Until Dawn is now in theaters and featured wall to wall monsters and gore! We had the good fortune of talking with the movie’s director David F. Sandberg about the project. David has worked on a variety of different horror and genre projects over the years from Lights Out, Annabelle: Creation, and the Shazam movies. And now he’s created a creature filled time loop of terror with the Until Dawn movie!
Jacob Davison: I was at the Until Dawn screening and had a fantastic time. I also wanted to tell you it gave me nightmares. I dreamed I was back in Boston and the Wendigos were after me in my dormitory.
David F. Sandberg: Oh, Boston Wendigo’s is the worst indeed.
JD: But thank you so much for joining me. I had a hell of a time. Starting off, tell us a little bit about yourself and your background in horror.
DFS: I’ve always loved horror. This has been my dream to do forever. And I mean, my wife Lotta and I, we started making no budget to horror shorts in Sweden because we couldn’t get any money from like the Swedish Film Institute or anything to make horror. We figured like, well, we’ll make some on our own. We made this short film called Lights Out that went viral and then all of a sudden Hollywood got in touch and wanted to make movies. So, that short film was only two and a half minutes long but it changed my life because for the last 10 years I’ve been living in Hollywood and making movies thanks to that thing. I’m just living the dream and now finally I got to do with Until Dawn, a movie full of like practical effects and gore and monsters which has always been a dream of mine.
JD: And on that, what was the process like in adapting Until Dawn, and if you had played the games previously?
DFS: I knew a lot about it, but I hadn’t actually sat down and played the whole thing. It wasn’t until Gary sent me the script and started talking about it that I sat down and played it and loved it, because it was so cinematic. It is like a movie that you’re a part of. But that’s also what I liked about the script that Gary and Blair wrote, that it wasn’t trying to tell that same story again, but instead being an expansion of the universe. Because it felt like you’d never be able to live up to the game if you were doing a movie trying to do the exact same thing because you know the game has 10 hours to tell its story. It has all these branching paths and you can get different endings so it’s like, what ending do you choose and I thought they did the right thing in making it something different. It excited me to be able to do all these different horror genres in one movie.
JD: Oh, yeah. And on that, what was it like, with the practical effects, applying that with all these different monsters? How did you go about that and make it different each night?
DFS: It was hard. It’s very hard to do this. I mean, the good thing about the, the sort of time loop is that it’s different from Groundhog Day where it’s a new threat every night. I didn’t have to be the same monsters, but it also just takes so much time and planning to do these things right and to do like practical effects. It was a challenge. And you even have to schedule it in certain ways. Like there’s a scene, you know, in the bathroom where when they drink the water. I mean, that thing, we had to schedule on the very last day because we ruined the set completely, blood everywhere. But it was fun to finally get to do all those things. It was just hard, especially that scene, because we had to shoot it on the last day, I was like, “Oh, I was so eager to do it.” “Oh, we have to wait until the last day.” But it was a great sort of finale to it all.
JD: Yeah, I guess that makes sense in retrospect, because it was just wall -to -wall bloodshed.
DFS: For sure, and like props and everything was just covered in blood, and there’s no coming back from that.
JD: Without spoilers, but I’m sure it’ll get a big audience reaction like it did at my screening.
DFS: Yeah, so far, every screening, you know, we’ve had it gets a huge reaction.
JD: Nice. And was there was there anything that had to be cut, you know, in terms of monsters? Because it felt like you guys were trying to fit so much in.
DFS: There was one creature, sort of a classic horror creature that we had to cut because it didn’t really, it didn’t turn out as well as we had hoped, but we’re putting all deleted scenes and alternate scenes on the home video version. So when you get that, you’ll be able to see it all because, I mean, I wanted to put it all there as well because, I mean, we went through the trouble of shooting it all, so I want to have a copy of it too.
JD: And last question, since it’s not really much of a spoiler, it’s a time loop. The characters die over and over again. What is your process in setting up kill sequences or the choreography of the kills?
DFS: Well, here it was so many, since it’s different genres, everyone was unique, like the slasher had to have a certain tempo to it to feel like a slasher movie and you shoot it in certain ways. And same thing with like, you know, found footage. That that has its own sort of aesthetic and vibe that you try to adhere to. So that was the fun part. They were all different and all had their different styles.
JD: Thank you so much for your time and thank you for the nightmares.
DFS: Sorry about that.