Inside Netflix’s ‘Unhinged’ Horror Game, Made in Secret Collaboration With David Fincher and ‘Weapons’ Director Zach Cregger
SPOILER ALERT: This article contains spoilers for Night School Studio’s new horror game “Unhinged,” now available on Netflix.
David Fincher, “Weapons” filmmaker Zach Cregger and Night School Studios founder and studio director Sean Krankel want you to die while playing the new Netflix horror video game, “Unhinged.”
“At least once,” according to Krankel.
Related Stories
Spotify Reverts iPhone App Icon to Original Version, Dropping Controversial Disco-Ball Logo
Comedian Adam Friedland to Relaunch Show on Spotify, Plus New World Cup-Focused Series With Ringer
In “Unhinged,” players take on the role of Ava (voiced by Zoë Kravitz), a woman who wakes up during an intense storm that has knocked out her power. The game, which can be played on Netflix via subscribers’ TVs or computers, has you use your real-life phone as your controller, which acts as your flashlight and way to call and text your best friend Claire (Sadie Sink) and building super Ben (Troy Baker), while also being the way you move around and make choices. And those choices become increasingly important as you discover a killer is afoot and coming for you and the other remaining building residents.
Popular on Variety
Developed by the Netflix-owned Night School Studios in secret collaboration with Fincher and Cregger (the two directors got a “Special Thanks” acknowledgement in the game’s credits when it was released Tuesday, but Netflix has not commented on their inclusion in the process beyond confirming their creative involvement to Variety), “Unhinged” is a survival game that includes “about 10 times” the player could die throughout the story, which will take you roughly more than 30 minutes to play.
At the very first point offered, Krankel said the team made the countdown timer to take an action to save yourself “intentionally kind of short” in hopes of killing the player off and giving them a taste for the game they were playing. And this is done without the user losing all their progress, as they will start up again in that same place after first listening to the cops discuss their gruesome murder at the hands of the killer.
“Every time you do die, the cops comment on the specifics of that crime scene,” Krankel told Variety. “If you die during that Noah scene, he’ll talk about both of you and them figuring that out. So there’s actually a bunch of little storytelling that happens just between the dumb-cop banter for each of those.”
Krankel and the team at Night School Studios (best known for “Oxenfree” and “Oxenfree II”) spent a lot of time figuring out how much agency the player should have in the game, which was put into development following Netflix’s acquisition of the game studio in 2021.
“When you start a project like this, sometimes there is a muscle memory that tells you we should have five different endings, 10 different endings,” Krankel said. “Or, ‘Hey, this studio, specifically, has spent the last 10 years making branchy game — so there was a lot of debate early on about, how branchy should it be, especially the dialogue piece. And when we started with dialogue and realized that every time you were making a dialogue choice in a story like this, that is as propulsive as it is, it was not going well. It felt weird and labored and just wasn’t right. And we felt like the magic trick between the two talking, and the act of being able to make a call or turn on your phone or not, or hang up on somebody, that was the choice that felt more interesting. So there is branching happening under the hood a lot, but it is not big branchy outcomes for the story. Rather, it is branchiness for how you interact with Ben and Claire and make your way through it.”
For example, Krankel says he’s noticed “a lot of people who play and are super annoyed with Claire and don’t trust her from the beginning, and then when she gets to the door, they’re like, ‘Do not open that damn door! She’s going to kill you!’ I love that.”
Minus all the different ways (and whens) to die, your choices will ultimately lead you to one “happy” ending, which sees Ava survive the night — and receive a final message from super-turned-killer Ben the next day that lets the player know he’s still around, too.
“The decision behind that was to make sure that it really was a singular piece that people could talk about, like a great movie with great twists and if you want to play it again, it’s not because it’s to see a bunch of different outcomes, it’s because you’re like, I need my friend to see this crazy ass game,” Krankel said.
That ending was not necessarily intended to set up another game — though Krankel says he’s not opposed to an “Unhinged 2” — but a particularly horrific choice made by Krankel, Fincher, Cregger and the “Unhinged” team.
“[The call] did happen after you loaded him up full of nails. Before the police got there, he got away. And he is still out in the wild and we don’t really know where,” Krankel said. “It’s not done specifically for a sequel, because I would even have a hard time today telling you what a worthwhile follow up to that would be with those characters. It was more to feel very creepy and to really just lean into that.”
But even in that final moment, the game lets you decide how you want to experience the horror: “You could have just not answered it, and then you just go off and the credits roll,” Krankel said.
Fincher and Cregger weren’t the only big names that Krankel and Night School worked with for the title, which stars Kravitz, Sink and prolific video game voice actor Troy Baker (“The Last of Us,” “Indiana Jones and the Great Circle”). Krankel says they had access to that high-caliber because “the casting team for this game is the team that works on film and TV and everything else” at Netflix.
“This was the thing that helped with making something so weird and not just a game, because we did really treat it as like a playable, interactive thriller,” Krankel said. “And I hate having these terms that are squishy — ‘it’s a transmedia this’ and ‘it’s a transmedia that’ — but we were like, let’s do right by this concept, which is a playable ride, essentially, that has a story. I truly believe it wouldn’t work without a great story under the hood. Otherwise, it would be a tech demo with a few gorey beats. So we really prioritize the story first and even if it happens fast, like the Ava and Claire relationship, and the two of them having this ‘Rear Window’-esque kind of thing, where she can see and be a lifeline at times, that was foundation number one, not, let’s watch somebody’s entrails get pulled out. It was, how do we have these two best friends who are both equally capable get through this crazy situation?”
Whatever you want to call it, “Unhinged” is a playable piece of media, so Night School still approached it as a game — but had to think through what that really means at its core when there’s no traditional controller involved in the game mechanics.
“It seemed like a monumental challenge in the beginning, because we were like, how do we replicate the types of inputs that we are familiar with from other games?” Krankel said. “And we had to just break our brains apart, and it took a long time for folks on the team, myself included, to not go, ‘It’s not a game if you don’t X.’ Like, ‘It’s not a game if I can’t literally choose exactly where I go.’ The flip side of that is like, it’s also not a good game if I am playing a first-person game and I’m walking into a wall, looking at my shoes or at a plant when a dude’s trying to kill me. Or when I’m trying to look around, I don’t need to circle strafe him and snipe him and stuff like that. So I love for our team to come from a place of player fantasy, and that player fantasy sometimes can just be expressed through passive moments. Sometimes that player fantasy can be expressed through a simple toy that just feels good, briefly. Now, for the narrative team, which is my whole area of focus is, I think we have the benefit of going well, the player’s fantasy is embodying a character and that could play out in a cut scene, or that could play out in just the bespoke nail gun sequence. But that doesn’t mean we need to make a great nail gun game that you get better at and upgrade and all that stuff.”
Krankel says what matters to him is “how do we use the phone in a way that the best version — and I know we’re not always going to hit it — is you go, this wouldn’t have been as good on any other thing.”
“And I believe that’s where we landed on this one,” he said. “You probably could use a controller that has a speaker on it to do some of it — but you wouldn’t have a phone that you’re looking at, and frustrating texts that you’re trying to swipe away, and turning your flashlight on and off. So it means there’s gonna be a lot of bespoke new stuff game after game, but I also think that’s the most exciting stuff.”
Before players enter the world of “Unhinged,” they will see an 18-and-up content rating that warns of the gore to come. But exactly how bloody did Fincher, Cregger and Night School want to make it and how much did they end up leaving to the imagination?
“There are some extremely grotesque moments, but we didn’t want to go there to make it like ‘Saw’ level, front to back, that level of stuff,” Krankel said. “But we did want you to feel really uncomfortable at times.”
At the climax of the horror game, Ava pulls her nailed-down hands up off a table and uses the nails to reload her nail gun and (almost) fatally shoot the killer landlord Ben. Krankel says “if it didn’t end also in her reusing those nails and loading them up, then we wouldn’t have done that. But the fact that that gruesomeness got a fast follow of equal gruesomeness just felt right for us.”
“We have to remind ourselves a lot that there’s so much great horror storytelling,” Krankel said. “Obviously, horror is having a total renaissance right now with ‘Backrooms, ‘Obsession,’ ‘Weapons,’ and all these titles in the last two years. We didn’t have awareness of all of them, but it’s more to say, other creators are going hard, and we’re like, ‘Let’s just go hard on this, Let’s not shy away from it.'”
Jump to Comments Loading comments...Fetterman: The 'Dirtbag Left' Is Clearly Anti-America
Fetterman: The ‘Dirtbag Left’ Is Clearly Anti-America
Pam Key30 Jun 2026
Sunday at the Kennedy Center’s Mark Twain Prize event, Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) told Fox News that the “dirtbag left” are “clearly anti-America,” referring to the two members of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) who won primaries in New York and Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner.
Fetterman said, “And in like it. It was a really it was a really big night for the dirtbag left. You know, last week, without a doubt. And some of the crazy things that they’ve said. You know, like clearly anti-America, you know, anti Western civilization. And they actually one of them was even part of the groups they wanted to end all Western civilization.”
He added, “So, overall, that is a wing of the party without a doubt. But they’re not Democrats. They’re not socialists, several of them, many of them have actually are an avowed communist. So between P hustle in Maine and some of the other winners, you know, in New York, that’s, you know, they should form their own party and run on all the things that they’ve had to do on, on social media.”
Comedian and host of HBO’s “Real Time,” Bill Maher, received the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor in a star-studded ceremony.
Follow Pam Key on X @pamkeyNEN
Trump Shares Image of 'Golden Gift' to White House for America's 250th
President Trump Shares Image of ‘Golden Gift to the White House’ for America’s 250th Birthday
President Donald Trump on Monday shared an image of a golden bald eagle adorning the White House, the post coming as America readies to celebrate its 250th birthday on Saturday.
In his social media post, Trump wrote, “A Golden Gift to the White House for its 250th Birthday Year!” along with a picture of the eagle:
The image of the eagle attached to the Truman Balcony appeared to be AI-generated, according to People, which pointed to photographs taken by Andrew Leyden, a freelance photographer, after the president shared the image.
“This is what the Truman Balcony looks like at 9:30pm Monday night,” Leyden wrote in a post on X:
However, Trump’s post highlighted the significance of the bald eagle, which is America’s iconic national symbol.
“As the United States prepares to celebrate 250 years of independence on July 4, 2026, one symbol rises above the rest. A bird that is fierce, feathered, and was almost lost to history,” according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service:
The America 250 celebration invites us to reflect on our nation’s journey: where we’ve been, what we’ve protected, and who we’ve become. And no story captures that narrative better than the bald eagle.
Nearly wiped from the skies of the lower 48 states, the bald eagle’s comeback is a distinctly American tale of resilience. It’s a reminder that our values of freedom, strength, and determination, are part of the fabric of this great nation.
It is interesting to note that President Harry Truman in 1948 launched a major reconstruction of the White House’s interior, “expanding its foundation and footprint — preserving only its exterior walls. The Truman Balcony provided the first family with a private outdoor space and enhanced the building’s aesthetics,” the White House’s website read.
Truman’s grandson, Clifton Truman Daniel, in 2020 told the White House Historical Association his grandfather was a “good president” who had a “good sense of humor and good common sense.”
Daniel said that during Truman’s presidency, the White House was in need of care and updates.
When renovations began, Daniel said, “My grandfather would not let them touch the stone exterior because the White House is a symbol of this country, a symbol of our democracy. Outside space was very important to him, which is why my grandfather built the Truman balcony out of funds he had saved, his White House budget. They enjoyed it and so have presidential families ever since.”
“I think the greatest lesson he showed this country was showing us all that a farmer, a small businessman, a soldier, can rise to the highest office in this land and do a better job of it than almost anybody else,” he added:
Along with cleaning up monuments and reducing crime in Washington, DC, President Trump has also undertaken renovation efforts at the White House.
In July of 2025, he announced plans to expand the complex with a $200 million, privately funded ballroom that would solve space constraints while also preserving the home, Breitbart News reported.
“The current structure at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue was mostly reconstructed 73 years ago by Harry Truman,” the outlet noted in October while also highlighting the fact it has endured so much over the years but remains a special place in the hearts of citizens.
