Years before making horror films like The Boy, this year’s Separation, the upcoming Orphan: First Kill, and The Devil Inside, William Brent Bell made his debut on the horror scene with 2006’s Stay Alive, which Ryan Larson recently revisited in his BD column You Aughta Know.
“Today, Stay Alive seems ripe for an update,” Ryan wrote in his article celebrating the 15th anniversary of the movie centered on a mysterious video game that bleeds into reality and knocks off its players one-by-one… in real life. We never did get any sort of follow-up to Stay Alive, but chatting with BD’s Boo Crew Podcast, Brent Bell says he still intends on making one!
“When I made that movie, I looked at it like… I love movies like Last Starfighter… I was like, ‘I want that to be what the movie’s gonna be like. When people watch it when they’re 13, 14, 15… when they get older, they’ll always have a soft spot for that movie. Here we are 15 years later and that’s exactly the response it seems to be getting,” Brent Bell notes.
He continues, “People just have a warm spot for this movie. We all knew… [it was] ahead of its time. The studios didn’t understand the video game aspect; they didn’t understand the importance of it. And how it can play as a story element, it didn’t just have to be window dressing. As far as a sequel goes, absolutely. We’ve been talking about that for a while.”
“It was ahead of the curve,” Brent Bell reiterates. “Five-ten years ago it would’ve been on the curve, ya know, riding the curve. Now we’d be behind the curve if we just did a straight video game. But AI and augmented reality… that kind of stuff is blending a video game and reality for real. So yeah, we definitely want to bring that sequel to life. And it’s a priority.”
You can listen to The Boo Crew’s full chat with William Brent Bell below.