Blumhouse and Atomic Monster’s film adaptation of Behaviour Interactive’s asymmetric multiplayer survival horror video game Dead by Daylight is steadily taking shape, as the project has found its director in Thordur Palsson (The Damned).
As reported by The Hollywood Reporter, the announcement was made during the game’s 10th anniversary celebration in Montreal’s Old Port. The Icelandic film director, best known for directing the 2024 folk horror film The Damned and writing the 2019 thriller series The Valhalla Murders, now joins veteran horror writers David Leslie Johnston-McGoldrick (The Conjuring 2) and Alexandre Aja (The Hills Have Eyes), making it a pretty decent horror trio.
“Thordur understands that the terror only lands if you care about who’s running, and The Damned proved he can make you feel the walls closing in. That is exactly the instinct this film needs on screen,” said Blumhouse Atomic Monster founder and CEO James Wan in a statement.
While plot details on the film have yet to be revealed, the original 2016 Dead by Daylight video game is centred around a group of four survivors as they try to survive and escape a killer. Played in an asymmetric multiplayer format, the game saw four survivors compete against one killer, with the former having to traverse the maps to find generators to activate and open an escape route, while the latter hunts them down using a variety of killers ranging from original creations to horror icons like Michael Myers, Sadako, and Pyramid Head.
While the game doesn’t feature a traditional storyline, it does provide quite a wealth of lore for the film adaptation to tap into, such as the existence of a cosmic, malevolent force known as “The Entity”, which kidnaps killers and survivors from various time periods and universes and forces them into endless trials, which explains how so many familiar faces from iconic IPs can exist in its world at the same time. With this in mind, it will be interesting to see if the film will follow suit, possibly including a range of pop culture cameos and references to some of the most iconic horror killers.
Kevin is a reformed PC Master Race gamer with a penchant for franchise “duds” like Darksiders III and Dead Space 3. He has made it his life-long mission to play every single major game release – lest his wallet dies trying.
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