The Until Dawn movie is an adaptation of the 2015 horror game with different characters, a different story, and an entirely different premise. So what’s the point exactly? That’s what fans are wondering and the first teaser trailer doesn’t do much to address that question.
Headed to theaters on April 25, Until Dawn is about a group of young adults who spend a night together trying to survive your standard horror movie slasher antics. While the original PlayStation 4 game focused on B-movie silliness and branching storylines based on player decisions, the movie version will employ an entirely different premise to try to recreate that effect.
Rather than choose who lives or dies in an interactive setting, the Until Dawn movie will see its victims killed again and again in different ways until they can figure out how to survive the entire night together. “The movie has this mechanic where things start over and they get to try again,” director David F. Sandberg says in the new teaser trailer. “Every time they come back to life, it’s like they are in a new horror genre.”
Until Dawn won’t feature any of the original game’s characters, either. Almost all of its high-profile cast, led by Rami Malek and Hayden Panettiere, are absent as well. The only person who has returned, as revealed in the first trailer on Tuesday, is Peter Stormare. But instead of playing the fourth wall-breaking psychiatrist Dr. Hill, it seems like he’ll be taking on a more sinister role to fill the apparent absence of the cannibalistic wendingos that served as the first game’s violent antagonists.
“Hey so, there’s definitely something here,” reads one of the top YouTube comments on the trailer. “However if this wasn’t labeled I would have had no idea that was Until Dawn.” Users on X were less generous. “We’re going to make a film with the same name as a popular videogame but we’re not actually going to base the story on the game in any way, shape or form,” one wrote sarcastically. Another lamented the lack of ham-fisted goofiness that helped define the game.
Until Dawn might still end up being a decent horror movie, and even potentially a worthy adaptation of its video game source material, but little in Sony’s “first look” helps allay concerns that it will break Sony’s recent losing streak at the box office. In the meantime, Until Dawn was recently remastered for PS5. Fans are split on whether it’s worth playing over the original PS4 version, however.
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