Stay Alive is a 2006 American horror movie. It was directed by William Brent Bell a fairly unknown director up until this creation, having not directed anything since you can make up your mind about what that tells you.

The film is based around a one-person shooter survival game called Stay Alive in which the players are transported into a 16th century nightmare, based upon the real life story of Countess Elizabeth Bathory, also known as the Blood Countess; a blood thirsty Romanian, who, according to legendary accounts would bathe in the blood of virgin girls in order to retain her youthful looks. Yikes! The gothic back story to this film will have you wanting to know more even after it’s finished, to the extent that there has been a huge demand for the actual video game.

It involves a bunch of teenage gamers getting hold of the unrated video game and playing until they are unfortunate enough to see “Game Over” appearing on their screen, and when this chick gets involved their life is definitely over. Unfortunately for our young gamers the game doesn’t end at the off switch, it slowly but surely moves its way into real life and it’s a race against time before their game is over for good.

The idea itself is fairly original since there has been no other film like it, the only comparison that could be made is with Japanese horror, The Ring, video tapes…video games they’re similar enough. The film has a few familiar faces such as Sophia Bush (One Tree Hill) as gothic chick, October (original huh?), Frankie Muniz ( Malcolm in the Middle), as computer whiz kid, Swink, Samaire Armstrong (The O.C) as innocent hottie, Abigail, among others such as Milo Ventimiglia and Adam Goldberg who play the secondary characters and are killed off pretty quickly.

Stay Alive will have avid gamers out there thinking again before they pick up their controllers.