The Until Dawn trailer brings the Wild And Gory Horror video game to the big screen

For those of you old enough to remember the 1990s, this decade saw the rise of what was called “interactive cinema” in PC gaming. It was a concept that had been brewing since at least the days of producer William Castle and Mr. Sardonicus, if not earlier, but when Hollywood tried and failed to bring such an idea to theaters (see: the 1995 Mr. Payback experiment), the gaming industry has made much more progress in combining the rich storytelling and emotional experience of cinema with the personalization and immediacy of video games. However, the format was inelegant; even seminal games like Phantasmagoria and Wing Commander III: Heart of the Tiger featured cutscenes with professional actors between non-cinematic gameplay moments. In other words, the best “interactive movie” games were still just movies.

For my money, it wasn’t until 2015 when Supermassive Games’ “Until Dawn” was released (and I am not alone in this sentiment). The horror game, with a script written by indie horror veterans Larry Fessenden and Graham Resnick, follows a group of young people who decide to throw a party in a snowy cabin on the anniversary of their friends’ untimely deaths, leading to classic slasher shenanigans and, ultimately, the supernatural turn The game became a bestseller, won many awards and even received a remake that was released last October. Now the circle between the game and the movie closes even further, as the first trailer for the motion picture “Until Dawn” has just been released. However, it doesn’t look like a copy of a video game; the film is set in the same universe as the game, but appears to contain an original standalone narrative. If the filmmakers really do what they set out to do, can Until Dawn do for the movie/video game crossover what the game did for the interactive movie and fulfill the promise of a shared universe between the mediums?

Like Fessenden and Resnick in the video game, the movie Until Dawn. there are some horror vets behind it: screenwriter Gary Doberman (best known for writing much of the Conjuring universe) and director David F. Sandberg, who returns to the genre after playing in the DCEU with his Shazam duology. Just as the game featured some well-known actors who had already established themselves in genre projects (like Hayden Panettiere, Brett Dalton and Rami Malek), this film included young up-and-coming actors like Ella Rubin (“Anora”), Michael Cimino (Annabelle Comes Home) and Odessa Azion (Hell Raised, 2022). All of this, plus the fact that the film carries the torch of a video game while trying to pay homage to the horror genre in its entirety, makes it feel like Until Dawn could become a franchise that rivals “Scream” is in genre status.

It remains to be seen what exactly the “Until Dawn” franchise looks like. This trailer gives us some clues, but many questions remain, chief among them being what happens to Peter Stormar, who is a completely different character than the one he portrayed in the game, Dr. Alan J. Hill? Given that the story of the Until Dawn game includes characters who are twins, could Stormare be playing Hill’s relative? Is there a new supernatural twist? Will Until Dawn become a horror anthology that tries to incorporate different elements and subgenres into each new installment? Or, like Scream , will it remain a slasher-meets-creature-feature focus? One thing’s for sure: Until Dawn won’t have an interactive component, at least other than the usual yelling and wailing at the screen. Go ahead and tell the characters not to go downstairs – you never know, one day they might hear you.

Until Dawn opens on April 25, 2025.