ENTRY 24: THE KRASUE (Burong Sukapat)
"By day, Burong Sukapat appears as a beautiful woman. By night, the Krasue emerges as a disembodied floating head…entrails dangling from its neck, to feed its insatiable hunger.
Alternate between forms to plunge Survivors into a nightmare of torn flesh, sopping blood, and grotesque body horror."
LORE SUMMARY: Burong was an opera singer who had the love and support of her best friend, Janjira, but yearned for real fame and recognition. One night, she was offered a bottle of strange liquid by another singer, Malai, who had become a sudden success. Burong thought it was a joke, but drank the tincture anyway.
From then on she felt invigorated, healthier, and was able to sing better than ever before...but one night, she awoke outside, covered in the blood of chickens she had seemingly devoured. It became obvious that she was hunting and killing in her sleep, until finally she asked her Janjira to watch over her one night, but only woke surounded by her best friend's pieces.
She sought out Malai, who admitted to having passed a curse on to her, and the monster that now shared her body tore free to kill Malai on the spot. But once she returned home, Burong found that she'd been given the lead role of her dreams, and nothing else mattered. She embraced what she'd become, dazzling audiences by day, while the monster fed at night. All would have been fine if not for the fact that the monster's appetite kept growing, and one night it was lured into the fog by a "promise of meat"...
LORE SUMMARY: Burong was an opera singer who had the love and support of her best friend, Janjira, but yearned for real fame and recognition. One night, she was offered a bottle of strange liquid by another singer, Malai, who had become a sudden success. Burong thought it was a joke, but drank the tincture anyway.
From then on she felt invigorated, healthier, and was able to sing better than ever before...but one night, she awoke outside, covered in the blood of chickens she had seemingly devoured. It became obvious that she was hunting and killing in her sleep, until finally she asked her Janjira to watch over her one night, but only woke surounded by her best friend's pieces.
She sought out Malai, who admitted to having passed a curse on to her, and the monster that now shared her body tore free to kill Malai on the spot. But once she returned home, Burong found that she'd been given the lead role of her dreams, and nothing else mattered. She embraced what she'd become, dazzling audiences by day, while the monster fed at night. All would have been fine if not for the fact that the monster's appetite kept growing, and one night it was lured into the fog by a "promise of meat"...
I never would have guessed that the very year I ever played Dead by Daylight for the first time, their very next new killer would be one of my all-time favorite mythological monsters, or at least genera of monsters, since there are several different cultures with some variation or another on a flying, flesh-eating or blood-sucking head with all its guts dangling off! I've advocated for more global awareness of these entities for as long as I've had this website, and Dead by Daylight, while still relatively niche, is now easily the biggest piece of media to feature them outside their natural range.
My introduction to this type of ghoul was actually in the original Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Fiend Folio, with its entry on Malaysia's Penanggalan, which both fascinated and nauseated me as a small child who could not at all handle anything to do with guts coming out of things. So much so, I actually made my mother cut the Penanggalan out of the book for me, but I wanted to preserve the adorable bug creature on the opposite page, and I still have that very book because I use it to rest my laptop on when I'm in bed:
So I guess I'm among those few American kids privileged to know all about flying intestine-head women before the internet, and I'll always associate them a little with my mother indulging my silly request to ruin what was already a nice collectible gaming book even all those decades ago. The Krasue however is not the Penanggalan, but merely one species in this rich taxonomic group that also includes related beings like the Pok-pok, Leyak and Kuyang in Indoneia, the Ma lai in Vietnam and the Manananggal in the Philippines, among many others! Sometimes they're considered ghosts, sometimes they're an unholy curse, and sometimes they're a form that evil magic users might take on purpose even, just for shits and giggles. Most commonly, they're presented in English materials as just one category of exotic "vampire," and that's fair enough for some varieties I guess, but I've come to avoid that comparison myself because they're really their own thing. They don't even all suck blood! Most of them eat solid foods! Like corpses! And fetuses. And sometimes feces.
It's interesting that the Krasue and Burong are considered two different entities in her story, but Burong is cool with the arrangement as long as it keeps paying off, and that complicity comes back to bite her when her monster side answers The Entity's call. If you let something else borrow your head every night, whatever that little scamp gets up to is still on you.
Besides being such a cool, gruesome and bizarre monster, what does she do? I'm just going to reiterate my original social media reaction to the killer's early teaser:
Yes, not only can she explode into flying guts and whip people with her intestines, but even in her human body she can barf up a "leeching gland" to infliced pitiful fool humans with "leeched" status, and yes, it gives them visible leech-like parasitic growths!!
These "glands" seem to be formed from intestinal tissue, but they also slough off clouds of teeny tiny little black worms, if you look closely, which actually aren't leeches, if we go by her perk "wriggling parasite," which depicts a mated pair of blood flukes! Another organism I've always been fascinated by! The little thread-like one is the female, if you haven't read enough of my stuff to know already, while the larger boat-shaped one with the suckers is the male:
Is that what she actually drank? A bottle full of supernatural schistosomiasis? Someone really did their research here, since it's not only a disease found in Thailand and especially some of its neighboring countries, but a disease that primarily afflicts your intestines, since the adult worms inhabit the mesenteric blood vessels. They aren't what makes you really sick though; it's the spiny eggs, floating around in your veins, that trigger the horrible symptoms. The fact that both Burong and the parasite represent a duo sharing a body feels meaningful, too.
Burong in "body mode" is also performed by a real Thaiwanese opera singer and professional vocal instructor, Dr. Fueanglada Prawang Carlson, who appropriately enough goes by the nickname "Organ". Her voice acting and singing are both positively awesome, and you can see a short promo video of her HERE. It feels like there's just so much thought and so much love that went into this Killer; they truly upped their game as soon as they started going more Monstrous, from the Dredge on out.
CURRENT SKINS:
MY SUGGESTIONS:
Alien Brain: what about one where the "head" in flying head mode is reduced to just a pulsing radioactive brain and eyeballs? The body's outfit could have more of a sci-fi look to it, a spacesuit or even a biohazard suit.Medusa: there are a few vaguely medusa-themed skins available to some killers, but none of them are really the full blown snake-haired gorgon you picture from Greek Myth. This would be a great combination for Burong, because we already have that idea of Medusa's severed head remaining alive, and you could make the guts into a bunch of snakes as well!
Flying Skeleton: what if instead of her head and guts, one version of Burong just sends her entire skeleton out floating around? I just think that would be fun. It wouldn't be a Krasue anymore, but it would be one of those far-out novelty skins anyway.
Medical Leeches: obviously I'm going to suggest that the killer who Leeches people be the first killer with an actual Leeches skin, which could re-skin the intestine tentacles as a bunch of spooky leeches, but I'm gonna say the body and outfit should be dressed up like an old timey doctor! Or...maybe a barber? Barbers used to be medical "professionals" too, who in fact offered leech therapy!
For now, I guess this actually wraps up these reviews...it was so, so nice of Dead by Daylight to welcome me, specifically, to their game with this most excellent birthday present. I had a ton of fun playing the Krasue as soon as it came out, and I also started WINNING a whole lot more.
And sure, the player base would have you believe that this is only because the Krasue was, quote, "broken" on release. "Overpowered" they said. "Too strong to be fun" they said. For weeks it was all "makes the game unplayable" this and "made me uninstall" that.
I realize I was only one of many thousands of killer players, yes, but as I gleefully flew this woman's little virtual head around for so many nights in a row, delightedly spattering players in the face with her virtual worm-infested bloody sputum, there is an above zero chance that more than one of them drew the same conclusions. That my leeching glands squelched upon their digital carcasses as their enjoyment of the game took a sour turn. And I sincerely, wholeheartedly apologize for this terrible pain that I have contributed to, I assure you, but I might also offer as compensation my most heartfelt piece of advice.
