STAY ALIVE

STAY ALIVE. William Brent Bell, dir., co-script with Matthew Peterman. USA: Hollywood Pictures, Spyglass Entertainment, and Endgame Entertainment (prod.) / Buena Vista (dist.), 2006.

According to John Anderson in Variety on line, "The source of all STAY ALIVE evil is Elizabeth Bathory, a reputed inspiration for Bram Stoker's Dracula and one of 16th-century Eastern Europe's leading sadists. In the script by Bell and Matthew Peterman, Bathory is headquartered at a Louisiana plantation rather than in Hungary, but, more importantly, she's inside a video game called Stay Alive, which acts out in real life the gruesome murders that players think are only part of the game." Anderson finds novel the premise "of possessed computer games," which recommends the film for study, though not viewing for entertainment,, format for titles regularized for clarity. Initial compiler Rich Erlich's student David Schmidt says that Bathory isn't trapped in the software of the game but has (demonically) possessed it; cf. 976-EVIL and D. Cronenberg's eXistenZ.