Shazam director David F. Sandberg has decided to take some time off from superhero movies in order to film horrible things happening to some people on a mountain. He’s been enlisted to direct an adaptation of Until Dawn, Supermassive’s first cinematic horror choose-your-own adventure that was the precursor to things like The Quarry and The Dark Pictures Anthology.
For now at least, Until Dawn is still trapped on PlayStation, but if you’ve ever played The Quarry you pretty much have the gist of it. The game follows the story of a group of hapless teens stuck on a mountain as a bunch of bloody horror stuff unfolds. In the game, those teens were played by actors like Rami Malek and Hayden Panettiere, and it also featured Peter Stormare as the world’s most upsetting therapist.
There’s no word yet on if any of the game’s stars will make a return for the film, but per The Hollywood Reporter, production company Screen Gems is calling the film “an R-rated love letter to the horror genre, centering on an ensemble cast.” Yup, sure sounds like Until Dawn to me.
The announcement follows a sustained push by Sony to get a bunch of its big games onto the silver screen, a process which gave birth to the (not especially well-loved) Gran Turismo movie and the (better received) Last of Us TV show last year. The world waits, breath bated, for the inevitable explosive appearance of the Knack Cinematic Universe.
I rather liked Until Dawn, but I’m not sure how it’s going to translate the things it does well over to a movie adaptation. Where The Last of Us was a linear tale that probably wasn’t too hard to port over to a TV series, Until Dawn lived and died by the choices you made and the various branching plotlines that were possible as a consequence. Like other Supermassive games, it even had a whole section of its UI dedicated to tracking the decisions you’d made and precisely why they were a really bad idea.
Take that away, and you just have a pretty standard horror movie with a decent twist I won’t spoil here. It seems an odd choice to adapt from everything in the Sony catalogue, even if director Sandberg has a record of making horror films like Lights Out and Annabelle: Creation. Then again, they literally made a Gran Turismo movie, so who even knows what’s going on there?
There’s no word on a release date for the Until Dawn movie, but given that it’s only just been announced, we likely have some years to wait.
