The Until Dawn movie has started filming.
The film’s official Twitter account shared a picture of a clapperboard for the production, with this caption:
“Action. Production on #UntilDawnMovie is now underway.”
The original Until Dawn was a 2014 video game exclusive to the PlayStation 4. Developed by Supermassive Games, it actually bucked the trend for Sony to produce open world action games. Instead, Until Dawn is an interactive drama with a horror theme. You can make choices on where the story goes as your play the game, which will affect how things play out, including which characters survive.
Supermassive also came up with a butterfly effect game design for those interactive choices, so that players would want to go through the game multiple times. The choices you make will have even bigger and more obtuse consequences, compared to most visual novels and interactive games. Some events that would seem to be unrelated to each other, would all come together because of a single choice that you make.
Supermassive talked up their intent to make the story something of a video game slasher, citing inspiration from movies like Poltergeist and Evil Dead II. So it would seem to be a no-brainer to make this into a movie. However, it still took a decade from its original release for Sony to announce the Until Dawn movie.
The film is a co-production of PlayStation Productions and Screen Gems. To be clear, Screen Gems is another label for Sony Pictures specializing in cult genres like horror and action movies. So this is still a 100 % Sony production.
Screen Gems’ releases have included the film franchises for Resident Evil, Underworld, Insidious, Hostel, etc. So they are a fitting producer, and one that would not shirk away from making it the R-rated production that it deserves to be.
An interesting detail is that Sony managed to get Peter Stormare to reprise his role as Dr. Hill from the interactive screen to the big screen. However, everyone else was entirely recast, a possibly unavoidable development since Sony pushed through with this production years late, and with no involvement from Supermassive Games.
But then, real cult horror films Humanoids of the Deep have been made under worse conditions. There is no respecting the original creator’s wishes requirement that is necessary here. A cult film based on a cult video game, inspired by a cult film, is an invitation to just go wild. We can just hope this production knows how to get this one right.
