Buena Vista Pictures DistributionLooking back from 2026, it’s almost impossible to believe that video games were once treated as a flippant, dead-end hobby reserved for burnouts and social outcasts. In a world where game streamers can potentially earn millions and the video game industry itself has generated a remarkable $180 billion in revenue annually since 2022 (factoring in the ubiquity of mobile games), it’s ridiculous to think of that there was a time when games themselves were a hotly contested cultural issue for a variety of reasons — from the fear of inspiring a sedentary, lethargic lifestyle to concerns that they would compel people to do real-life harm in a discussion that echoed the Dungeons and Dragons controversy at the height of the Satanic Panic.It’s true that video games and the virtual escapist potential they represent has become completely normalized in mainstream society, which makes it so funny (and occasionally interesting) to go back and revisit certain relics from when gaming was considered “niche” and incomprehensible. There are evocative, thought-provoking high points like the original Tron or David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ, which show us brilliantly realized virtual worlds or interrogate the very idea of simulated reality… and then there’s 2006’s Stay Alive, a film that just grazes up against some prescient and thoughtful ideas across the span of its mind-numbing and yet stupidly entertaining 86 minutes.“There are 100 million gamers in America,” proclaims the text accompanying the film’s trailer, “and one in four of them is addicted.” It’s obvious that the aim of Stay Alive’s horror conceit is to frame video games with a seductive, dangerous allure. In the movie, a group of friends (including Westworld’s Jimmi Simpson as the described video game addict, Frankie Muniz as the computer whiz nerd-in-the-chair expert, and an aggressively goth Sophia Bush) start to play the titular video game only to unwittingly invoke the spirit of notorious serial killer Elizabeth Bathory through a seance in the title screen. Each of them starts dying one-by-one in the manner they died in the game, which sounds like it should lead to some Final Destination style Rube Goldberg setpieces. But instead the film opts for supernatural hooks-and-chains carnage that feels like leftovers from Hollywood’s obsession with the Saw aesthetic.Everything about Stay Alive feels like a movie firmly rooted in the year it was made, from its bias against gamers as a concept synonymous with “nerd” or “loser,” to the Y2K-era teen fashion. With its age comes a bit of an outsider unfamiliarity with gaming culture, but there are some aspects that feel surprisingly authentic in retrospect. The first time our main characters play the game, there's a pregnant anticipation in the air that feels distinctly reminiscent of buying a game like Silent Hill 2 at launch and booting it up for the first time surrounded by friends all just as excited and tense as you are. That sort of communal, tactile gaming experience doesn't exist as much in person as a result of the age of online multiplayer and Cloud gaming.The average gamer in 2006, apparently. | Buena Vista PicturesFor a movie from the era it belongs to, there's also a fair bit that Stay Alive gets right about the look and immersion of a horror game. The aesthetic of the haunted Bathory mansion that the game drops players into, with its decaying exterior and the fog-choked mausoleum on the land, looks like it was ripped straight from an early Resident Evil game, and the four-player shooter mechanics look like some kind of third-person arcade rail shooter like The House of the Dead.However, all these years later, it's remarkable that the game Stay Alive most resembles is the immensely popular Dead by Daylight, a 4v1 asymmetric multiplayer horror game. With the central premise of the movie being that death in the virtual world translates to real-life death, along with the presence of Elizabeth Bathory’s vengeful ghost as the sole antagonist, means that the game is a rather extreme spin on the “outlast the killer” setup that Dead by Daylight popularized. Throw in those familiar looking chains and hooks and it feels like Bathory could fit in right alongside The Trapper and The Wraith as base-game characters.The game's Bathory manor could be a location from Resident Evil 4. | Buena Vista Pictures While the film falls short of being genuinely scary, in an abstract sense it captures the draw of horror games so well — even though nobody is actually dying from fright while playing them, the adrenaline rush and tense nerves and feelings of dread that come from playing them are as close to real as we can get, and there's a morbid thrill that comes from cheating death in a virtual sense. For a split-second, when a zombie kills you in Resident Evil or a Killer snatches you up in Dead by Daylight, that immediate jolt to the system is preying on a real survival instinct, a real fear of a permanent Game Over. Even though Stay Alive can't escape its shlocky teen horror trappings, it does understand just what it is that makes so many people fall victim to the siren song of horror gaming.Stay Alive is available to rent on Prime Video and other digital platforms.