior design of the Derceto.

Using Unreal we already had a good head start, especially when it comes to setting up the volumetrics and lighting. Biggest concern was to hit our performance targets while maintaining the high-quality bar of the visuals. It is a lot easier to make something look moody and cinematic when on a high target for sure.

Yes, for sure. It gave us a lot of freedom to come up with new fresh ideas that fit a modern game but at the same time pick and choose from this old box of ideas from the original game and try to marry them as best as possible.
For example, we decided early on what the base narrative looked like and that it would feature the house itself (Derceto). Knowing that, we tried to incorporate as many rooms from the original as possible but at the same time make sure to do it in a totally reimagined way.

For characters we were really keen on making the clothes designs as period appropriate as possible. So we drew a lot of inspiration from the 1920s to early 30s fashion with flapper styles and noir films to have something that could come straight out of The Great Gatsby.
We still had limitations on what we could do but I think it turned out really good with all the dresses and suits. A big shout out to Amr Mohammed, animation director on the game, for sticking to the plan developing the cloth simulation tech.
For the actual character designs we stuck to a classic look, golden age of cinema inspired, getting those strong character traits going. And not to forget, a few of the character designs are of course inspired by the old game to some degree. With these we tried to pay homage and still add a new fresh take on them. 
Monster designs were designed in cooperation with monster designer Guy Davis and a big part of that process was to let Guy design the monsters with as free reins as possible without us giving him too many visual cues. With that said, the baseline is that they are inspired by nature and would sort of spawn from there. They do of course find a good amount of inspiration in the Lovecraftian mythos as well.

Our internal animation department used the XSens mocap system to make the gameplay animations and some of the cinematic sequences. In short XSens is a sensor driven mocap system that lets you capture movement without cameras.
Moreover we partnered with metricminds which is a cinematic focused studio also under the THQNordic umbrella. Metricminds did all the cinematic work including cinematic direction, layout, mocap, integration and polish. It is a tremendous task for 120 minutes of cutscenes.
The performance mocap was split between facial and body mocap separately. For facial mocap we used FaceWare with great results.

When doing this for such a long time as we have done in this project it's quite hard to disconnect yourself to see how far - or not - to go with the different elements at your disposal when doing horror.
Going more into a specific topic, I think pacing and timing is hard to nail as it is a very iterative process involving a lot of different disciplines and it can be a very advanced and difficult task.
Moreover it has been difficult to make sure we stay in our kind of horror that is just the slot before going into a terror horror realm. 

It's very case by case, and very player experience driven I would say. We're leaning in the realistic corner when it comes to individual characters, materials, environments / props and so. But depending on how the player experience should be, we have shifted aspects around.
So for example we have very different and stylised moods in certain levels which are intended to add a disruption and to convey a different feeling for the player.
Another example would be this level where we have a realistic environment in general depicting a historical event but we have exaggerated the height of the walls to add a sense of pressure and claustrophobia. In short, I would say it's a mix but it's always in the realm of believability.

Without spoiling, we have these large otherworldly events happening throughout the game. They usually happen during otherwise calmer investigative periods so I would say they add quite a lot of fear and suspense.

One key pillar for the art, and the whole game, has been 'Grounding' or 'Grounded'. This means we need to make sure to ground the player in the game world. Technically this means we have a lot of systems triggering different outcomes depending on what is happening around the player.
For example, we have different weapon shot hit decals depending on material getting hit, feet getting grounded correctly, wet and muddy feet decals, stuff getting destroyed when shooting them, player bumps into objects and they fall, the player character looks at interesting objects when moving through the environment, clothes move believably when the character moves and interacts with wind among others.

We use a lot of volumetric effects to add extra atmosphere and noir-tone. Moreover, being able to use solutions such as a high degree of dynamic lighting while still keeping a high visual bar helps us to do these quick horror events where the player is "transported" to a totally different place in an instant. Character wise our advanced facial rigs let us do a lot of facial expressions that help to convey a wider range of emotions of our characters.