Thank god, the Until Dawn movie has hired Peter Stormare to save it from itself

Peter Stormare has joined the cast of Sony’s Until Dawn film adaptation, THR reports, and thank Christ for that. We’ve been watching David F. Sandberg’s adaptation of the 2015 horror game hit develop with some mild curiosity for the last year and change, for a couple of different reasons. The first is that Sandberg—who directed Lights Out and Annabelle: Creation before getting locked into making two kid-friendly Shazam! movies over the last five years—is a potentially interesting horror director when he feels like it. The more perverse, and, if we’re being honest, compelling reason, though, is that the movie is set to make for a very weird paradox: It’ll be the first film adaptation of a video game we’ve ever seen in which the film cast is significantly less famous than the actors in the original game.

Now, partly, this is just a factor of time; nobody necessarily had Rami Malek pegged as a future Oscar winner when he recorded and filmed the mo-cap for the interactive horror movie back in the early 2010s. (Although Hayden Panettiere was already pretty damn famous.) Maybe, in 10 years, we’ll be talking about the Oscar campaigns of the film’s cast, which include Ella Rubin, Michael Cimino, Ji-young Yoo, Odessa A’zion, and the just-announced Maia Mitchell and Belmont Cameli. But where the game also grabbed a couple of old-school horror ringers—including fright flick polymath Larry Fessenden—to fill out its cast, the movie had made no such moves.

Until now, because if you’ve played Until Dawn, you already know how incredibly important Peter Stormare is to everything the game is trying to do. Whereas the rest of the game plays out in a more cinematic format, Stormare’s character—captured in the game’s extremely good motion capture animation—only shows up in first-person, getting right in your face, taunting you, yelling at you, and cajoling you in interstitial segments throughout the game. You might think you’ve seen Stormare chew scenery in John Wick: Chapter 2 or Armageddon, but the freedom of horror gaming gives the man free license to lose his mind in the best ways. (We’d post his scenes, but they’d likely constitute spoilers for the upcoming film; if you just want to see Pete go off, you could do a lot worse than a quick Google.) Even though Stormare’s segments only barely matter to the game’s plot, Until Dawn wouldn’t function without him, and knowing he’ll be there to yell at viewers in the movie is the first genuinely exciting thing we’ve heard about the film since Sandberg was announced as directing it.