Not much is known about the upcoming adaptation from Blumhouse aside from a recent announcement naming Crawl director Alexandre Aja and The Conjuring 2 co-writer David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick as the screenwriters. With the script officially underway, the story for this film is going to be its biggest hook, but there are a number of storytelling issues it needs to overcome to become a success.
Dead By Daylight Needs To Focus On Adapting Lore Over Gameplay
The gameplay of Dead by Daylight is fairly straightforward and works for the medium it’s targeting. However, this asymmetrical style isn’t quite suited for the big screen. The point of each game, labeled “Trials” by the developers, is to be repetitive, since the survivors and killers are trapped in a realm where they must kill and escape over and over to satisfy an Eldritch being called The Entity.
There’s very little a film adaptation can achieve with this, aside from a time loop story, which has become a fairly overplayed storytelling mechanic in recent years. What can be done, though, is to look beyond the Trials and explore the richer aspects of the Entity’s Realm.
Dead by Daylight‘s lore is one of the most interesting parts of the game because of how far it expands into the omniverse to tell a fascinating story. The game features a Tome system that allows players to dive deeper into the world of the game. There are over 20 collections that feature backgrounds of fan-favorites like The Wraith, but the stories focusing on unseen characters wandering through the Realm explore some of the game’s biggest mysteries.
The Dead by Daylight Movie Has Plenty of Potential
The ever-expanding lore of Dead by Daylight is where the film needs to dig into in order to create a well-crafted film. The stories of characters like the Red Crane, the Entity-worshipping cult called the Black Vale and the mysterious Observer provide much-needed world-building to a fairly simple idea. They reveal that there’s far more to the Entity’s Realm beyond the Trials, and it’s a constant battle for survival.
Dead by Daylight producer Behaviour Entertainment has even shown how a proper film could be made through their team-ups with other studios to expand the game’s omniverse. Supermassive Games’ creation, The Casting of Frank Stone, showed just how small the Trials are with a story that takes place entirely outside the Realm. Meanwhile, the comic series from Titan Comics further highlighted just how ambitious the Dead by Daylight multiverse can be by connecting various characters together.
While the Dead by Daylight film doesn’t necessarily need to omit the Trials from the story, it can’t be the primary focus of the movie. There’s way too much potential in its expanded lore and characters. If the film can make the mystery of the game’s universe its primary focus, the story could make the film the next great video game adaptation that will have fans of the series cheering once the credits roll.