«Keeping people as afraid as possible» — Until Dawn Movie Creators Discuss Their Approach to Adapting the Famous Game

Well, what horror do I want to do? A slasher or supernatural or whatever? And then Gary came along with this idea and I was like, ‘This is perfect because I get to do all of it,’ you know? I thought it was a great idea to do because the game is already a movie. It's the most cinematic game that I've played, the closest thing to a movie. So it felt like doing the exact same thing would be just cutting out eight hours of stuff and condensing it into a movie and removing the interactive stuff, and that wouldn't have been as interesting to me.

What's mentioned in the movie is what's scarier than not knowing what comes the next day? You cannot prepare. Maybe you're dealing with the slasher villain one day, like, ‘Okay, we know how to deal with that,’ but then the next day it's like a supernatural movie, and all those rules you just learned just go out the window. It has to do with keeping people as afraid as possible.

I didn't want it to feel as if you're watching someone else play the game. So if we're not going to do that, we still want to be true to the spirit of the game, and how can we really explore the story further and push it further and expand the mythology, make the game part of a larger narrative?