"Interactive horror movie" Until Dawn to become un-interactive horror movie for some damn reason

Ohhhh, this one is going to give us a headache. See, THR is reporting this week that Sony has just moved forward with plans to plug 2015 horror game sensation Until Dawn into its freshly minted video game adaptation machine, hiring Shazam! franchise director David F. Sandberg to helm a movie version of the bestselling title. But fans of gaming will know that Until Dawn’s whole reason for existing, in the firs tplace, was to be the culmination of years of efforts to create a playable horror movie, one that recreated all those fun, bloody, trope-y moments in a way that let players actually hop in and control the outcome of the scenes. So, turning it back into a non-interactive film…

Yeah, there’s the headache.

Anyway: The film is being produced through Screen Gems and PlayStation Productions, all part of the Sony hivemind, with regular horror script writer Gary Dauberman—who previously worked with Sandberg on 2017's Annabelle: Creation—handling the writing. Sandberg, meanwhile, has a long history with horror: Before he got into the kid-friendly superhero game, he broke into the industry with Lights Out, an adaptation of his own horror short, following it up with the Annabelle prequel the next year.

Developed by Supermassive Games, Until Dawn was a huge hit for Sony, creating, for maybe the first time, a game that really captured the “Don’t go in there!” fun of watching a horror movie with friends—except with you, the player, deciding whether or not they did, in fact, go in there. (It doesn’t hurt that the game came along just as video game streaming was really getting going; the game, with its jump scares and spectator-friendly nature, was instant and irresistible Twitch-bait for online audiences.) The game centers on a group of friends who take a trip to the mountains, and end up running through several consecutive horror movies’ worth of awful events before the night is out.

We’ll be especially curious to see how casting for this thing goes: Given that the original game featured high-profile performances from Hayden Panettiere and a pre-Oscar-win Rami Malek (to say nothing of a beautifully deranged performance from the always great Peter Stormare) this might be the rare gaming adaptation to have a less recognizable cast than the game it’s lifting from.