Until Dawn is officially out in theaters and whether you’ve played the PlayStation game or not, you may be wondering how the movie and the video game connect. Until Dawn is a PlayStation horror game that came out in 2015 and has had long legs. It was a defining title for the PS4 generation and has even been remade for PS5 and PC. The game helped put developer Supermassive Games on the map and cultivated a genre of choose your own adventure-style horror games with an emphasis of using Hollywood actors and being as cinematic as possible. It was a massive hit and it seems like an Until Dawn sequel may now be in the works, based on a new ending in the remake.
Spoilers for Until Dawn follow below.
However, in the meantime, fans will have to use the new Until Dawn movie as a bit of an appetizer. It’s not a retelling of the game, in fact it’s a brand new story that seems to take place in the game’s universe. A group of young 20-somethings arrive at a creepy house in the middle of nowhere and get stuck in a time loop. Every time they die, they restart the night and experience new untold horrors such as monsters, killers, witches, and more. To break the cycle, they have to survive until dawn. So, really nothing like the game at all outside of a group of young adults being terrorized by monsters and killers in a remote location. However, it does connect back to the Until Dawn video game in a huge way.
The Until Dawn Movie Is Apparently a Prequel to the Video Game
The one big piece of connective tissue between the Until Dawn video game and movie is Peter Stormare’s character, Dr. Alan J. Hill. In the game, Dr. Hill is sort of this ambiguous guide through the story, warning you about how your decisions can impact the story, but he is also a psychiatrist for Josh (Rami Malek).
However, you eventually learn that Josh hallucinates Dr. Hill. Stormare’s role in the Until Dawn movie raises questions if he is just a hallucination for Josh or something more supernatural, as the character is essentially using the film’s cast as an experiment. He is testing all of these horrors in the film on trauma victims to see what kind of response it creates in people and seems to believe that enough stress and trauma can lead to people turning into a wendigo, the monsters from the video game.
At the end of the Until Dawn movie, Dr. Hill breaks it all down for the main character, Clover, in his strange, secluded office from the video game. Here, we see that he is not only able to watch everyone via camera feeds from inside of the house, but he also has a file on Josh which has a picture of Rami Malek’s likeness attached to it. Given the decision to specifically note that this is the Rami Malek version of the character, it seems evident that the movie is trying to specifically connect itself back to the game.
At the end of this scene, Dr. Hill is killed by Clover and she escapes with her friends. However, one last scene reveals that Dr. Hill is still alive and his camera feed now changes to reveal a snowy cabin in the woods, just like the Until Dawn video game. It seems like Josh’s file was on Dr. Hill’s desk because he was preparing for his next experiment, which indicates that the movie is actually a prequel to the video game.
There are some other tangential links, such as the wendigos, the Psycho killer, and the fact that a large portion of the story revolves around a tragic incident in a mining town. It seems possible that there’s a chance that both Until Dawn the movie and the game take place in the same location, but there’s a supernatural force that is changing the appearance of the location or something. We also see that Dr. Hill has different ID cards for different hospitals/locations, which could also indicate he is traveling around or a supernatural presence. We don’t get all of the answers in the Until Dawn movie and it seems like even the movie might be a bit confused as to how everything fits together, but it does appear that the movie and the video game are directly connected.
What did you think of Until Dawn? Let me know in the comments!
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