Dead by Daylight Movie Gets Major Update (And Horror Fans Should Be Excited)

The horror game Dead by Daylight has just received some great news in regard to its upcoming movie adaptation. Dead by Daylight is a survival horror game that is a one-versus-four competition where one player plays the role of the Killer and the other four play as Survivors trying to live through the encounter. The Killer has to kill all four Survivors and impale them on sacrificial hooks for the Entity. Meanwhile, the Survivors have to work together to power up the exit gates by fixing five generators. While this sounds like a great idea for a game, it seems like it could be a difficult transition into a movie, although some big names are coming onboard to try.

The Hollywood Reporter reveals that Blumhouse-Atomic Monster is teaming with Canadian gaming studio Behaviour Interactive to turn Dead by Daylight into a movie. The horror movie studio has signed Alexandre Aja (The Hills Have Eyes, High Tension) and David Leslie Johnston-McGoldrick (Orphan, Aquaman) to write the script. While the two writers have never worked together, Johnson-McGoldrick has worked with James Wan on several movies, while Aja remains one of Hollywood’s top horror minds.

It should be noted that Alexandre Aja, while a great director, will not direct Dead by Daylight because he has already lined up the Netflix horror sequel Under Paris 2 next. Blumhouse-Atomic Monster is currently looking to line up a director for the video game adaptation. “What David and Alexandre bring to Dead by Daylight is a rare balance of character-driven storytelling and relentless genre intensity,” Jason Blum said. “Drawing from survival horror and psychological terror, their work establishes a world where fear is not just experienced, but earned.”

Read Next

5 Best Games That Really Mess With Your Head

How Could Dead by Daylight Work as a Movie?

The coolest part of Dead by Daylight is that the player playing as the Killer can choose from any number of characters to be the Killer. This even includes characters from other franchises, including Xenomorphs, characters from Resident Evil, and even Vecna from Stranger Things. Survivors even include names like Ash Williams from Evil Dead and Ellen Ripley from Alien to choose from. The movie will need to stick with one Killer and likely generic Survivors, and that might limit it to being more of a typical slasher movie with the video game.

However, that doesn’t mean that it won’t be an entertaining movie that has the spirit of the game. In fact, earlier news about the movie indicated that Blumhouse-Atomic Monster wants to take the same direction they did with Five Nights at Freddy’s and make a movie that is geared toward the fans of the games, rather than changing things too much to attempt to reach mainstream audiences. With over 60 million players worldwide, this could be a massive success story if the movie plays well with the game’s fans, as Minecraft and Five Nights at Freddy’s have proven.

What do you think? Leave a comment below and join the conversation now in the ComicBook Forum!