A HELL OF A NIGHT. ON LOOP

David F. Sandberg calls survival horror hit Until Dawn a 'love letter' to the genre

- TATAT BUNNAG

In Until Dawn, horror is a ticking clock.

From the minds of director David F. Sandberg (Annabelle: Creation, Lights Out) and writer Gary Dauberman (The Nun, IT), comes a chilling new survival horror film where time isn’t just against you — it's out to kill you. Based on the popular 2015 PlayStation video game but reimagined as a standalone story, Until Dawn plunges a group of friends into a remote valley, where a sinister time loop resets their nightmare with escalating terror every time they die.

“A love letter to horror” Sandberg calls it, and he means it literally. “Every night, the story begins anew, and we enter a new horror film,” he explained. “As lifelong horror fans, working on all these subgenres is a dream come true. Every night, the characters are presented with something that feels like a new chapter in a different story.”

It all starts when Clover Paul (Ella Rubin) receives a disturbing video from her missing sister Melanie (Maia Mitchell), showing an abandoned petrol station in a desolate location. Haunted by the unresolved disappearance, Clover convinces four friends to join her on a trek to the mysterious Glor Valley — her ex-boyfriend Max (Michael Cimino), best friend Nina Riley (Odessa A’zion), Nina's boyfriend Abe (Belmont Cameli), and the emotionally attuned Megan (Ji-young Yoo), Max’s stepsister.

But what begins as a search mission quickly devolves into a deadly supernatural game. A masked killer stalks them, killing each one — only for them to wake up back at the beginning of the same night. The twist? Each loop brings a new threat: a slasher one night, a ghost the next, then a monster from their worst nightmares.

“You never know what's going to happen next in our story because it changes every night,’ said Sandberg. “Before I heard about Until Dawn