Until Dawn is now playing in theaters, and I had a chance to catch up with some of the film's cast and creators recently at WonderCon, where we talked about adapting the video game and the movie's commitment to practical effects:
Until Dawn is one of my all-time favorite horror games. What was your initial experience with the game, and can you talk about why you were excited about introducing the time loop element into the film's story?
Gary Dauberman: My whole life, I've been a gamer, so I played it when it first came out. I played it with my son, and we played it multiple times. It's so cinematic, and I was thrilled when PlayStation reached out to me. What excited me was: How can we push [the story] further and make it feel good as a movie?
Every night [in the film], it's a different horror movie and different sub-genres [from the game]. That was a clean way to bring that element of the game into it. That decision was made pretty early on in the process and excited us to play with different sub-genres of horror in one movie.
David F. Sandberg: I thought it was so brilliant because the game has the supernatural, psychos, and Wendigos. You can play the game [multiple times] and see different deaths and different outcomes. This was a way to get that replayability, so to speak, in a movie. It's an expansion of the game, but it's in the spirit of the game.
I was thrilled to hear how much the film relied on practical monsters and blood. What was your experience like on set, encountering these monsters face-to-face?
Ella Rubin: It's a very all-encompassing film. It's incredibly physical and emotionally demanding. The experience was grueling and quite intense, but acting in a film where there are practical effects is such a luxury because you're not acting across from a tennis ball. You're truly in front of a monster. When you're running from someone, it's a real monster chasing you. I felt really lucky to be a part of a film like this with such great actors that have become some of my best friends.
Odessa A’Zion: [Practical effects] are always the best. That's ideal. It's very time-consuming and VFX is [probably] cheaper, but these people [who create the effects] are artists, and it's really fun to not have to act with a tennis ball.
Michael Cimino: It was a really fun experience to get to stretch my muscles, and try something that's completely different. I haven't really quite done something like this before to this scope.
David F. Sandberg: It's been my lifelong dream to make a horror movie in this way and have lots of latex, blood, and monsters. The [horror] movies I've done have been supernatural, so I wanted to go mainly practical for this. We tried to do as much practical as possible. That was our whole approach and it was so satisfying. I realize why movies like this aren't made anymore, though, because it's like one shot, right? We actually had to schedule [effects] on the last day because we basically destroyed the set. You can't get it back at that point. It's a lot of monsters and a lot of blood.
[Editor's Note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.]
After spending more than 10 years as a consultant in the tech and entertainment industry, Jonathan James launched Daily Dead in 2010 to share his interest in horror and sci-fi. Since then, it has grown into an online magazine with a staff of writers that provide daily news, reviews, interviews, and special features.
As the Editor-in-Chief of Daily Dead, Jonathan is responsible for bringing the latest horror news to millions of readers from around the world. He is also consulted with as an expert on zombies in entertainment and pop culture, providing analyses of the zombie sub-genre to newspapers, radio stations, and convention attendees.
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