David Sandberg has had a strong presence on the internet for as long as I can remember, making how-to videos about his process of making short horror films and how he’s applied that mentality to big-budget studio movies like Shazam. It’s clear that he just loves the craft of filmmaking and sharing that with other aspiring filmmakers.
As part of the promotion for his new movie Until Dawn, he’s made a great video about his desire to do as much of the horror movie gags in camera as practical effects, using CGI sparingly and only when necessary. He shows how he made quick tests with his wife, co-producer, and frequent collaborator Lotta Losten, to prove out how scenes like smashing someone’s face against the floor, or stabbing them through the chest with a pickaxe, could actually work.
If it’s not clear, I highly recommend watching that video before you see Until Dawn, for a few reasons: first, it’s just interesting to have the process in mind as you’re watching it play out. Second, it’s fun to see the actors having fun with the process of making a horror movie, since the final product always just shows them being miserable. But most importantly: it was a perfect bait-and-switch to set me up for my two favorite scenes in the movie.
I can’t say what those are without spoiling them, but I can say that the movie was kind of rough going until it hit my favorite scene. It has to set up its premise, of a young woman with a group of her friends traveling to the last known locations of her sister, who went missing a year ago. I guess that all of the exposition is effective for setting up everything it has to: those details, plus the relationships between all of the characters, along with the fact that one of them is at least a little bit psychic. But it sure is clunky.
Even after the movie gets to the good stuff, and sets up the part of the premise that is revealed in the trailer — all of the characters are killed, after which time resets and they have to go through it all over again — it doesn’t seem to do a lot to make itself stand out as more than a b-grade millennial horror movie. That’s until the third night of the cycle, which is when the movie completely won me over.
Until Dawn is only loosely inspired by the video game, more borrowing images and ideas than a concrete plot line. That’s not a problem for me, since I only ever got about halfway through the game before I lost interest. For people like me who are v e r y s l o w at getting through games, the time investment wasn’t worth the payoffs. But it borrows the best elements: the story of a mine cave-in, a mention of Rami Malek’s character from the game, the game’s monsters, and best of all, Peter Stormare coming back to play his creepy psychiatrist with a copious amount of beard dye.
As the filmmakers themselves have said in interviews, making a live-action adaptation of the game would be a pointless retread, since the game was already cinematic and heavily relied on motion capture performances from recognizable actors. So I think taking it in a different (and in my opinion, much more interesting and fun) direction was exactly the right choice.
Because more than anything else, it’s based on the idea of video games, and the way that having multiple lives changes how you think about stories. And it’s based around delivering the most memorable moments from exploitative horror and slasher movies: the kills that make you cringe, or laugh, or ideally both. There’s just enough story and character development to tie everything together, and I don’t think it’s at all dismissive to say that. Instead, it’s a sign that the filmmakers knew exactly the strengths of this format and what they wanted to emphasize, with as little as possible getting in the way.
Now more about my two favorite scenes, and why I liked them so much, after a spoiler break.
On my way to see Until Dawn, I joked that I was watching it as part of my ongoing plan to desensitize myself to horror movies. And the movie does pretty much exactly that; by the end, you’ve seen these characters be brutally murdered in so many different ways, that it mostly stops being unsettling. I was especially appreciative that it got my worst phobia out of the way quickly, by having a horrible spike-through-the-eye kill in the first night.
But I was still anticipating the other gross-out that was still to come, shown both in the trailer and in Sandberg’s how-to video above: one of the characters has a worm that’s burrowed into her cheek and is just seen poking out and wriggling. I was dreading an entire scene devoted entirely to that kind of body horror.
And for a while, it seemed as if it would just keep on iterating on having the characters be tortured to death in various ways, until it was drained of any capacity to be interesting. But on night three, I felt like the movie and I were finally in sync.
After a brief establishing shot of a water tower that hadn’t been there before (and which I had no idea was foreshadowing until after the fact, of course), we see that the characters are finally learning. They’ve barricaded all the possible entrances for murderers, and they’re all assembled in the bathroom, waiting out the night. One of the guys gets a drink of water from a tap that hadn’t been working before. And then he passes it to each other character, who all take a long drink, agonizingly slowly, while everyone in the audience knows that that’s a terrible idea.
This is going to be the worms! It’s going to be awful! It’s going to happen to all of them, and the movie is going to force us to see each one play out!
But then, after coughing up some blood and surreptitiously wiping it on a shower curtain, and then some unsettling sounds of his stomach gurgling, he just straight-up explodes in what I think is the movie’s best, most surprising moment. Sure, I’d already seen similar in two recent Radio Silence movies, but I had absolutely no idea it was coming.
Then they manage to follow it up multiple times, in ways that feel clever instead of repetitive. One character’s agonizing death felt more fun than ghoulish to watch, since I’d seen the practical effects devoted to making it work. And then best of all, after the movie’s planted the image in our minds but hasn’t overstayed its welcome or been dulled by too much over-use, we see it make a come-back at the end, when our protagonist actually gets the chance to be kind of clever. (No matter how implausible the scenario is. We’ve already seen that this simply isn’t a movie about plausibility, so just go with it).
But what about that worm scene? That’s saved for my other favorite part of the movie: when we’ve fast-forwarded through several nights, the characters are all exhausted and bearing the side effects of all their previous deaths, and they can’t even remember what’s happened to them. They discover a phone filled with video clips from the previous nights, each one a horror movie gag executed without all the extraneous stuff like “plot” dragging it down.
I really think it’s an ingenious way to knock off a bunch of elaborate kills that the filmmakers wanted to include in the movie, but including them in full would’ve killed the pacing. It would’ve felt not just tedious, but like ghoulish torture porn; there’s a reason that stories about time loops always have a montage section. It’s not played for laughs like in Happy Death Day 2U, but it does stay comfortably in the realm of “fun horror movie” instead of “being entertained by watching torture being heaped onto a bunch of hapless young people.”
The script acknowledges that this isn’t an unprecedented premise for a movie, or even for a horror movie. And even its “message,” about life having more meaning when you know you’ve only got one, is something we’ve seen before. This isn’t a movie for groundbreaking ideas, or for Cabin In the Woods-style meta-commentary on horror as a genre.
But it also has no desire to be. It doesn’t want to talk about horror movies, it just wants to be one. And I think it does a pretty good job of it, being violent and gory but also clever and occasionally darkly funny. Not to mention a couple of inspired moments of filmmaking, like an extended shot with a single flashing red light in pitch blackness, showing a wendigo getting closer and closer to our hiding protagonist with each reveal. Not only did Until Dawn manage to win me over, but it has so many clever riffs on its premise, and it does so much more interesting stuff with the source material, that I think it obviates the video game.