Sony PicturesThe Until Dawn movie contains some of the gnarliest deaths you’ll see in the cinema this year – and there’s one especially gruesome kill that shocked studio execs.
If you played the original PlayStation game, this shouldn’t be surprising. It has some proper gut-churning moments, whether it’s a wendigo twisting someone’s head off, another character’s eye getting gouged out, or someone’s jaw getting ripped off.
The new horror film, directed by David F. Sandberg (Lights Out, the Shazam movies), isn’t a one-to-one adaptation. It follows a group of friends who find themselves in a house in a remote valley, and they end up stuck in a nightmarish time loop – and the only way to make it out is to survive… until dawn.
However, that doesn’t mean it isn’t as violent as the source material. Characters die in grisly and grotesque ways, and one death took the studio by surprise.
Until Dawn’s sledgehammer kill shocked the studio
Until Dawn was always going to be R-rated. “It was very important for me that we did go there because the game is very violent and gory… it felt like the movie can’t be lesser than the game, we have to have an R rating,” Sandberg told Dexerto.
However, that doesn’t mean the studio didn’t try (at least at first) to make it a bit easier to stomach.
“I was a little worried at first, because the studio did ask me, ‘Hey, could you shoot these scenes sort of like the less gory version as well, just to have it?’ And I was like, ‘Well… why do you want that?'” Sandberg said.
Thankfully, the team didn’t have enough time to produce an alternate, less bloody version of the film, so they went “full-on gory” with all of the scenes. “To the studio’s credit, they were all fine with it afterwards,” the director assured.
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Sony PicturesThere was one kill that caught them off guard. At one point, one of the characters gets their head smashed with a sledgehammer. That was a combination of practical and VFX.
“For the longest time in the movie, it was sort of a dummy that we hit with a sledgehammer, but the head didn’t break completely. So, later on, we shot some blue screen elements and added them to it to really break the face,” Sandberg explained.
When Sandberg showed the final cut of the film to the studio execs, they’d never seen that scene before. “[They] didn’t expect it coming. So when that happened, it’s very over the top. The studio was like, ‘Agh!’ And I was like, ‘Oh, holy sh*t, they’re gonna ask me to cut it out, aren’t they?'” he recalled.
“But they didn’t. So they were they were fine with it, which was great.”
Until Dawn hits cinemas on April 25. Check out our breakdown of the movie’s ending and post-credits scene, and check out our list of the best video game movies and the best horror films. You can also see what else is dropping this year with our 2025 movies calendar.