The Death Loop or Endless Night is a unique supernatural phenomenon featured in the Until Dawn film. The loop is represented by the hourglass on the cabin wall that reverses every time the night is restarted.

History

1998

The first known use of the loop dates back to 1998 in Glore Valley. Following a mining accident that sank the town underground and killed over 1100 people, the remaining survivors suffered physical and psychological trauma. Dr. Hill, who was brought to Glore Valley to treat the survivors, secretly began experimenting on both them and town visitors, using the death loop to examine their fears. After several nights, he discovered that when exposed to the trauma, people slowly transformed into Wendigos. Over the next two decades, Hill continued to oversee Glore Valley and experiment with the loop, luring many new subjects to the town.

2023

In 2023, Melanie found herself trapped in the death loop where she is killed 12 times. On her last 13th night, she is chased by the Wendigo underground, but manages to escape to the surface. Unfortunately, the Slasher is waiting for her and despite Melanie's pleas for mercy, he kills her, resulting in Melanie transforming into the Wendigo.

2024

One year later, in 2024, Melanie's sister Clover and her friends Max, Megan, Nina and Abe travel to Glore Valley following Melanie's trail. Stopping at a reception center to wait out the heavy rain, Nina writes her name on the register, unknowingly starting the loop. As night falls, the group encounters the Slasher who kills them one by one. After Clover is killed last, the hourglass turns over and the group finds themselves alive at the beginning of the night.

On Night 2, as the group tries to figure out what just happened to them, Megan is possessed and killed by the Spirits. Afterward, an invisible force lures Clover outside and drags her to a shack where she is possessed by the Witch. While Max goes after Clover, Abe and Nina attempt to escape in a car, but are stopped by one of the Giants before they are both killed by the Slasher. Meanwhile, a possessed Clover kills Max and leaves the shack, after which the Slasher also kills her.

On Night 3, the group tries to survive by hiding in the bathroom. Waiting for dawn, they decide to drink the tap water, but it turns out to be the Bad Water. Moments later, the group starts exploding one by one and before Clover dies, she meets Hill.

On Night 4, the group explores the basement and find some old newspapers and VHS tapes, through which they learn the truth of Glore Valley's past and Hill's identity. After contacting Hill by radio, Clover, Max and Megan head into the woods where they are attacked by the Wendigos (including Melanie), one of whom kills Megan. Meanwhile, at a reception center, Nina and Abe are found and killed by the Slasher. Choosing to start the night over, Max kills Clover before committing suicide by drinking the Bad Water.

Throughout Nights 5-12, the group encounters and is killed by various threats, including the Parasite Worms, the Cloaked Man, the Wendigos and the Siren Alarm. They don't remember the events of the previous nights, so they use Abe's phone, which has all the records saved. After everyone except Megan die on the last night, she decides to follow Hill, but ends up captured.

On their last 13th night, the group goes after Megan through the mines, but are forced to split up, with Max, Nina and Abe fighting and killing the Slasher, and Clover going to the Sanatorium, where she also fights and kills Wendigo Melanie. After finding Megan, Clover confronts Hill and kills him by secretly putting the Bad Water in his coffee. The two groups separately escape from the Wendigos and make their way to the surface just as dawn breaks. With the loop broken, all five friends leave Glore Valley.

However, the ending suggests that Hill is still alive and currently plans to use the death loop to experiment on people in new location: a snowy lodge.

Rules

The death loop is shown to have the following rules:

1. In order to activate the loop, two actions are required: entering Glore Valley's territory and writing one's name in the register at the reception centre. After that, night falls and the loop starts, with the moment the name was written acting as the starting point. With each new iteration, the same name reappears in the register, showing the number of loops already traversed.
2. After the loop starts, the hourglass is turned over by the mechanism and the sand begins to flow, showing how much time is left until dawn. Once the sand runs out, the hourglass is either turned over again if everyone died, starting a new night, or left empty if someone survived, completing the loop.
3. With each restart, time rewinds back to the starting point. Survivors regain their memories from the previous night (though at some point they start to forget about past loops for unknown reasons) and also exhibit bruises in place of their fatal wounds, but they eventually disappear. The environment also returns to its original state, with some objects being exceptions and retaining changes throughout all nights (register, Abe's phone).
4. In order to continually maintain fear and prevent adaptation, each night introduces a new and unexpected threat, which sometimes comes with a new location. Some appear exclusively for one night, while others go on subsequent nights. All threats embody the psyche of one person, usually the most emotionally vulnerable if it is a group (in the movie, it's Clover's fears). Visitors who failed to escape the loop also appear as spirits or Wendigos to hunt down current survivors.
5. Surviving until dawn is the only way to escape the loop, but according to Dr. Hill, for it to work, one of the survivors has to die (whether it's actually true or Hill was lying to the group is unknown). Moreover, those who were killed will stay dead permanently.
6. The survivors have only 13 lives. With each loop passed, they slowly transform into the Wendigo, which includes losing hair, growing pointy teeth, extending nails, and a protruding spine. The signature also becomes increasingly illegible. If a person wastes all their lives and fails to escape the loop, they either disappear or irreversibly turn into the Wendigo.

Effects

The Death Loop is a supernatural phenomenon in which victims are condemned to endlessly relive their own demise.

• Time Loop: the death loop generates a repetitive cycle. Each time a person dies, they are brought back to the beginning of the same night, trapped in an endless loop.
• Manifestation of the psyche: the death loop can manifest, in different ways, the psyche, feelings and traumas of those trapped in it.
  • Manifestation of Fears: the death loop can physically manifest a person’s fears, taking the form of people or monsters.
  • Manifestation of Psychological Disorders: it can also materialize an individual’s psychological troubles in various disturbing forms.
• Environmental Transformation: with each loop, the environment changes and distorts, pushing victims toward absolute terror.
• Memory Alteration: the death loop erases and distorts memory, causing victims to lose track of time and the number of loops they have endured.
• Transformation of the Victims: the more loops a person goes through, the more their body and mind twist, gradually turning them into a savage creature, a Wendigo.

Victims

Signatures

List of known victims who wrote their name in the register and started the death loop:

• Nina Riley (13 names)
• Melanie Paul (13 names)
• Isabella Jacobsen (at least 10 names)
• Ryan Lewis (9 names)
• Mary Hall (9 names)
• Barbara Murphey (11 names)
• Remi Lee (5 names)
• Edward White (at least 5 names)
• Kimberly Richardson (6 names)
• Stephanie Price (10 names)

Threats

List of all known threats that have been presented in the death loop:

• The Slasher: A quiet and ruthless serial killer wearing a miner's suit and broken skull mask. His main weapon is a pickaxe, though he is capable of killing with any other weapon (such as a knife or sledgehammer) or just using his bare hands. The Slasher is pretty durable and able to withstand most attacks against himself, with the group having to use his own sledgehammer to kill him.
• The Glore Spirits: Numerous souls of Glore Valley's previous visitors who failed to escape the loop and died permanently. They are able to possess people sensitive to the supernatural and subsequently kill them. Abe suggests that possession can be contagious and pass on to another person upon physical contact, however, whether this is true or not is never shown.
• The Glore Hag Witch: A sick old woman living in an abandoned shack. Breathes through an oxygen mask, which she can also use to possess victims, with her body drying up and crumbling in the process. Possessed people have completely black eyes and wear one of her multiple white masks in a shack. The possession ends only after the victim dies, with the Witch disappearing as well.
• The Giants: Colossal humanoid creatures towering above the trees. They have noticeably wide torsos and elongated arms. Presumably the Giants' main role is to guard the borders of Glore Valley so that victims are unable to escape the town.
• The Bad Water: Seemingly ordinary water that has the ability to blow up anyone who drinks it, even if it's just a couple of drops. Before the explosion, victims sometimes start coughing violently and even spitting up some blood and internal organs.
• The Wendigos: Glore Valley's previous visitors who failed to escape the loop and under the influence of trauma turned into creatures with insatiable hunger. Despite their lean build, they are quite agile and strong, able to tear their prey into pieces with their sharp teeth and claws. While they are tough, they can still be killed by simple means, such as stabbing.
• The Werewolf: A man turning into a wolf at the full moon. It is unknown whether he appears in the loop, though Max finds sketches of the Werewolf on a table in the witch's shack on Night 2.
• The Siren Alarm: Air raid siren capable of producing sound loud enough to cause pain and internal bleeding in the victims. However, it hasn't been shown how the Siren exactly kills them, though it's either by causing blood loss or by exploding.
• The Parasite Worms: Small, nimble worms that can easily penetrate the skin and cause necrosis, which slowly spreads through the body. Apparently the process is painless, as Clover felt nothing when the Parasite ate her face.
• The Cloaked Man: A mysterious humanoid creature wearing an all-black cloak and a simple white mask. It is very tall, as it has to slightly tilt its head to pass through the hallway.

Gallery

Posters of missing visitors who were trapped in the death loop

Updated missing posters, which now includes Megan, Max, Clover, Abe and Nina (Melanie is also visible)

Signatures in the register

Trivia

• It seems that only people who have suffered a great trauma can also activate the loop.
• The idea of the time loop is based on Until Dawn's gameplay mechanic, which allows the player to replay the story after finishing it, thus "reversing" time.
• The hourglass is a reference to the game cover art, which also features an hourglass.
• The survivors having 13 lives refers to the belief that 13 is an unlucky number.
• Of all the threats in the movie, only three of them are revealed to have a clear theme:
  • The Slasher - powerless feeling.
  • The Glore Hag Witch - repression.
  • Bad Water - self-destructive tendencies (according to Hill, it's very rare).
• Out of all the deaths presented in the movie, Clover's death in Night 4 is the only one that was not caused by a threat, but by another survivor (Max).
• In the VHS tape, the male subject transforms into the Wendigo in 11 nights instead of 13, with Hill calling it "the most in my experiments so far," suggesting that different people require different numbers of loops to transform depending on their trauma.
  • Also, some past visitors have left less than 13 signatures, but it is unknown whether they had different numbers of nights, survived until dawn or died permanently while the rest of their group survived.
• Originally, Night 4 was supposed to be focused on the Werewolf. However, for unknown reasons, it was removed and replaced with the Wendigos instead.
• In the deleted alternate ending, it is revealed that the loop was originally created by the Slumbering Gods (The Giants) instead of Hill and served as a curse to punish the inhabitants of Glore Valley for awakening them by mining.