The Until Dawn movie has been confusing fans since it was announced. I wrote months ago that the film clearly wasn’t catering to the people who played it and was instead searching for a new audience, and then wrote about it again last week speculating on what the movie could be about if it wasn’t actually a straight adaptation of the game itself.
It turned out that I didn’t have to wait long at all to find out – we’ve just seen a first look at the movie. What director David F. Sandberg thought the “essence of what makes the game great” was, apparently, a time loop mechanic. Every time a character dies, the scenario resets, and each reset puts the cast in a different horror subgenre.
But There’s No Time Loop In Until Dawn
This is, to be sure, a strange choice, considering that nowhere in Until Dawn is there a time loop, unless you consider starting a new game to be a time loop. There is also no jumping between subgenres to be found in the game.
In fact, I’d say that the game directly defies the idea of a time loop – it famously forces you to use an autosave system that prevents you from reloading old saves. You can’t just change a decision you’re unhappy with. You have to live with your choices, even if you just watched your favourite character die a grisly death.
As Editor-in-Chief Stacey Henley correctly points out in her dissection of this mechanic, none of what we know about the movie correlates to what the game is about – Until Dawn’s take on the adaptation is more trying to create the vibe of playing a video game, which shouldn’t really be the goal. It’s like they slapped the Until Dawn name onto a random horror film.
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Until Dawn’s movie has no connection to the game beyond the name.
Until Dawn Is About Supermassive’s Shtick, Not A Specific Game
What struck me about this premise wasn’t the time loop, though. It was the switching between horror subgenres, and the way the director emphasises that he’s trying to “expand upon the universe”. Supermassive built on Until Dawn to create a whole bunch of horror games, some anthological and some standalone, spanning a breadth of different subgenres.
It feels less like Until Dawn is about Until Dawn, and more like it’s about Supermassive’s games as a whole – how each of the studio’s games gives you a different group of characters, a different scenario, and allows you to decide their fates. Transplanting this group of new characters into different situations is very much in the spirit of the games, if you look at its oeuvre from a macro level. I see it more as a metaphor for Supermassive’s experimentation as a studio.
It might have been more honest to market the game as being inspired by Supermassive’s games than as an adaptation of the game itself, but that wouldn’t have gotten as much interest, just from a name-brand standpoint. Whatever the movie is, it certainly isn’t Until Dawn, but I’ll go on record as saying that the central mechanic isn’t as out of left field as we might all have assumed.
Until Dawn was launched in 2015 for the PlayStation 4, and was developed by Supermassive Games. An interactive horror, you must help eight people survive a night on Blackwood Mountain.