Until Dawn, the 2025 film remake of the 2015 video game, solves one of the big problems of horror movies. Creating likeable characters and then killing them off. The set-up of Until Dawn is that the characters have to survive until dawn in order to escape a time loop where they keep dying over and over and over again until they either do so or transform into the same monsters that are hunting them. All that creates a scenario where the characters can be brutally killed over and over and over again and they all get to survive at the end.
That is the end of what is good about the film. The set-up to the video game was a group of friends taking a trip to one of the group’s family ski lodge which happened to be the same place where the sister of one of the friends had disappeared. The set-up for the film version is a group of friends is helping this one friend look for her sister and they stumble upon a haunted visitors center.
That isn’t even the worst part of it. I am not sure who made this film, but they aren’t from a part of the country that has rain. After the cliched stop at the gas station store with the creepy bearded guy warning the kids to go no further they drive into a small thunderstorm. Half the characters are screaming that they need to stop or turn around because the rain is too scary. This isn’t a windy thunderstorm. It is just rain and the lightning is far off. It can be defeated by looking at the white line on the side of the road. There is no reason to pull over or turn around for just a bit of rain. I also don’t know what turning around would do. It would still be raining.
Eventually the characters drive through the storm wall and then have a ten minute debate about what a storm wall is. I get that the film maker is doing this to show the tension in this group of friends, but it just makes them look dumb, but not as dumb as they look soon after.
At night the horror begins. As creatures hunt them and kill them night after night after night the characters discover a new response beyond fight or flight, stare like a dumbass at the thing about to kill you. What made the movie Scream great was it was a horror movie filled with characters that had seen horror movies before. If a dude with a pickax in a weird mask is walking towards you in a haunted visitors center either run or fight. Don’t stand there wondering what the blood is doing dripping off the pickax. Horror movie characters aren’t meant to be the brightest, but this group takes it to a new level.
A lot of horror movies achieve the status of so bad they’re good, but not Until Dawn. Part of that is it is coming from a video game that both had a better cast, Hayden Panettiere and Rami Malek, and a better story. Skip the movie, play the video game.
David Huzzard Writes 