Stay Alive (2006)

“Somebody ran my brother down in a horse-drawn carriage. I'm gonna find whoever did it, and hurt them.” - October Bantum

Full disclosure, Stay Alive wasn’t on the original list for Shocktober 2013. Or, actually any other year. I had never seen it, but Steve had and recommended it on our Piercing the Veil Shocktober Special, which you can listen to at this link. He talked it up pretty well, to the point in fact that I ordered it online while he was still speaking about it. Then, we got some feedback indicating that it was a fan favourite out there. Obviously, I was missing out.

I think that one of the reasons I hadn’t bothered with the film was the image on the DVD box cover. There’s so much red on it that I hadn’t noticed there was a game controller in the picture (see photo). I just glanced and wrote it off as another Hostel style torture movie. Yeah – I got that wrong. The actual plot is pretty good, as this is one of the first horror gaming movies. Meaning that the cast are playing a horror video game, and whatever happens to them in the game, however they die – they’ll die that was for real. That notion appeals and intrigues me from the get-go.

The game in question is called Stay Alive, and the opening reel shows us Loomis Crowley (Milo Ventimiglia) and his apartment sharing friends playing the pre-release version of the game with dire consequences. As Loomis’ character is hanged, then shortly afterward – so is he. We don’t see what happens to the others, but we know it’s fatal.

At Milo’s funeral, a bagful of games is handed to his brother Hutch (Jon Foster) – including a beta version of Stay Alive.

Stay Alive is a first-person shooter (as the kids say) horror survival game, based on the all-too real story of Elizabeth Bathory who actually existed with some liberties being taken with her story. For example, in the game she operates in Louisiana, whereas in real life she lived in Hungary. Not the first time extreme liberties have been taken with her, Hammer’s Countess Dracula had her portrayed by Ingrid Pitt as a woman who remained young by bathing in the blood of virgins. But, in real life she did try that method, and loved a bit of torture and sadism.

The game starts outside a plantation mansion, taking the players through a cemetery full of zombie children before entering the mansion itself, facing further horrors and then there’s a tower. It’s pretty intense for 2006, but having played a couple of horror games with Steve, including one on a VR headset – I can confidently say the industry has moved on quite a bit.

As the game progresses, so does the difficulty level. And as the difficulty level increases, so does the player’s chances of dying and the game being over. The game will only begin when the players repeat an onscreen prayer, requesting that all who resist perish so their blood can keep the Countess alive and young.

Hutch and his friends begin to play, their first session sees a player whose character had strayed away from the others die, stabbed with a pair of oversized scissors by Countess Bathory.

As the game progresses, so does the mortality rate of the players until they decide to simply stop playing. But the Countess will have none of it – she starts cheating and starts killing players who haven’t died in the game. Luckily, the mansion in the game is in Louisiana, where the players are based, so they discover its location, find the Countess’ remains and burn them.

However – the game has now gone to mass production, and as eager players start to recite the opening prayer, we see Bathory in her tower, smiling as she looks out of the window.

That’s a quick overview of the movie, but the question is; does it work? Yes, I’d say it does. It isn’t particularly frightening, once you’ve seen the Countess the first time, her appearance loses its shock value, and we see her pretty early on. But having said that, it’s an entertaining, fun way to while away an evening, and it’s a far better film than, say, Exorcist II: The Heretic.