As has been well established at this point, video game movies are having a bit of a moment right now. The likes of The Super Mario Bros. Movie and S
As has been well established at this point, video game movies are having a bit of a moment right now. The likes of The Super Mario Bros. Movie and Sonic The Hedgehog have smashed it at the box office in recent times, while the imminent release of A Minecraft Movie and announcements of Horizon: Zero Dawn and Helldivers II adaptations shows there’s no sign of the trend slowing any time soon. The prospect of a movie based on Sony’s Until Dawn however, a choose-your-own-adventure style interactive survival horror set amid a supernaturally spooked ski chalet, did we’ll admit have us scratching our heads a little. How would director David F. Sandberg take such a uniquely gamey experience and make a movie of it? The answer, as we now know, is you keep the title, keep Peter Stormare, and retool the whole thing as a time loop slasher movie — obviously. Just check out the first look trailer below:
Bye-bye frostbite. Bye-bye Wendigo. Bye-bye, well, just about every vestige of Until Dawn as you’ve known it up until this point, save for the aforementioned Stormare’s inscrutable Dr. Hill. Rather than totems and haunted ski cabins and creepy Rami Malek, as we learn from this fresh teaser, Sandberg’s Until Dawn is latching on to the cycle of life, death, and respawning intrinsic to gaming and using that as the animus for a slasher flick in which a band of friends are marauded by a masked killer, dying over and over as they attempt to survive — you guessed it! — until dawn. If the initial dislocation of the movie from its game roots, both geographically and tonally, is jarring to say the least, then Sandberg and writer Gary Dauberman do at least sell the fresh concept pretty well here. Glimpses of the adolescent ensemble — Ella Rubin, Odessa A’zion, Michael Cimino (not that one), and more — gadding about a suburban guest house and getting picked off one by one hold popcorn horror promise, while Stormare’s presence lends some gravitas and the hourglass that’s so emblematic of Until Dawn itself makes a fun, gimmicky appearance too.
Here’s the movie’s fresh synopsis: “One year after her sister Melanie mysteriously disappeared, Clover and her friends head into the remote valley where she vanished in search of answers. Exploring an abandoned visitor center, they find themselves stalked by a masked killer and horrifically murdered one by one…only to wake up and find themselves back at the beginning of the same evening. Trapped in the valley, they’re forced to relive the nightmare again and again – only each time the killer threat is different, each more terrifying than the last. Hope dwindling, the group soon realizes they have a limited number of deaths left, and the only way to escape is to survive until dawn.”
A full trailer for Until Dawn is expected to drop soon ahead of the movie’s planned 25 April release. We guess we’ll just have to really get into the time loop spirit and play this minute-long teaser again, and again, and again, and again until we get more word on what could wind up being one of the surprise hits of 2025.
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