Horror Doubles and Digital Doppelgängers…
With everyone working on a better version of themselves in the New Year, Nina Romain looks at creating a completely new version of yourself onscreen.
With 2025 finally upon us and everyone full of the “New year, new you” self-improvement resolution, we’re all about hitting the gym, eating healthier and saving more money. But how about creating a stronger, faster, fully-armed – if fictitious – version of yourself online?
Twins and other versions of the same person are a strong horror motif. Twins can be little girls in matching dresses, holding hands creepily in orange-carpeted corridors (The Shining) or second schoolers with unnervingly-similar haircuts, planning on destroying their school with their evil powers (Seconds Apart). But what if there is an exact copy of you online and this doppelgänger is better than you at everything?
As cyber-slasher Stay Alive (2006) shows, evil spirits can take on even the improved version of you. You can enter the evil world of Countess Elisabeth Báthory, who has been mysteriously relocated from Hungary (modernday Slovakia) to New Orleans, and her evil spirit is after the unwise players who decide to play the titular horror survival game.
The players Miller, Swink, October, Abigail, Phineus and Hutch create a cooler onscreen version of themselves in Stay Alive with smarter garb and slick new weapons of choice (crossbow, rifle, magic evil-defying roses). But perfection comes at a price in horror, especially when you can’t just start another virtual life and start the game afresh. And the game itself is now out to get its players. But disadvantages of this game include when your digital doppelgänger gets killed by the Countess, you die in reality in a similar manner.
First, the evil Countess hunts down one of the gamers, city-slicker Miller, in his office late at night, and sticks a pair of her shears through his throat. His online persona, equally dapperly-dressed but now deceased, will be found murdered the same way in a dungeon.
The Countess later rides up to the unfortunate gamer Phineus in a horse-driven carriage, and fatally runs him over, leaving his lifeless body on a modernday highway. It’s time for the geek of the group, Swink, to try to fight Báthory and save the group from further mayhem. He created his online self to be taller and stronger than he is in real life, but it’s his real life street-smarts he needs to outwit her, not cyber-muscle. He joins forces with the surviving members and they realise that they need to find her real life mansion, the Gerouge Plantation to outwit her. With the help of a few Gothic roses.
So as we all face 2025 head on, we can reflect that fortunately we aren’t being chased by any undead killers. While it may be tempting, not to mention a lot quicker, to create a better version of yourself online, maybe we should stick to a realistic goal of self-improvement to create a less glamourous version of ourselves in reality, this new year.