Can They Really Make A Movie Out Of Dead By Daylight?
The adaptation has a director now, but it still needs a plot.
The fact that some of Hollywood’s biggest successes this year — Obsession and Backrooms — are both horror films is yet more proof that the genre is still part of the industry’s financial backbone. As far back as the days of independent hits like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Halloween, unique horror movies have captured the attention of audiences starved for something to push the envelope, and nowadays, the constant stream of superhero movies and high-concept action-comedies aren’t really making the impact that they used to 10 years ago.
The ideal of what a blockbuster is has changed over time, and one of the biggest beneficiaries of that shift has been video game movies. 2026 is a far cry from the embarrassing attempts of the ‘90s and early 2000s; instead of bombs like Doom and Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li, we now have box office smashes like The Super Mario Bros. Movie and A Minecraft Movie, films that are far from perfect but clearly rewarding to fans of their source material.
This year’s Iron Lung also proved that mainstream adventure games aren’t the only gateway to success, as Markiplier’s independent adaptation of an indie horror game brought in a whopping $51 million on a budget of just $5 million — and now there’s another horror game with a film adaptation on the horizon that’s looking to continue the trend.
In Dead by Daylight, you become the Slasher... if you're lucky.
This Sunday, The Hollywood Reporter announced that Thordur Palsson, the Icelandic director of 2024's The Damned, will direct the upcoming adaptation of Dead by Daylight, the horror game sensation that popularized the now-dominant asymmetric multiplayer trend. The project was first announced in March 2023, when it was revealed that Jason Blum and James Wan would be producing the film under Blumhouse and Atomic Monster. Earlier this year, screenwriters David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick (a major contributor to The Conjuring franchise) and Alexandre Aja (the French filmmaker who exploded with the New Extremity horror movement and recently directed 2019’s Crawl) were hired to write the script.
The game, which was released on PC in 2016 before exploding across consoles, was predicated on the idea of one player stalking four “Survivor” players who attempted to survive a demented, interactive depiction of a slasher movie. Over time, the game has hosted licensed crossovers with horror properties like Halloween, Silent Hill, and Stranger Things. It's an innovative and rewarding concept for a game, but it’s not exactly the kind of thing Palsson can present on-screen, which raises the question of how the film will engage with the game’s thin lore.
Part of DoD’s charm is the novelty of being able to experience terrifying horror franchises like Silent Hill in-game.
On the plus side, the idea of an ancient, Lovecraftian being compelling tormented souls into becoming slashers is a great place to start, and each of the creatives involved has made some strong horror movies. Dead by Daylight is a massive phenomenon with countless imitators, including from major film franchises seeking to emulate the material. If Palsson and his creative team can offer audiences something capable of standing on its own while bringing the terrifying source material to life, it might just become a cinematic horror icon itself.
Dead by Daylight does not yet have a release date.
