In 1943, Universal Pictures had the inspired idea to throw two of their monster characters into the same film, “Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man,” thus making it appear twice as alluring and scary as their prior entries. In the 1950s and ’60s, a steady wave of repertory showings of the Universal Monster movies and other horror films were advertised with lurid names like “Horror Show,” and were typically shown on double, triple, or marathon billings. In 1962, Bobby “Boris” Pickett released the song “Monster Mash,” a novelty pop rock record whose lyrics told the story of a party attended by every famous movie monster to date, and the song became so popular that it’s still a kitschy Halloween staple to this day.
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As all of this proves, there is a long tradition of quantity-as-quality in horror cinema, a trope which leans into the more experiential and carnival aspects of the genre. Essentially, it’s a capitalization on the notion that more is more when it comes to fear, and that a group of unsuspecting characters facing numerous threats is more exciting than one. While this is hardly an unequivocal rule, there’s no denying that variety can be a welcome factor in horror movies, and if handled well, the exponential threat factor it brings can genuinely heighten the suspense rather than flatten it.
This month’s “Until Dawn” is a rather nifty example of this principle. It’s a film that features a rotating roster of beasties, along with the premise that the poor young people trapped alongside them are also stuck in a loop of death and resurrection unless they can survive, well, until dawn. This latter idea stems from the fact that the film is an adaptation of the 2015 video game of the same name, and rather than bringing over that game’s plot wholesale, director David F. Sandberg and writers Gary Dauberman and Blair Butler have chosen to bring over a typical video game mechanic, where the characters can die and then live to try again multiple times. In doing so, the filmmakers have made a movie which, while not being particularly deep, manages to be fresh, engaging, creepy and fun. For a mainstream horror flick adapted from a game, that’s a feat in and of itself, but what gives “Until Dawn” extra heft is its meta, existentialist twist on the monster mash, making the film not the best, but the most horror movie of the year.
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Live, die, repeat…until dawn
In order to get to the time loop monster mash as quickly as possible, “Until Dawn” keeps its set-up quick and tidy. In the tradition of many a horror film (including Drew Goddard’s similarly meta yet much more thoughtful “Cabin in the Woods”), the movie sees a cadre of vaguely college-age folks on a road trip to a remote and secluded valley. Instead of heading there merely to have a rowdy party, the group are attending in support of their friend Clover (Ella Rubin), as she searches for her sister Melanie (Maia Mitchell), who disappeared in the area a year prior. After an encounter with a mysterious and eerie gas station owner named Hill (played by Peter Stormare, who fans of the game will recognize), the five friends venture deeper into the valley, discovering a violent thunderstorm that mysteriously ends right at the edge of a clearing which contains a dilapidated “welcome center” house for a lost mining town.
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Upon some of the group entering the house and signing the guestbook, the friends find themselves attacked first by a masked psycho with an axe. Once all of them succumb to his blade, they discover they’ve been resurrected and transported to earlier in the night, only the psycho is now joined by a witch looking to possess and kill them. Soon enough, it dawns on the group that they’ve become the latest victims of some supernatural trial that’s cursed this land, some endurance test wherein they have 13 attempts to survive through the night. Yet not only does each attempt introduce a new threat to come after them, it also brings them closer to a fate worse than death.
As one can see, “Until Dawn” is playing in a similar sandbox as prior time-loop movies like “Groundhog Day,” “Edge of Tomorrow,” and especially “Happy Death Day,” the latter being a similarly high-concept take on classic horror structure and tropes. Both “Edge of Tomorrow” and “Happy Death Day” are cited as cleverly bringing video game strategy to cinema, giving its protagonists the power to try and close their loops by learning patterns and playing a perfect game. Despite being a video game adaptation, “Until Dawn” smartly revises this concept, putting its protagonists in a nightmarish loop where there are no patterns to learn, where each repetition introduces a heretofore unseen threat, and where each resurrection causes the groups’ memories to become murkier. It’s a clever, unsettling thing to take what initially seems like a helpful device and make it yet another obstacle for these poor kids to try and survive through.
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The experiential joys of Until Dawn means sacrificing depth
Of course, so many wild ideas and expositional moments stuffed into a 103-minute movie means that something had to fall by the wayside, and in the case of “Until Dawn,” that thing is the characters. Don’t get me wrong, the ensemble of actors do some good work here; Rubin imbues her Final Girl with the right amounts of strength and vulnerability, Belmont Cameli makes a great comedy relief heel, and Ji-young Yoo infuses her moments of peril with disturbing reality. This isn’t a movie where you’re likely to get confused as to who’s who, as each character conforms to a unique enough type to set themselves apart. Yet you might forget their names (even as they’re constantly screaming them at each other), and you certainly will struggle to know much about them. Dauberman and Butler give a few of the group members a semblance of a character arc, but everyone involved seems to realize that the film’s real bread and butter isn’t character development.
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This is part of the trade-off with the high-wire meta plot act that the movie is pulling off. After all, if these characters were more grounded, they’d probably either lose their minds or constantly babble when trying to rationalize all that’s happening to them. The film can’t afford to waste time on such stuff, so if these people aren’t screaming, then they’re explaining what’s happening next, and so on. This aspect might make some folks check out of the film, and nothing much is done to salvage it. Yet if you meet the movie on its own terms — and especially if you’re used to the myriad horror films in which the characters are paper-thin — you’ll likely be dazzled by everything else occurring, and find enough empathy to at least put yourself in these victims’ shoes for an hour and a half.
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Sandberg puts his showmanship to great use with the film’s creatures and effects
The most winning aspect of “Until Dawn” is that it’s so clearly primarily concerned with being an experiential good time, essentially choosing to be a haunted house in movie form (something Sam Raimi once dubbed a “spook-a-blast”). That’s why Sandberg is the perfect man to make the material sing; since his debut with “Lights Out,” he’s proven himself the type of genre filmmaker who’s in love with the craft of it all, the sort of person who goes the extra mile to make sure an effect works the best that it can, or that a bit of timing is perfect. Dauberman is also this type of old-school schlocketeer, someone who is keen to embrace the kitsch of horror without saying it has to be meaningless fun. There’s just enough weight in “Until Dawn” to keep it engaging without making the proceedings leaden with elevated explorations of trauma and the like, and that’s impressive considering how trauma is actually a major plot point.
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Sandberg, Dauberman, and their fellow cast and crew clearly wish to do nothing more than put on a good horror show, and the creatures, effects, and gags they’ve come up with do exactly that. There’s one particular moment in the film which is grotesquely audacious, a gag that beats Radio Silence and “Ready Or Not” at their own bloody game. Even if the movie leans on the gag subsequently one too many times, it’s still potent enough to help bring a bit of the old ballyhoo spirit back to horror. Heck, even last year’s indie experiment “In a Violent Nature” became a talking point more for its signature kill scene than its deconstruction of slasher tropes. In horror, showmanship will get you pretty far, and “Until Dawn” has the chutzpah and panache to stand out in an already busy year for the genre.
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Although the film is deliberately not a repetition of the video game’s plot, it absolutely adapts the game’s implicit concept of asking the player whether they could actually survive a horror movie or not. “Until Dawn” the movie subtextually asks those questions of its viewers throughout, and with so many various beasties to encounter, the answers will vary for each person alone, never mind for multiple people. The movie’s variety is the peanut butter to that idea’s chocolate, never allowing the film to feel stuck in one mode even as it establishes its own structure. To borrow a phrase from Bobby, “Until Dawn” really does feel like the platonic ideal of a graveyard smash.
/Film Rating: 8 out of 10
“Until Dawn” opens in theaters on April 25, 2025.
