Icelandic director Thordur Palsson has been set to helm the feature film adaptation of Dead by Daylight, the survival horror video game that has drawn more than 60 million players worldwide since its 2016 launch. The announcement was made Sunday during the game’s sold-out 10th anniversary celebration at Montreal’s Old Port, with Blumhouse Atomic Monster and Behaviour Interactive — Canada’s largest gaming studio — jointly backing the project.
Palsson is best known for creating and directing Iceland’s first Netflix Original series, The Valhalla Murders, and for his 2025 feature debut The Damned, which received a wide release from Vertical. He is currently in production on Avalanche, a four-part miniseries about a meteorologist racing to warn her village of an impending disaster — work that underscores his appetite for tension-driven, atmospherically dense storytelling.
The Dead by Daylight game pits one player controlling a killer against four survivors who must repair generators to unlock an escape route, all while evading sacrifice to a malevolent entity. The franchise has built a massive global audience over the last decade, expanding well beyond its original PC release to PlayStation, Xbox, and Nintendo Switch. Its roster of crossover killers has included icons from Halloween, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Evil Dead, and more — a breadth of IP that gives the film’s creative team significant material to draw from, though no plot details have been disclosed.
The script comes from David Leslie Johnston-McGoldrick and Alexandre Aja, pairing the Conjuring 2 writer with the director behind The Hills Have Eyes remake and Crawl — a duo with deep roots in studio horror.
Jason Blum called the 10th anniversary the perfect moment for the reveal, saying the team trusts Palsson to carry the property “from the screen you play on to the big screen you watch in theaters.” James Wan, who co-founded Blumhouse Atomic Monster alongside Blum, pointed to The Damned as proof of Palsson’s instincts: “One million people step into Dead by Daylight daily, and this adaptation brings them the world they love most, from Greenville to The MacMillan Estate.” Wan added that Palsson grasps a core truth of effective horror — that fear only registers when the audience cares about who’s in danger.
An animated series set in the Dead by Daylight universe is also reportedly in development, signaling that Behaviour Interactive intends to grow the franchise across multiple formats. No release date for the film has been set.
