Halloween is still two months away, but it’s never too early to watch horror movies on Netflix. And clearly, many of you are, given that the 2025 horror movie Until Dawn is one of the streamer’s top 10 trending titles right now.
Directed by David F. Sandberg, with a screenplay written by Gary Dauberman and Blair Butler, Until Dawn is loosely based on the 2015 interactive drama survival horror game of the same name. While the video game featured A-list voice actors like Rami Malek, the Until Dawn movie cast includes Ella Rubin, Michael Cimino, Odessa A’zion, Ji-young Yoo, Belmont Cameli, and Peter Stormare, the last of whom was also the voice of Dr. Hill in the video game.
The Until Dawn movie plot is quite different from the plot of the Until Dawn video game. If you got confused along the way, don’t worry, because Decider is here to help. Read on for a thorough breakdown of the Until Dawn movie plot and the Until Dawn movie ending explained, including what was going on with the wendigos in Until Dawn.
Warning: Major Until Dawn spoilers ahead. Duh!
Clover (Ella Rubin) is on a journey to retrace the steps of her sister Melanie (Maia Mitchell), who went missing shortly after their mom died. With Clover on this journey is her ex-boyfriend Max (Michael Cimino), their best friends Megan (Ji-young Yoo) and Nina (Odessa A’zion), and Nina’s new boyfriend Abe (Belmont Cameli). The group of friends’ last stop is as a gas station where Melanie was last seen one year ago.
Clover asks the gas station attendant if he remembers Melanie. He doesn’t, but he advises Clover that a lot of people go missing around an old mining town nearby, Glore Valley. The friends drive to Glore Valley, and take shelter from a rainstorm in the town’s abandoned visitor center. In the center, Abe finds dozens of missing persons posters, with no contact information, including Melanie’s. Nina finds a blank guestbook, and signs her name. Clover thinks she hears Melanie calling her from the woods, and attempts to follow, but is pulled back by Max.
After signing the guestbook, Nina discovers a page she hadn’t seen before, which shows that Melanie also signed the guestbook, 13 times. Abe suddenly sees himself and all the friends’ faces on the missing persons wall. Something very weird is definitely going on! It’s not long before a masked killer breaks into the visitor’s center, and kills every single one of the friends. Wait, so is the movie over? Nope, it’s a time loop!
The night resets. Everyone finds themselves back where they were before: Megan in the bathroom, Abe by the missing persons board, Clover in the woods, and Nina writing in the guest book. The only difference is, Nina can see that this is the second time she is writing in the guest book.
However, the night doesn’t repeat the horrors of the night before. Instead, there are new horrors: Megan is possessed by a demon, and Clover is dragged into a spooky house where a witch tells her she must either “survive the night, or become a part of it.” Everyone dies, again, and the time loop resets, again.
The friends decide to camp out in the visitor center bathroom and attempt to survive the night. However, after drinking water from the bathroom faucet, they all spontaneously combust. Don’t drink the water in hell, apparently! Before Clover dies, she sees the guy from the gas station, who tells her she is getting closer, but cannot simply wait out the night.
On the next loop, the group goes looking for information. They find an old VHS tape that reveals the guy from the gas station is actually a sadistic psychologist named Dr. Hill (played by Peter Stormare). After a mining accident buried most of the town, Dr. Hill came to Glore Valley to act as a therapist for the survivors. But instead, Dr. Hill performed sick experiments on his already-traumatized patients. In one experiment, Dr. Hill trapped a man in a room with no food or water, and, over the course of 13 nights, the man turned into a wendigo, aka a former human that becomes a feral cannibal out of extreme hunger.
Clover speaks to Dr. Hill via an old radio, and he tells her that there is a way out, but one of the friends must die. Clover demands a meeting with Dr. Hill, and he says to find him in the woods. The friends try to stop her from entering this obvious trap, but Abe—clearly thinking Clover could be the one sacrificed—wants to let her go. However, Max, Nina, and Megan all insist that unless they are all alive, they should agree to kill themselves and try again. Nina punctuates this point by stabbing Abe. Max goes after Clover, and rescues her from a bear trap in the woods. They are confronted by another wenigo, who Clover recognizes as her sister Mel. After learning that Megan is already dead, Max and Clover decide to kill themselves and restart the loop.
When the loop restarts, Megan is missing. Nina reveals it is the 13th night, based on the log book. It seems no one else survived more than 13 nights without also becoming a monstrous wendigo like that guy from the video. The group is shocked to hear this, as they can’t remember what happened all 13 nights. Abe discovers videos he took on his phone that fill in some of the blanks. Basically, a lot of messed up shit has happened to them. In one video, everyone is dead except Megan. Dr. Hill comes through and examines the dead bodies, and then leaves through a tunnel in the wall. Megan tells the camera she is going to follow Dr. Hill to find out what he’s up to.
Clover realizes that it’s too late to rescue her sister, but not too late to rescue her friends. She resolves to go into that tunnel, too, and rescue Megan. The rest of her friends opt to come, too. Friends stick together!
The group is attacked by a bunch of wendigos. Max tells Clover to run ahead to find Megan, while they fend off the monsters. After killing her own sister, Clover finds Megan restrained in a room, with a wendigo chained to the wall, champing at the bit to attack. Clover runs to find a key, and finds herself face-to-face with Dr. Hill in his office.
Dr. Hill reveals his evil plan: He studies the affect extreme fear can have on already-traumatized people. He came to Glore Valley because it was a place of tragedy. Now, apparently, he uses that as his home base, and lures traumatized people like Melanie and Clover to the area to study them, too. Apparently, all of the various monsters are manifestations of Clover’s own fears: the masked killer represents feeling powerless, the witch represents repression, the spontaneous combustion represents self-destructive behavior.
In general, wendigos are a mythological creature from Algonquian folklore, said to be driven by an insatiable hunger to eat human beings. The wendigos in Until Dawn, apparently, are all other patients who were experimented on and didn’t escape—former humans driven insane who “become the night.” Are they also driven by extreme hunger, the key characteristic of wendigos? Kinda! Sorta! Maybe!
If this doesn’t really make sense to you, you’re not alone. The wendigos were the big bads in the original video game, which took place in a cave and had nothing to do with a psychology experiment. Even though the wendigo thing didn’t fit into the new plot invented for the movie, it seems the filmmakers still wanted to include them. The result is a mishmash of too many monsters, and a plot that doesn’t add up. I mean, is anyone going to explain the time loop?
Clover tricks Dr. Hill into drinking some of the contaminated water, causing him to explode. He’s the one who dies, meaning all five friends can escape. And they do! After fighting off the last wendigos, the friends claw their way back above ground, and witness the sun come up. They survived the night, and are free from the time loop.
In the final scene of the movie, we see the TV monitors where Dr. Hill was observing his subjects flicker and change. The screens depict a new location, a snowy log cabin. A different car pulls up to the cabin, suggesting that this is a new location with a tragic backstory, and that these are new traumatized victims showing up for another sick Dr. Hill experiment. We’re not sure how that would work, given that Hill is now dead. But we’re sure if Sony wants to make Until Dawn 2, they will find a way.