I didn’t go see Until Dawn on Friday. To be honest, I had every intention to, but one thing led to another, I got caught up with work and life and before you know it, it’s 5am on Saturday morning and I haven’t seen it. 

I’m still planning on it, although if I’m honest I’m not terribly optimistic. Not because the reviews and other viewer’s opinions haven’t been as glowing as other recent horror movies. From the very first trailer, it was clear that Until Dawn was not following the same story, setting, or mechanics of the game. That last one is rather critical to the experience of the player, and since the movie goes with a Groundhog Day-style time-rewind hook, it’s actually, on a surface level, the exact opposite of the message of the game.  In other words, the trailer put a damper on my interest in this film.

Start With The Game

I played Until Dawn on the recommendation of some of guys I was working with when it came out. The experience was way more memorable than the plot of the game itself, although that was fine. It became our own “book club” kind of thing; three or four of us were playing at the same time. Every couple of days, we would compare notes on how far we had gotten in the story. Who was still alive, and which characters we had gotten killed off in horrible and sometimes totally avoidable ways.  We never discussed another game the way we got into Until Dawn.

Death Matters

One of the core mechanics of Until Dawn the game, is that death for the characters is permanent. It’s a narrative-heavy, interactive horror game where the player takes on the role of various characters as they try to survive a night in an abandoned ski lodge. There’s a lot of horror tropes crammed into this game: pranks gone wrong, revenge, cannibal monsters, infested prisons, scary guy with a flamethrower.  The decisions the player makes affect who survives the night, even down to choices made in conversations.  But again, everything is permanent.

The player can only save at the end of the chapter. A lot of hard restarting occurred, particularly with one super-unfair death in the mines. Yep, there are mines too.  But when a character did die, it felt meaningful to the player and to the other characters in the story. When I finished the game, I didn’t get the best ending, and I felt some regret about that. That regret made the experience better.  It’s not a perfect game. The Quarry, also from Supermassive, is probably a better story with better graphics, and a more refined formula.  But I prefer Until Dawn. 

The Problem With Adaptations

Turning this specific game into a movie was already a massive challenge. For starters, the game used recognizable stars for their characters, like Rami Malik and Hayden Panettiere.  The other issue is the trope-heavy plot works well in an 8-hour game, 26 hours for 100% completion; not so much in a 90-minute movie.   

Changes had to be made, and one of the core themes of “death is permanent”, while meaningful to gamers, is assumed to filmgoers.  Until Dawn, the movie, was not made for me, the fan of the game. That’s fine; there are a great many things that I am not the intended audience for. The reality is, for a movie to be profitable, it will need to reach a far wider market than just the fans of a ten-year-old game.  

Right now, I can only judge the movie on the marketing, mostly the trailers. From what I’ve seen, I’m not optimistic. Although the use of Peter Stormaire is always a good sign.  I’ll update this when I actually see the movie.  I hope I’m wrong, and this is another case of bad marketing disguising a hidden gem. It may be different from the game, but that doesn’t mean it’s bad.

Final Thoughts:

More and more, I’m realizing that my time is precious, and while I want to see every horror movie that comes out, that’s just not feasible.  If the marketing departments go out of their way to let me know that a specific film is not for me, why should I bother?