Stay Alive

From Angel Heart to The Skeleton Key, horror films have found fertile terrain in the miasmic swamplands and arcane superstitions popularly associated with Louisiana. Stay Alive, the last film to be shot in New Orleans before the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina last summer, makes familiar use of a haunted plantation but otherwise wastes its locations. Director William Brent Bell’s interest in the real world, like that of his videogame-playing protagonists, is subsumed throughout by a preference for the virtual sheen of graphics.

The film’s title refers to an unreleased first-person shooter game in which grisly ‘game over’ moments ominously foreshadow the exact nature of the gamer’s impending demise. When an eager beta tester is killed playing ‘Stay Alive’, a group of his friends take up the multi-player challenge, unwisely reading aloud the game’s introductory incantation and entering a crepuscular game-world of inky skies, a forbidding tower and crypts swarming with preternatural adversaries. That these adversaries include crawling child-women with long dark hair is not the only giveaway that Stay Alive’s plot is borrowed wholesale from Hideo Nakata’s The Ring.

Stay Alive is unlikely to win over audiences wary of movies either centring on computers or adapted from computer games, especially as the film-makers struggle to integrate pixels and reality. Forced by serial tragedy to abandon playing the game in favour of hunting down its developers, survivors Hutch, Abigail and Swink trace the genesis of ‘Stay Alive’ to a decaying plantation mansion recognisable as the one from the game. As Hutch’s climactic search is intercut with Swink’s simultaneous exploration of the mansion in 3D platform mode, the editing is brisk, as if apologetic for making us experience these scenes twice.

At the heart of the mystery is Elizabeth (Erzsébet) Báthory, history’s notorious ‘Blood Countess’, who murdered her way through the young girls of 16th-century Hungary, though it is not explained why her story has been transposed to New Orleans or what her connection with 21st-Century videogame programming might be. It feels broadly logical that her spirit should be reawakened by the game’s opening invocation, but her motives for meticulously replicating the in-game deaths remain vague.

Eschewing the current trend for gratuitous gore in horror cinema, Stay Alive insinuates rather than revels in its gruesome content, though elliptical cutaways suggest a clumsy, late-in-the-day re-editing for a teenage audience more than faith in the viewer’s ability to imagine what is not shown. Otherwise, the uninspired direction adheres to a horror-by-numbers formula over-reliant on amplified musical exclamations, the sounds of clapping thunder and neighing horses.

This review features in the July 2006 issue of Sight & Sound.