Is The Video Game Horror Movie ‘Stay Alive’ Based On A True Story?
Remember 2006’s Stay Alive? A group of young adults find an experimental horror video game, but if they die in the game, they die in real life. In order to close the loop and survive this gaming-related living nightmare, they have to kill the real threat that the game developer used as inspiration. A plot as whacky as that couldn’t possibly be based on a true story, right? Wrong! While the killer video game plot is obvious fiction, the lore the game is based on is very real–and pretty spooky.
The cause of the killer video game.
In Stay Alive, a group of friends are rocked by tragedy when one of them dies a mysterious death. The cops say suicide but the friends aren’t so sure. He was playing this underground beta of a horror survival video game and they all decide to play it in his honor. As they boot it up and recite the incantation at the beginning of the game, nothing seems amiss. Then they start dropping dead in the same way their characters died in the game. Uh oh, we got a spooky haunted video game on our hands.
In the end, they find that the game developer was using an old female serial killer as the inspiration for the game’s murderer. According to the movie, Elizabeth Bathory moved to New Orleans and began bleeding young women dry, using their blood in order to make herself younger. The video game’s incantation was bringing her spirit back in the form of some pixels in a game. They had to find her body and destroy it in order to survive.
While the movie flubbed some of the details, Elizabeth Bathory was real, and her story is way more gruesome than what they show in the film.
Elizabeth Bathory in real life.
On December 30th, 1610, Elizabeth Bathory was eating dinner in her castle. The Castle of Csejte, located in what was then known as the Kingdom of Hungary, was a part of the well-known and respected Bathory estate that Elizabeth had been born into. Just as she’s noshing on her dinner, an investigator busts in to arrest her and four of her servants. The charges? Over 300 witnesses in the nearby town claimed that she abducted and killed more than 600 young women over the years. She tortured them and bathed in their blood, all with the help of her servants.
Rumors had been spreading for decades. Some people insisted that they’d seen her snatch their daughters. Others said they saw weird markings on the dead bodies that’d show up in the area, proving torture. Most just repeated the rumors they’d been hearing for years: That Bathory bathed in the blood of the young women she murdered. That their youthful virgin blood kept her looking young.
Rumors did what they do best, and she became a legend in the area, often with the nickname “The Blood Countess.” Sure enough, when György Thurzó compiled his evidence and came to arrest her, he stated that he’d found a dead woman in the castle and a living one that had been held in confinement. That was proof enough for him.
Elizabeth Bathory and her four servants had trials. The servants turned on their mistress and acted as witnesses against her. Even so, they were sentenced to death and Bathory was sentenced to house arrest. You can probably blame her social standing for that.
Bathory died a few short years later in her sleep, having spent her remaining time roaming her castle. Since her death, she’s become a monster used regularly in folktales and movies alike. Still, there are some historians who believe she was really the victim. They explained that there was never much actual proof of her many atrocities and the reason why she became a pariah was based merely on the testimonies of a town full of people who hated her.
No, Elizabeth Bathory never moved from Hungary to New Orleans. She never entered a video game to kill nerds who were bad at the game. But she was real and she may be one of the most prolific serial killers of all time.