The long-developing Dead by Daylight movie finally has someone in the director’s chair. Icelandic filmmaker Thordur Palsson is set to direct the big-screen adaptation for Blumhouse Atomic Monster and Behaviour Interactive, a development confirmed during the game’s 10th anniversary celebration in Montreal’s Old Port.
If the name does not immediately register, that is fair. Palsson is not yet a household figure, but his track record is the kind that should put fans at ease. His feature debut, the folk horror film The Damned, landed in theaters in early 2025 and earned strong reviews, sitting at 90 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. Before that, he created and directed The Valhalla Murders, Netflix’s first original Icelandic series, which premiered in 2020. The throughline in his work is atmosphere and slow-building tension, which lines up well with the survival horror premise Dead by Daylight is built on.
Jason Blum framed the timing as fitting for the milestone, saying there was no better moment than the 10th anniversary to share the news and calling Palsson the filmmaker the studio trusts to carry the game from the screen you play on to the screen you watch in theaters. James Wan added that Palsson understands the terror only works if you care about the people running for their lives, pointing to The Damned as proof he can make the walls feel like they are closing in. Behaviour’s chief product officer Stephen Mulrooney praised the director’s atmospheric storytelling and ability to build tension, calling him the right voice to bring the universe to life for longtime fans and newcomers alike.
Palsson joins a screenplay that is already complete, written by Alexandre Aja (The Hills Have Eyes, Crawl) and David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick (Orphan, The Conjuring 2). Wan, Blum, and Mulrooney are producing. The executive producer lineup includes Behaviour’s Remi Racine, Atomic Monster’s Michael Clear and Judson Scott, Blumhouse’s Ryan Turek, and Striker Entertainment’s Russell Binder.
The film has been a long time coming. Blumhouse and Atomic Monster first optioned Dead by Daylight back in 2023, and progress was quiet in the years that followed. The anniversary stream put that to rest, with the project now set to begin filming in 2027 and game locations like The MacMillan Estate and Greenville expected to feature. A release date has not been announced.
For anyone who needs the refresher, Dead by Daylight launched in 2016 and grew into one of the most successful horror franchises in gaming. It is an asymmetrical multiplayer game that pits four survivors against a single killer, with the survivors racing to complete tasks and escape while the killer hunts them down. The original three killers were The Trapper, The Wraith, and The Hillbilly. Over the years the game has become a crossover machine, pulling in characters and settings from Halloween, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Scream, Hellraiser, Silent Hill, and Resident Evil, among others.
That crossover history is part of what makes the adaptation an interesting prospect. Dead by Daylight does not have a fixed protagonist or a single narrative the way most game adaptations do, which gives the writers and Palsson real freedom to build something original inside the world rather than translating a set story beat for beat. With a director attached, a finished script, and a filming window now on the calendar, the movie is in a more active phase than it has been at any point since the rights changed hands.
Sources: Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, Fangoria, GosuGamers
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