Until Dawn director David F. Sandberg has revealed what convinced him to take on another IP-based movie, despite swearing off them after the "crazy" backlash to his DC Comics adaptations Shazam! and Shazam! Fury of the Gods.
"What I loved about the script [is] that it wasn't trying to recreate the game," the filmmaker tells GamesRadar+, when we ask whether he felt any pressure giving Supermassive's butterfly effect-based title the Hollywood treatment. "Trying to condense 10 hours into two, or something like that. But it is scary still, even though we're doing a new thing.
"I mean, to be honest, fans can get very, very crazy and very angry with you. You can get, like, death threats and everything so after Shazam 2, I was like, 'I never wanna do another IP-based movie because it's just not worth it,'" Sandberg continues candidly. "But then I was sent this script, and I was like, 'Ah, this would be so much fun to do, to do all these kinds of horrors? I kind of have to do it, and hope that the people see what we're trying to do and like it.' I really thought it was brilliant of the writers to come up with this time loop idea where the night starts over because then you do kind of get that feel of the game, when you're replaying it and making different choices. I think it's very much in the spirit of the game."
Written by Blair Butler and It: Chapter Two's Gary Dauberman, Until Dawn follows Clover (Ella Rubin), as she convinces her pals to take a road trip into the mountains to retrace her missing sister Mel's last-known steps. After a cryptic chat with a gas station employee, they're pointed in the direction of Glore Valley and stumble across an abandoned welcome center. Shortly after they arrive, though, they get brutally murdered by a masked killer.
Only they don't "die", and instead, wake up at the beginning of the same evening – with both the memories and physical scars from what happened before. Soon, Clover and her friends realize they're stuck living the terror over and over again, with new threats to face each time. As the official trailer spells out, "death starts the night over", but how many go-arounds can they take?
"I think we would've gotten a lot of critique if we had tried to [recreate the game], because people would've been like, 'It's not as good. It's not the same actors, because, you know, they're older now,'" says Sandberg. "You wouldn't be able to better the game, so you'd just be in a losing situation."
When the first look was released, fans of the 2015 source material, which featured the likes of Hayden Panettiere and Rami Malek, took to Twitter to share their thoughts on the footage. Despite the film's big changes, many of them seemed most upset that it isn't set in a snowy location like the game...
"It's a funny thing to get hung up on," Sandberg laughs. "Since it is sort of a sequel, I was thinking of movies like Die Hard 3. That doesn't take place in LA or at Christmas, but it's still Die Hard. It's still the second-best Die Hard movie."
So far, it seems as if Until Dawn is going down well, with some critics calling it the "surprise horror film of the year". It releases on April 25.
For more, check out our list of the best horror movies, or our guide to the most exciting upcoming horror movies heading our way.
