The first full trailer for the Until Dawn movie has arrived, and it probably doesn’t look quite how you expected. While Sony announced last week that the movie would honor the game’s legacy but feature a whole new story and cast of characters, it wasn’t clear what that meant until this trailer arrived. As it turns out, it means that the movie is going to be love letter to every type of teen horror you can think of in a combination of Cabin in the Woods and Groundhog Day.
Until Dawn’s trailer starts out pretty conventionally: a group of teens show up at a remote house in the woods, only to encounter a terrible masked murderer. The twist is that once they’re all dead, they wake up earlier in the night only to find they’re being stalked by an entirely different kind of monster. After this reveal, the trailer opens itself up, crossing into all kinds of different horror sub-genres, from zombies and found footage to monsters and ghosts, swapping up the movie’s style with each new terror.
This method of repeating the day but changing up the horror is a fascinating way for the filmmakers to pay homage to the game that gives the movie its title, without trying to replicate what makes the game great. While the game’s allure is mostly in allowing players to choose how the story progresses, giving it dozens of different branching paths, the movie will bring in variety by swapping up subgenres. On top of that, the trailer also includes Peter Stormare as the genre classic: a mysterious gas station worker to tell the kids not to venture into the woods.
Of course, all that matters in the end is whether or not the movie is scary, fun, and good, but we won’t know that until it comes out in theaters on April 25.
