“Interactive horror movie” Until Dawn to become un-interactive horror movie for some damn reason
Sony has announced that Shazam! director David F. Sandberg is handling a movie adaptation of fan-favorite horror game Until Dawn
Aux Features Until Dawn
Ohhhh, this one is going to give us a headache. See, THR is reporting this week that Sony has just moved forward with plans to plug 2015 horror game sensation Until Dawn into its freshly minted video game adaptation machine, hiring Shazam! franchise director David F. Sandberg to helm a movie version of the bestselling title. But fans of gaming will know that Until Dawn’s whole reason for existing, in the firs tplace, was to be the culmination of years of efforts to create a playable horror movie, one that recreated all those fun, bloody, trope-y moments in a way that let players actually hop in and control the outcome of the scenes. So, turning it back into a non-interactive film…
Yeah, there’s the headache.
Anyway: The film is being produced through Screen Gems and PlayStation Productions, all part of the Sony hivemind, with regular horror script writer Gary Dauberman—who previously worked with Sandberg on 2017's Annabelle: Creation—handling the writing. Sandberg, meanwhile, has a long history with horror: Before he got into the kid-friendly superhero game, he broke into the industry with Lights Out, an adaptation of his own horror short, following it up with the Annabelle prequel the next year.
Developed by Supermassive Games, Until Dawn was a huge hit for Sony, creating, for maybe the first time, a game that really captured the “Don’t go in there!” fun of watching a horror movie with friends—except with you, the player, deciding whether or not they did, in fact, go in there. (It doesn’t hurt that the game came along just as video game streaming was really getting going; the game, with its jump scares and spectator-friendly nature, was instant and irresistible Twitch-bait for online audiences.) The game centers on a group of friends who take a trip to the mountains, and end up running through several consecutive horror movies’ worth of awful events before the night is out.
We’ll be especially curious to see how casting for this thing goes: Given that the original game featured high-profile performances from Hayden Panettiere and a pre-Oscar-win Rami Malek (to say nothing of a beautifully deranged performance from the always great Peter Stormare) this might be the rare gaming adaptation to have a less recognizable cast than the game it’s lifting from.
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This is incredibly stupid. As mentioned, the game’s appeal is primarily its choose-your-own-adventure style interactivity. The story is nothing but a series of purposefully hacky tropes. “Until Dawn” is a good movie title but, really, that’s all you can get from adapting this.But, since they are apparently going to give this a try, let’s think about what there is to work with. (i’m procrastinating from work, so forgive the long ramble)SPOILERS FOR A NEARLY TEN-YEAR-OLD GAME:For anyone who’s curious, the game’s story is basically this:
A group of stereotypical horror movie college students go to a spooky winter lodge where their friends died a year earlier (the insane idea that they’d want to go back to that lodge is the kind of purposeful nonsense we’re dealing with). For the first half of the game, it seems like a slasher movie story with a masked killer. Then, randomly, the killer is revealed to be the dead friends’ brother who’s just pranking everyone.HOWEVER, it turns out that the dead friends have ACTUALLY become wendigo monsters in the year since their supposed death. So, then, the game completely switches sub-genres and becomes a monster movie story for the second half.So, yeah. Not really an Oscar-worthy plot there screaming out for adaptation.If I had to adapt this silliness into an actual movie, what the hell would I do? I guess you could either downplay the genre switch and just make it a wendigo movie. Or you could really embrace the whole “this is every horror movie combined into one movie” approach and play up the idea of a monster movie invading a slasher movie. Hell, throw in a ghost for good measure. Why not?Anyway, this is probably a bad idea and wish luck to whoever’s trying to write it.Ps. Typing out the game’s plot made me realize, for the first time, that the title Until Dawn might be a reference to From Duck Till Dawn, since that movie also switches from human monsters to literal monsters midway through.
Damn that sounds bonkers. And thank you, I was curious.
The absurd story works well for what the game is: a 10 hour interactive horror movie that keeps changing up what tropes it’s using to keep the player on their toes. Condensed into a 100 minute movie, the story would be absolute trash.The wendigo stuff by itself could work as a movie, but it’s surprisingly dark (the monster is only created when two girls are left for dead and one has to resort to cannibalism). Without the sillier slasher stuff, the movie would have a very different tone than the goofy game.
Thinking about it more, the adaptation will probably go like this:Instead of 50/50 slasher to monster ration, the slasher stuff will probably be heavily reduced. More like a slasher fake out in the first act before the movie reveals itself to actually be about monsters.In that case, I gueeeeeeess you can make an okay movie with that set up (depends on the monster effects). But it really wouldn’t have any of the appeal of the source material.
Remember FNAF Movie? It’s based on stupid game that relies on player input. Did it made a load of money? Of course it did. And if you think Sony (a cocaine fueled company that try build Spiderverse without spiderman) didn’t try to follow the trend, guess again.
Until Dawn is nowhere near the pop culture phenomenon FNAF is. Which is a bummer to me as I think it’s 1000x more fun than that silly jump scare jack-in-the-box series.However, I agree that Sony is following a trend. But the trend they’re following is the success of their own Uncharted and The Last of Us.Both of those adaptations were things I was wary of since they seemed so inessential. The Uncharted series was already “Indiana Jones movie BUT A GAME” while The Last of Us was already “prestige TV drama series BUT A GAME.” It seemed so boring to just take away the “game” part which was the one part that made those properties unique.However, my disbelief in both adaptations turned out way wrong. Uncharted looked awful and I haven’t seen it, but it made fucking bank. And The Last of Us is arguably better as a show.So maybe I’m wrong about Until Dawn. But I’d guess that this might be the end of the successful streak Sony has found with their “turn a game based on movies back into a movie” strategy.
Yeah I always thought the game was influenced by the Dusk Til Dawn switcheroo, and in that sense I think making a less tropey version of the game with the shift halfway from slasher suspicion to monster survival could work. The advantage of adapting virtually any game as opposed to novels is that there’s relatively little story, so it can generally be condensed easier. Obviously it loses a lot without the CYOA aspects, but you can say that about most games (save for the Naughty Dog-style “you are in a film with some more interactive parts” game-as-cinema approach. But there, you’ve basically got the entire adaptation storyboarded.)
the title Until Dawn might be a reference to From Duck Till DawnIs that the movie where Donald Duck plays the character ‘Quack Machine’ and has a gun on his crotch?I don’t really feel that there would be an issue in translating the story to film. The decision-making aspect didn’t appear to have sweeping consequences to the story (I actually tried a perfect playthrough a few years ago and was surprised by how many key events still went down the same way as my first unguided try).I do agree that the ‘slasher’ portion of the story was pretty unbearable, though you could argue that it was intentional in the same vein as Cabin in the Woods. The Wendigo stuff however, was appropriately spooky and the dark, snowy environments were also pretty damn great. The ‘twist’ wouldn’t be much of a surprise anymore, but it was pretty easy to tell from the start of the game that there was something else going on in those woods that wasn’t related to a serial killer.I think my biggest concern is that the movie would focus on the slasher misdirect, because… well, that’s cheaper to make.
I think you and Stroopwafel below are right. They could turn this into a movie by limiting the silly, self-aware tropiness and focusing on the wendigo plot. But at that point, is it really an adaptation of the game? Does that capture what made the title fun?It’s a game where the story itself is less relevant than the tone. The appeal isn’t “We’ve come up with a super original monster and story” but rather “Hey! You know all those stereotypical horror characters you love? We’ve made the MOST stereotypical version of them AND you get to be in control of them!”At the end of the day, they’ll probably make a completely adequate horror comedy monster movie. But that’s loses so much of the appeal. If a game is famous for letting you control a generic, hacky horror story, then losing that control just leaves the generic hack stuff.
Why? I loved Until Dawn but the best part is that you’re creating the story.
Cool. I’m not into gaming, but this seems fun.
Gotta have something they can put on Sony Core, I suppose. You can only watch that Gran Turismo movie so many times, after all.I just checked and they don’t even have that Twisted Metal TV show (it’s on Peacock) or the Uncharted movie (Hulu). I wonder if they still have that Powers adaptation that nobody watched.
The fact that it was “twitch-bait” seems to indicate that there’s an audience of folks wanting to watch the story without making their own choices. Japanese visual novels with multiple endings and routes get adapted – players mostly just accept them as a complement to their experience, not a replacement. I’m sure they’ll somehow nod to the various routes or interactivity – maybe they’ll screen multiple endings ala Clue, or one of the characters will get some magic totem that gives them future vision or lets them “replay” sections of the movie.Cynics are probably right and this is just the next Five Nights at Freddy’s, but if all the pieces fall into place this could be a good to decent meta horror/comedy like Cabin in the Woods, where the trope-y plots and villain are a feature, not a bug.