First Look at Until Dawn Adaptation Hints at Meta Horror Elements

When you’re making a film adaptation of a popular videogame that was influential primarily for the fact that it was based largely around the consequences of player choice, there’s an obvious question to be answered: How exactly do you transplant that kind of gimmick, or at least the spirit of it, to the screen? In an at-home, streaming setting, one option would be to go the route of something like Black Mirror: Bandersnatch, which literally put choice into viewers’ hands, but this obviously isn’t so workable in a theater, with a potential audience of hundreds. So in the case of something like the quickly approaching adaptation of Until Dawn, one of our most anticipated horror movies of 2025, just how do you make it work? The first look footage shared today (you can watch it below) gives some hints at the meta structure that the filmmakers are employing.
Here’s how director David F. Sandberg puts it: “One of the creative things the game did, is that people make different choices and die in different ways. The movie has this mechanic where things start over, and they get to try again. Every time they come back to life, it’s like they’re in a new horror genre. To survive, they have to make it to dawn.”
This is all to say, this Until Dawn movie looks to be avoiding a straight adaptation of the game’s plot, which is set on an isolated mountain where the players are attempting to survive until dawn. The game features many branching pathways that are the result of player choices both small and large; an illustration of butterfly effect-type principles of fate and causation. This presumably would not have been possible to evoke on screen, and the filmmakers wanted a version of Until Dawn that would preserve the various characters being able to die in significantly different ways. The result is a story that is now a meta, time-looping premise, somewhere in the same wheelhouse as say, Happy Death Day, presumably with less comedy. The new official synopsis makes this more clear:
One year after her sister Melanie mysteriously disappeared, Clover and her friends head into the remote valley where she vanished in search of answers. Exploring an abandoned visitor center, they find themselves stalked by a masked killer and horrifically murdered one by one … only to wake up and find themselves back at the beginning of the same evening. Trapped in the valley, they’re forced to relive the nightmare again and again – only each time the killer threat is different, each more terrifying than the last. Hope dwindling, the group soon realizes they have a limited number of deaths left, and the only way to escape is to survive until dawn.
If you ask us, this feels like a fine horror premise, albeit one in a subgenre (time loop movies) that has become a little rote in recent years. More than anything, it risks alienating those potential audience members who are big fans of the original game if they perceive this just isn’t “Until Dawn enough,” but that was always going to be one of the pitfalls in attempting to adapt a narrative framed by its unconventional storytelling style. A straight adaptation of a single playthrough of Until Dawn probably would have drawn similar criticism as well–it feels like the filmmakers were in a bit of a “damned-if-you-do,” etc. situation here. Regardless, we hope the final product will be serviceable horror fare regardless of whether it ultimately pleases the franchise superfans. You can check out the first Until Dawn footage below–the film hits theaters in the U.S. on April 25, 2025.