SPOILER WARNING: The following article contains spoilers for Until Dawn. If you have not yet seen the film, proceed at your own risk!
Until Dawn, a love letter to the horror genre, is a movie featuring a wide variety of terrors – from slashers to witches to possession to wendigos – but my favorite of all of them is simple spontaneous combustion. The film’s protagonists think that they can subvert the plot by holing up in a bathroom and waiting for the sun to rise, but that plan turns calamitous when they drink down water from the faucet and start exploding.
I love the sequence as a kind of meta rebellion by the characters that is met with extreme consequence, and I love the sequence as a horror fan who likes to see big bursts of blood. Because of this, I felt compelled to ask screenwriter Gary Dauberman and director David F. Sandberg about it when I spoke with them earlier this month at the Until Dawn press day in Los Angeles. Dauberman explained that in the writing of the script, the basic idea of the scene was something that actually pre-dated his work on the new video game adaptation, and he thought that Sandberg (with whom he had previously worked on Annabelle: Creation) was the right filmmaker to pull it off:
I've always loved this idea. It was something I was like, 'Lemme see if David could pull this off.' It was kind of throwing him like, 'I'm gonna make this not easy.' But I also was like, 'What would I do in this situation?' And be like, yeah: barricade a door and I'd sit behind it and just like count the seconds. And then the challenge with it really was we were trying to go practical as much as we could. So that became a real challenge of that scene.
Exploding characters practically means using a ridiculous amount of fake blood – enough fake blood to completely ruin a set. That was a big thing in the time-looping story of Until Dawn, which repeatedly uses the same locations. The way that the production got around this issue, as David F. Sandberg explained, was to schedule the sequence to be shot at the very end so that clean-up wasn’t a big deal. Said the director,
We had to shoot it last because we destroyed the set and there was blood everywhere. But technically, I mean, once we had figured out sort of how much explosions and everything of that sort, it's in essence pretty easy. You just shoot a person sitting there or standing there, cut, put in the dummy, blow it up, and then it's just a simple cut in the edit, and it works.
As Sandberg went on to explain, the production created blood-filled replicas of the actors (they weren’t just human-shaped bags), and filming the characters explode was as easy as swapping the replicas into frame.
It was so simple, in fact, that the Until Dawn crew was able to put together a rough edit on set that effectively demonstrated the effect. Gary Dauberman added,
It's great. He just did a quick edit on set and it's just like, you can just see, Bel [Cameli], he leans into the thing and then you cut to the model as it explodes. It's so perfect. It's great.
Starring Belmont Cameli, Ella Rubin, Michael Cimino, Odessa A'zion, Ji-young Yoo, and Peter Stormare (reprising his role as Dr. Hill from the game), Until Dawn arrived in theaters this past weekend and is now playing everywhere.
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