It began as an excellent interactive horror movie for PlayStation in 2015, then made it to PC as a so-so remake last year, and now its evolution (or perhaps devolution) is nearly complete. Supermassive's chilling horror adventure Until Dawn is getting the movie treatment in 2025, and the first trailer has arrived.
Does it look as good as the original game, or at least better than the semi-wobbly PC remake? You be the judge:
Though it looks like it diverges pretty far from the source material, the movie does at least have some recognizable elements. A group of young adults? Check. A spooky environment? Check. A lotta nasty ways to die? Double-check.
As a way of introducing a game-like system to the movie as a nod to its roots (or maybe just so the filmmakers can brutally kill its characters more than once), Until Dawn is a time-loop film, like Groundhog Day but with jumpscares. While searching for her missing sister, Clover (played by Ella Rubin) and her friends wind up in a mysterious cabin where they're hunted by horrors. Death provides no escape because once they're dead, the clock resets and they get murder-killed again, but in different ways. Their only hope is to survive through the entire night—until dawn—before 13 nights have elapsed.
The trailer looks like a pretty generic slasher. If I didn't know it was based on a game, a movie trailer where a bunch of twenty-somethings get horribly murdered by a dude in a clown mask in a B&B wouldn't put it on my Must Watch list (though Peter Stormare as a shifty shopkeeper is an automatic win). Is the reveal each night of some new monster going to be scary after the first couple nights? I sorta doubt it. My main hope is that it's not just gory but funny, too: I honestly laughed at the response to "Is it gone?" at the end of the trailer. "Yeah, it's gone." I mean, what the hell else are you gonna say?
Until Dawn will show "exclusively in movie theaters," though Sony Pictures hasn't put a date on it yet.
