Until Dawn’s best sequence pays homage to one of the game’s standout mechanics

The horror movie Until Dawn doesn’t exactly follow the video game it’s based on. In fact, it has an entirely new cast of characters and a totally different story. But that doesn’t mean the filmmakers abandoned their source material entirely. In fact, the movie’s scariest scene feels like it was pulled directly out of the game. Polygon sat down with director David F. Sandberg and co-writer Gary Dauberman to talk about how they pulled it off. 

[Ed. note: This story contains spoilers for the Until Dawn movie.] 

Until Dawn’s best scene comes late in the film, once the band of teenagers trapped in a repeating-day scenario in the strange mansion at the center of Glore Valley have reached their final day: They’ve each died and then restarted the day 12 times already, but on the 13th iteration, they’ve figured out, their deaths will be permanent.  As most of the teens just try to survive, Clover (Ella Rubin) sets off to get to the bottom of Glore Valley’s mystery. In the process, she winds up in a terrifying underground cavern, with a bright, blinking red light as the only illumination guiding her through the darkness. 

But she isn’t entirely alone down there. There’s also a wendigo hot on her heels. Knowing she can’t outrun the bizarre creature, she freezes behind some rubble, trying to hold perfectly still as the wendigo crawls over her hiding place and peers around, just above her head. Fans of the game will recognize this moment as instantly evocative of the many scenes in the game where the player has to hold their controller completely still, or get one of their characters caught by the monsters and possibly even killed, altering the story permanently. And it’s no coincidence that the scene feels so familiar. 

“That was very intentional,” Sandberg told Polygon. “Because that’s such a great moment in the game, where you can’t move the controller, you have to remain still. So you’ve gotta have a moment like that in the film as well.”

That moment of motionlessness is only half of the equation, however: For the scene to work, the wendigo has to be really damn creepy. Just like in the video game, the wendigo are notably absent from Until Dawn’s first half. But they were always part of the plan for the film. 

“I like the idea of fear transforming people physically, [which] starts to change them into the monsters themselves,” Dauberman told Polygon. “So I really like that aspect of [the wendigo]. I feel like that can be a hallmark of the franchise, and not necessarily just the first game. So that was an idea I really liked carrying over.”

Perhaps the most effective, frightening aspect of the game’s wendigo is how strangely they move, and Sandberg had to get creative with recreating that on film. 

“I really wanted to do practical effects as much as possible in this movie,” Sandberg explained. “And that meant changing the wendigo a little bit, because in the game, they have these extremely long limbs that no human can ever have. So we tried to find these really skinny, tall people to play our wendigo, because I wanted them to be physical. And we hired dancers to play them, because we wanted people who knew how to move their bodies in interesting ways.”

The effect is undeniable. As soon as the wendigo appear on screen, they separate themselves from the movie’s other horrific hosts. Each creature looks incredible, with bizarre, unnatural movements as they slink through hallways, shift with inhuman speed from shadow to shadow, and hang from ceilings in a way that feels thoroughly supernatural. 

While the rest of the movie isn’t exactly teeming with ideas taken from the original game, it’s appropriate that the Until Dawn movie’s biggest standout moments and scares feel lifted straight from it. Fans of the game will appreciate that the movie at least accurately captures the terror of the wendigo.

Until Dawn is in theaters now.