[Film Review] Stay Alive (2006)

The 2000s were a special time if you liked movies about dead, older women using inventive ways to return from the dead and kill people. 2003 gave us the Tooth Fairy fable Darkness Falls, 2007 saw James Wan dive into the world of ventriloquist dummies with Dead Silence, and in between both these movies we got Stay Alive (2006). While the story of Stay Alive is fictional, the villain is based on the legend of Elizabeth Bathory and her love of bathing in the blood of virgins in order to keep herself young. 

The film opens with a video game sequence showing Loomis (Milo Ventimiglia) playing a game he’s beta testing called Stay Alive. After a run-in with a lot of creepy characters, Loomis’ character is pushed off a staircase and hung. Later that night, Loomis has a creepy encounter in the kitchen with a shadowy figure, finds his roommates brutally murdered, and stumbles off the staircase in the kerfuffle, ending up dead in an eerily similar way to his game character.

Loomis is a lifelong friend of Hutch (Jon Foster), and at Loomis’ funeral, he is gifted a bag of video games, including the beta version of Stay Alive. Because Hutch and his friends have never heard of this new horror game and are keen to have a gaming session to remember Loomis, Hutch invites Swink (Frankie Muniz), siblings October (Sophia Bush) and Phin (Jimmi Simpson), his boss Miller (Adam Goldberg), and Abigail (Samaire Armstrong), who he met at Loomis’ funeral, over to his apartment so they can experience Dead Alive. In order to start playing the game, the group must recite an incantation. While Swink believes voice activation is the sign of next-level technology, it turns out there could be something far more sinister at work.

After Miller is killed in his office, Hutch realises that there may be a connection between the in-game deaths and the murders in real life. The group quickly work out that if you die in the game, then you die for real, and you only have one life to work with. And while they make the pretty obvious choice to stop playing the game from then on, it turns out Elizabeth Bathory (Maria Kalinina) isn’t above a little cheating, forcing the game to continue even when the characters don’t want to participate. 

The opening of Stay Alive could be something straight out of Silent Hill (1999) or Resident Evil (1996), ensuring that fans of both scary movies and horror video games feel right at home as soon as the film starts. One thing that works particularly well about Stay Alive is that the clips we get to see of the video game itself make it look like something you would want to play. There are in-depth levels of character customisation, creepy villains, a clear objective for the players, and pretty gnarly death scenes. If Stay Alive had been released as a spin-off game, I could see it being a great way to spend an evening with your friends, as long as you could avoid dying. 

With a runtime of 86 minutes, Stay Alive doesn’t waste a lot of time getting into things. This means that Hutch and his friends manage to figure out what is going on pretty quickly. Rather than fall into the research hole that a lot of horror movies do, Stay Alive keeps things moving, treating us to frequent deaths, and regular creepy video game sequences. Instead, October shouts facts about Elizabeth Bathory down the phone to Hutch as he drives from one location to the next, Abigail and Hutch split up when they reach the Gerouge Plantation and each makes separate, significant discoveries, and Hutch finds the clue he needs the first time when he goes to explore Loomis’ house. It means we never have to wait too long between the scares but we still get to explore the lore behind Stay Alive’s creation without any padding.

While we get some insight into the creation of the video game and where it was made, there’s not a lot of time spent explaining who actually made the game, which is probably to the film’s benefit. Sometimes films like this can fall apart when it comes to the third act, and lots of time can get wasted on explanations that don’t aid the scares anyway. Rather than risk dampening the creepiness of the haunted video game, Stay Alive steers away from too much explanation, and still manages to give us a satisfying ending that relies more on October’s gothy knowledge of witches and local legends than it does on tying up all the loose ends.

Stay Alive does something impressive for a horror film based around technology by giving us  a film that still feels relevant now even though technology has vastly improved. Movies like The Ring (2002) gave us a creepy videotape, but when technology like DVDs and Blu-Rays started to take over, this meant that you were more likely to be safe purely due to the limited access to VHS players. Even the invention of mobile phones ensured that horror films constantly have to factor phones into the stories, either having characters lose their phone or having the action take place somewhere where the characters can’t get a signal. 

However, even though the graphics in Stay Alive look dated, horror video games are still as popular as ever. Even 15 years after its release, though the consoles may have changed, there’s still the risk that the next horror game you pick up could be a cursed one. If an unseen force can create a video game that’s designed to kill you, I’m sure they can keep up with the console wars at the same time. 

Overall, Stay Alive is a great movie that really stands out as something unique in the strange array of horror movies we were given in the 2000s. It’s a mix of tech horror, revenge horror, and a scary video game. While the character names date the film incredibly, and things like Abigail constantly carrying an old, oversized polaroid camera to mark herself as the quirky girl versus October’s angry goth character are a bit of a stretch, on the whole the main cast are great. Hutch is a likeable main character with a tragic backstory and a strong desire to protect his friends. Supporting cast members like Sophia Bush are fantastic, and I’m glad they made October cry more than once because that’s where Sophia really gets to shine. 

Elizabeth Bathory has featured or been alluded to in a number of horror movies, and yet, Stay Alive still manages to make her a unique villain. The creepy noise that practically makes your screen vibrate, the added lore of fending Elizabeth off using roses, and Elizabeth’s transition from a video game ghost to a real-life threat are all amazing.

Video game horror films are often seen as hit or miss but don’t let Stay Alive’s inclusion in this subgenre put you off. This film features some great death scenes, an innovative tech curse, a superb villain, and a fast-paced story centred around a great group of friends. It’s so achingly 2006 it hurts, but having seen Stay Alive in the cinema 15 years ago, and having watched it many times on DVD since, it never gets any less fun!

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