DEATH LOOP

UNTIL DAWN FRIGHTENED GAMERS EVERYWHERE IN 2015 NOW, IT'S COMING TO THE BIG SCREEN. SFX MEETS THE TEAM BEHIND THE MOVIE ADAPTATION

- JACK SHEPHERD

UPON ITS RELEASE, Until Dawn was a revelation; a story-centric PlayStation game, featuring voice work by major Hollywood actors Rami Malek and Hayden Panettiere, where every decision you make significantly alters the ending. With almost six hours of cutscenes and a typical playthrough lasting 10 hours, the game is essentially an interactive horror movie about eight twenty-somethings who visit a haunted cabin in the woods. This begs the question: why would anyone bother adapting Until Dawn for the cinema?

“The game is already such a cinematic experience, a direct adaptation would feel as if you're sitting on the couch, watching someone else play,” says writer and producer Gary Dauberman. That didn’t stop Dauberman – best known for scripting Andy Muschietti’s two It adaptations and directing the recent Salem’s Lot - from thinking about different ways to bring Until Dawn to the big screen. “We thought about how we can expand the world and start this into a franchise that’s not just games, but also movies and other media,” he continues. “We wanted to think about it as a universe as opposed to just this one thing.”

Dauberman and co-writer Blair Butler concluded that the best way to move forward was not to retell the original story, but to create something different within the same universe. The result is a movie about a new group of twenty-somethings heading to a cabin in the woods - except this time, they're stuck in a twisted time loop where each cycle brings a new horror.

“Blair brought up [the time loop] early on, which I thought was genius, because it replicates playing a game in a lot of ways; you die and then you start over,” Dauberman says. “What we didn’t want to do was Happy Death Day, or Groundhog Day, or