Until Dawn is a wildly popular Playstation game written by Larry Fessenden and Graham Reznick. It utilizes Supermassive Games’ engine to craft an eerie and dangerous world, allowing gamers to choose character outcomes. This butterfly effect leads to all playable characters’ lives being in the hands of the gamer. This is also one of the titles that really got me back into gaming after stepping away for years. It understands the tropes in the movies that it nods at and gives horror fans the feeling of being in their own movie. So, when word came out that there would be a film adaptation of Until Dawn, we assumed it would be a fairly easy transfer. However, you know what they say about assuming things.

A Familiar Premise with a Time Loop Twist

The Until Dawn film follows a pretty standard premise at first. Clover (Ella Rubin) is looking for her missing sister Mel (Maia Mitchell). She and her friends are tracing Mel’s last steps through a weird small town when they find themselves in a creepy abandoned home. However, when they begin to investigate the property, they are murdered by a mask-wearing psycho. This resets them to a key part (or checkpoint for us gamers) and gives all five of them the chance to make different choices and possibly survive. This is a clever way to navigate the freedom of the original game and kill people in various ways, in different orders, etc. I love that Blair Butler and Gary Dauberman thought of that as a way to stay sort of close to the source material’s energy.

The friend group supporting Clover is filled with some familiar faces. Ji-young Yoo (Freaky Tales) as Megan, Michael Cimino (Love, Victor) as Max, Odessa A’zion (Hellraiser (2022)) as Nina, and Belmont Cameli (The Alto Knights) as Abel. Megan is a little psychic and can sense things the others cannot. Max seems to only have Clover on the brain, and we find out they used to be a couple. Nina and Abel have been together for three months. So, it is wild that he is traveling the country with her friend group as they try to help Clover get closure. While the cast is charming enough, none of them get to do anything interesting with their characters. Even their repeated deaths are not exciting.

A Series of Unfortunate Paint by Number Scares

Director David F. Sandberg finds a chuckle, some gore, and shows off some familiar creatures. However, that does not stop Until Dawn from feeling like a forgotten title held over from all of the early aughts slashers that came fast and furious. This movie has a couple of visual cues and easter eggs for the gamers. It also has the time loop device that should have helped lead to various interesting outcomes. However, at the end of the day, it is just a group of young people going through the motions. Most of the scares are very paint-by-number, meaning none of them are effective. This makes characters sacrificing themselves or doing something brave fall flat every time. It does not feel like any stakes are being raised until they believe it is their last attempt to survive the night. That is when the movie finally finds second gear for a few seconds before going back to coasting downhill.

Peter Stormare follows his character, Hill, from the game to the big screen. However, even he is wasted in this mess. By the time he is revealed to be exactly who he is, even the most diehard Until Dawn fan will be over it. When we see his familiar office, with some of the coolest easter eggs, it is way too late to care. We have already figured out the movie is not going to do anything exciting with this premise. It is too intent on getting the best outcome where all of the characters survive to ever make us feel unsafe. The runtime is also filled with bad dialogue and characters sacrificing themselves to restart rather than look for more clues. It is a frustrating affair that misses everything that made the game exciting and interesting. It also sidesteps everything that makes halfway-decent horror movies stand out in 2025.

Ultimately Until Dawn is an Uninspired Disappointment

Until Dawn feels like a movie that the game would make fun of while being meta. If it had been a solid film in its own right, I could forgive it for not living up to its IP. However, it has the energy of a Tubi movie that found extra funding. While it is not the worst survival horror video game adaptation we have gotten, it is depressingly underwhelming. Even the few cool kills feel like uninspired box-checking rather than something to make us lean in. This is sad because movies like Happy Death Day have taught us every kill can be an event, even in a time loop.

I take no joy in stating that Until Dawn feels like an uninspired and disjointed mess. It is like someone put all the right ingredients into a pot but forgot to turn the stove on and are feeding us uncooked soup. Until Dawn sadly falls into the trap of being a bad film adaptation of a great game. We have to wonder if this is fan abuse or a skill issue. All I know for sure is that we all deserved a much better product than whatever this is.

Remember that trend a few years ago where everyone was bringing up their kindertrauma? Well it’s high time that resurfaces. There are a handful of traumatic moments from my childhood that still make me double-take when the lights are off, and my TV is shut off for the night. The first that comes to mind is the tooth fairy from Darkness Falls. The second is the opening scene from 28 Weeks Later, when Don (Robert Carlyle) sprints away while zombies overtake his wife and friends. Back then, I wasn’t as studied as I am now with horror and assumed 28 Weeks Later was its own entity. It wouldn’t be until I saw a copy of 28 Days Later for sale at Blockbuster when I was 17 that I realized I was wrong. Dead wrong.

28 Days Later starts with some animal activists breaking into a testing lab. They’re attacked by a monkey infected with a rage virus, and England’s apocalypse has officially begun. Cut to 28 days later. Jim (Cillian Murphy) wakes up in a hospital, unaware of the brewing hellstorm. Selena (Naomie Harris) and Mark (Noah Huntley) come to Jim’s aid as a group of zombies run him out of a church. As expected, things go awry. Over the next few days, Jim and Selena meet up with an interesting cast of characters as they try to make their way to a lesser-occupied area in hopes of some semblance of survival.

Why 28 Weeks Later Outshines 28 Days Later in Horror Intensity

It’s time for us to have a frank conversation; 28 Weeks Later is scarier than 28 Days Later. That doesn’t mean Days is a bad movie, but it’s a weaker, less focused film that takes too long to find its footing. At its core, Days is really three different movies hastily thrown together into one. Each third of the film feels too self-contained with a forced through line of Jim and Selena (and eventually Hannah (Megan Burns)). Whereas Weeks feels more focused and in touch with the story it needs to tell.

That’s not to say writer Alex Garland and director Danny Boyle didn’t strike gold with 28 Days Later because they did. Along with Resident Evil and, to a lesser extent, 2003’s Undead, Days kicked off the aughts resurgence of zombie films. Boyle brought Garland’s script to life in the most early-aughts way possible: heavy grain, low lights (but still somehow enough to see the action), buckets of blood with reckless abandon, and a hell of a cast filled with up-and-comers as well as actors in their prime. It’s hard for the 2025 mind to imagine a film with Cillian Murphy, Naomie Harris, Brendan Gleeson, Christopher Eccleston, and Ray Panthaki in the same film.

What is the Rage Virus: Are These Zombies or Something Else?

With Horror Press’ theme for April being zombies, it’s important to raise the question, “Does rage virus mean zombie?” When we think of zombies, we usually think, “When hell is full, the dead will walk the earth,” or something like that. For a film that took heavy inspiration from Romero, Garland’s rage virus plays heavily on the idea of what a zombie can be. Like Primal Rage, Pontypool, Rabid, and Night of the Creeps, the question of infection, possible cures, and how the virus infects the inhabitants varies. There’s no question that the rage virus zombies in 28 Days Later are violent, fast, utterly terrifying creatures of death. However, it should be noted that Days is often credited as the film that created the “fast zombie” but that crown really goes to 1980s Nightmare City. With all that said, I say yes, rage virus does equal zombie. Zombie means to you what it means to you and if you think rage viruses turn people into zombies then there’s no problem with that. Even if I can understand the argument against it.

Pacing issues aside (too slow at points, unnecessarily fast at others), without 28 Days Later, it’s safe to say the zombie subgenre might not be what it is today. Granted, 9/11 would be a driving force to a lot of the anger and xenophobia behind how the subgenre was perceived in the aughts, Days catapulted zombies back into the spotlight. Weeks is my favorite but I’ll be curious to see how 28 Years Later handles the previous two films and incorporates them into their canon. When this piece releases, we’ll have just a couple of months to wait until we get to see the shot-on-iPhone zombie epic grace the silver screen.