Thordur Palsson, the Icelandic filmmaker behind 2024's horror film The Damned, will adapt the 2016 multiplayer horror game, in which one player stalks the other four, for Blumhouse, three years after the adaptation was first announced.
Thordur Palsson does not want to make a movie about a monster. He wants to make a movie about what it feels like to hear one behind you.
That framing, drawn from the "looking over your shoulder" tension of the 2016 asymmetric multiplayer horror game Dead by Daylight, is the bet Palsson is making as the newly attached director of the long-gestating film adaptation. Palsson, an Icelandic filmmaker whose 2024 first feature The Damned earned quiet critical notice, was revealed as the project's director during the game's 10th anniversary livestream on Sunday, June 14, 2026, by Behaviour Interactive chief product officer Stephen Mulrooney and Blumhouse founder and CEO Jason Blum.
For non-players, the source material is built on a simple imbalance. In Dead by Daylight, released in 2016 by Behaviour Interactive, one player controls a killer and four others play survivors trying to escape. The horror comes from asymmetry. The survivor cannot fight back in any meaningful way, and the only survival skill is knowing where the killer is, or guessing. Palsson's stated pitch to translate that feeling to a single-camera film is the clearest creative signal the project has produced in three years.
The film was first announced in 2023 by Blumhouse and Atomic Monster, according to Gizmodo's reporting on the hire. In February 2026, the production companies added David Leslie Johnston-McGoldrick and Alexandre Aja to write the screenplay. Johnston-McGoldrick, who has written for Blumhouse before, brings direct experience translating a long-running horror property to screen. Aja, the French director behind High Tension and Piranha 3D, brings genre credibility that maps to Dead by Daylight's slasher-inflected bestiary.
The director attach is also a quiet acknowledgment of how unusual the adaptation problem is. Multiplayer games do not translate cleanly to film because their tension is generated by another human being's choices, not by scripted events. Palsson's framing, leaning into the "being hunted" feeling rather than the game's lore, suggests the film will not try to reproduce the game. It will try to reproduce the emotional register of playing it.
That is a craft bet Blumhouse has reasons to back. The company's two Five Nights at Freddy's adaptations were critical underdogs but commercial hits, and Blum used the livestream appearance to take a swipe at the critics who "turned their noses up" at those films, per Gizmodo's report. The comment is fair industry color, a producer publicly defending a track record his studio has chosen to keep building on.
What is still missing is almost everything else. There is no cast, no release date, and no confirmed production schedule. A director attached to a project that has spent three years in development is news, but it is also the kind of news that is easy to overread. The Blumhouse track record, the writer team's genre credentials, and the director's stated approach all point in the same direction. They do not, by themselves, tell readers what kind of film this will be.
The next real test of whether the project is moving will be a shoot start, a casting notice, or a release window. Until then, what is on the table is a director with one prior feature and a stated intention to put the audience inside the position of a survivor who can hear the killer but cannot see them. That is a specific enough creative bet to be worth watching.