Father Loutermilch is an antagonist in Outlast 2. He was a music teacher at St. Sybil High School, a catholic learning institution which Lynn and Blake Langermann, as well as Jessica Gray were enrolled in. It is implied he raped and killed Jessica by pushing her down the stairs, then staged her hanging as a suicide.
Story
Father Loutermilch can be seen variously throughout Blake's hallucinations laughing, singing, speaking and taunting him. After some time passes, Blake starts to perceive Loutermilch as a demon. This can be proven by a red birthmark above his right eye, which the demon also bears.
When Blake approaches a well in the village, the demon's tongue pulls him in. After Blake winds up Jessica's music box and finds her hanged, the demon's tongue appears and pulls Jessica into the ceiling. In another hallucination, Blake roams a long, dark hallway, when all of the lockers start to open and close violently, as Loutermilch echoes. When Blake approaches the exit door, the demon spawns and throws him to the end of the hallway. Blake suddenly appears in a locker. Father Loutermilch is standing right infront of the locker, then walks away. Blake opens the locker and starts to walk about the school, when he notices a computer in one of the rooms is turned on. He opens up an email:
I took Miss Gray out of phys ed today to have a little talk with her. Father Loutermilch was telling me he's worried that she's a touch more sensitive than is good for her. (And I don't doubt it, poor girl. I know you've dealt with her dad and his big personality, and her mother was a real tragedy, God rest her soul.) But anyway Fr. Loutermilch says he thinks it might not be a good idea for Jessica to go on the field trip to the piano factory and I tend to agree. She seems like a decent risk of a runaway.
On top of which, her father's signature on the permission slip is a little embarassing in what an obvious forgery it is. So I'll need your say-so to suspend permission: we'll put her on library study for that day.
Later on, Loutermilch can be heard singing a song along with Jessica. When Blake returns, a phone can be heard ringing inside one of the offices. As Blake approaches, the demon walks out and runs for Blake. Blake tries to hide, and the demon disappears. Returning back, Blake picks up the phone and a familiar voice can be heard at the other end: "Hello! Hello, oh thank God you're alive. I need you to stay calm. We're going to get you help, we'll get you out of there. I want you to find a place to hide, someplace safe where you can remember the taste of her kiss when you felt her neck break you diseased cocksucker."
A tongue then appears on the phone, taking Blake by the neck. Then Blake throws the phone down, and the tongue disappears. When Blake exits the office, all doors close violently and the demon appears again, chasing after Blake.
In a next hallucination, Blake walks under the school, in a hallway system where all the pipes and cables are located. He finds his way through a corridor, when the demon appears and chases him.
Blake is rowing down a lake, when the tongue sprungs out of the water and pulls Blake in. He has another vision of the demon chasing him, this time he is in the school's swimming pool. He finds his way up the stairs, where another chase happens.
Now finding himself in the school library, Blake makes his way through the confusing maze of shelves, when the demon appears at the end. When Blake hears Jessica screaming, he turns around and runs for her, with the demon right behind him.
After Blake falls down into a pile of bodies, he lies on top of Jessica on the stairs. She is visibly beaten, and her neck is broken. We can see the demon on the top of the stairs looking down at Blake. Blake runs around the school, Loutermilch taunting him.
As Blake and Jessica are making their way from their hiding place in the kitchen, Loutermilch steps out of one of the doors. He questions Blake and Jessica about their whereabouts in the school at this time, when he tells them to step back into class. He threatens Blake and Jessica by talking to their parents. He orders Blake to leave, but as he heads out, hears Jessica screaming for help. He runs back to the classroom, where he can see Jessica and Loutermilch are gone. Jessica can be heard in what is only to be assumed is a fight with Loutermilch, then Blake finds her brutalized corpse on the stairs. It can be assumed that Loutermilch forced Blake to go along with the suicide coverup.
Personality
Loutermilch speaks like any other priest - finely, fatherly, and maturely. Beneath his kind exterior, however, he is quite clearly evil to the core, molesting a young girl to the point where she's deathly afraid of his mere presence and climaxing with her violent, gruesome murder, covered up as a suicide.
The school recordings in the game have strange, "nonsensical" voices in them. When played in reverse we hear them as the voice of Loutermilch. The voices seem to be his inner thoughts on God and how he is happy he was born with talent. He is interested in music and math and love and sometimes thinks music and math helps him cope. Later on, Loutermilch is shown to have inappropriate thoughts on children's sexuality hoping to share in their discovery of things everyone knows but no one talks about. This becomes deadly when it is focused on Jessica Gray: Loutermilch starts sexualizing the child feeling she has sexual potential. This is further backed up when he starts making claims to the school counselor, Shelly Parham, that he thinks Jessica is too sensitive and should not be allowed to go to a school field trip. Suggesting to Parham that she was a flight risk was a way to isolate her for nefarious intentions. Furthermore, in the school recordings it is implied heavily that Loutermilch is fixated with Jessica Gray to the point that he is happy at her death feeling he has escaped culpability for his actions. His evil is established when he suggests that Jessica was not "morally ethical" with her potent charms so it was fate that she would die. Loutermilch stated that Jessica was "resilient, smiley, flirty, not even aware of the power she had."
Loutermilch is manipulative and he also manipulates religion to his own benefits. When Blake discovers Jessica he dissuades a confused young boy on the nature of the events. In Blake's flashbacks, Loutermilch speaks of Blake being "generous" and thanks him, though it is all very condescending. When Loutermilch had found Jessica and Blake he actually had plans to molest her so he told Blake to go home. The action makes Jessica panic making her plead Blake to stay which he listens to initially. However, this makes Loutermilch specifically shame Blake though Blake says that he hasn't done anything romantic or sexual with Jessica, which is the truth. The priest states that "shame is a gift from God" and Blake feeling ashamed is righteous as it shows him he has done something wrong. He also manipulates Blake by trying to make him leave by saying with malice that if he didn't he would get into trouble. Furthermore, he insists on Blake leaving so that the situation did not become more "awkward".
His actions towards Jessica are less exasperated, but very manipulative. Loutermilch uses his deceptively friendly voice to say he just wanted to be friends with the duo and make things right. He even threatens on calling Jessica's father and Blake's parents which make the children afraid. At these actions, Jessica is saddened and looks away but Loutermilch holds Jessica's shoulders and tells her to help him make things right. He then caresses her face when he says to her to "pray with him". This line makes Jessica panic and desperately plead Blake to stay. It is implied that he spoke this line before sexually assaulting her, which is why it triggered this response.
The game does not specify how Blake could hear Loutermilch's inner thoughts but it is speculated this is due to the radio frequencies that are emitted by the towers. Additionally, Loutermilch may have been the priest who told Blake that music of the birds is proof of God's existence, present in a recording, as the priest was the music teacher of St. Sybil.
Physical Description
Loutermilch is a tall, slim, middle-aged man with light brown eyes, black receding hairline and a large birthmark on his forehead. He wears a priest's robe and a black clergy shirt tucked into black pants, with a matching belt around his waist.
Loutermilch, as the demon, is nude and coated from head to toe in blood. He has multiple limbs, an inhumanly long, pulsating tongue and is noseless, jawless and lipless.
Trivia
- The "shadow" version of the Loutermilch demon is making a masturbatory gesture with one of its hands around its groin, foreshadowing the perverse nature of Loutermilch's character.
- In his concept artwork, Loutermilch is shown bearing the cross of the Testament of the New Ezekiel. This might suggest that the earlier version of the character was somehow connected to the cult. This is further supported by the fact that his dialogue is labeled with the cult in the demo's game files.[1]
- In Golgotha, panning Blake's vision intensely to the right as he is dragged before his crucifixion reveals Loutermilch to be one of the observers alongside other Scalled villagers (before disappearing, as is revealed in third-person mode). Whether this was intentional on the developers' part or left in by accident is unknown.[2]
References
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