Toby Meakins
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Filmography
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A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)
Directed by Wes Craven
influenced Choose or Die (2022)
Themes Visuals
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Direct references to A Nightmare on Elm Street mingle with a concept reminiscent of Black Mirror: Bandersnatch , ghoulish omnipotent Saw isms, the retro fetishism of 8-Bit Christmas and the dumb gamer throwbackiness of Pixels .
Netflix’s Choose or Die draws heavy inspiration from A Nightmare on Elm Street in tone, style, visual references, and even voice-over by Freddy Krueger himself, Robert Englund.
It's a throwback to 1980s horror, right down to the voice cameo of A Nightmare on Elm Street 's Robert Englund.
We see this early on, as a large poster of A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) is plastered against a wall in full view.
It sees Eddie Marsan’s collector of 80s memorabilia (there is a poster of A Nightmare on Elm Street on the wall of his man cave, which is amusing because while the cast list does involve the embodiment of the iconic slasher Freddy Krueger, Robert Englund only has a quick but impressionable voiceover role) unpacking and firing up a forgotten CYOA (choose your adventure) game.
You can feel the Cronenbergian inspirations that flow through Meakins’ debut, in the body horror and themes on display, recalling Videodrome and ExistenZ .
Anyone remember The Lawnmower Man (1992) or Videodrome (1983)?
Un’idea che era stata già esplorata da classici come Videodrome di David Cronenberg (insuperato, cupo apologo sul potere del mezzo televisivo) o, nei decenni successivi, dai giapponesi Ring di Hideo Nakata e Kairo di Kiyoshi Kurosawa.
Though the storyline might sound a little familiar (the plot feels akin to 2008’s Untraceable and 2016’s Nerve ), writer/director Toby Meakins and writers Simon Allen and Matthew James Wilkinson walk the story down a more supernatural path than other voyeuristic manipulation horrors, which results in a surprisingly original movie that manages to shock, distress and entertain.
The fact that it warps reality makes it easy to think o films like Jumanji or th aforementioned Truth or Dare , whereas the game’s prompts reminded me more of the more realistic films like the horror franchise Saw or even Ariel Schulman and Henry Joost’s techno-thriller Nerve , a tiny bit.
We've had horror movies before about video games and technology affecting reality, such as Stay Alive or Pulse .
Similar to horror films like Stay Alive , Truth or Dare , and Would You Rather , this film takes on a game gone wrong to the extreme.
Difetti che potrebbero anche essere perdonabili in presenza di un impianto narrativo solido e votato al puro intrattenimento, sulla scia di quanto visto in progetti analoghi come Stay Alive , Unfriended o Bedevil .
Though the storyline might sound a little familiar (the plot feels akin to 2008’s Untraceable and 2016’s Nerve ), writer/director Toby Meakins and writers Simon Allen and Matthew James Wilkinson walk the story down a more supernatural path than other voyeuristic manipulation horrors, which results in a surprisingly original movie that manages to shock, distress and entertain.
Also getting the short end of the stick is Ryan Gage as a slum-building super whose villainous sleaze is so generic, he might be cannon fodder in a later “Death Wish” movie, his every utterance an invitation to be stomped by Charles Bronson.
Anyone remember The Lawnmower Man (1992) or Videodrome (1983)?
This is the kind of film that, not too long ago, would’ve been the kind of horror picture that could be released in theaters and earned quite a bit of money, like Jeff Wadlow’s Truth or Dare , which this film reminded me of at times.
“Choose or Die” might encourage you to think back to 1983, when “WarGames” ended with a salutary observation about Pentagon nuclear war simulations—“the only winning move is not to play.”
Tom Hanks even encountered one in the 1988 family film, “Big.”
Butterfield and Evans essentially must carry the film squarely on their shoulders, as their characters work to solve the mystery and outsmart the video game like Rachel and Noah trying to resolve Samara’s trauma and beat the ticking-clock element of the cursed videotape in 2002’s iteration of The Ring .
I imagine given a script with a thoroughly developed plot and a bit more originality and focus (I mean there is a nod to The Matrix which is decidedly NOT the 80’s genre), he could make a name for himself in this genre, as the ambience is quite creepy, even if the scenes play out disappointingly.
Though kudos to director Toby Meakins for choosing to stage a couple of the film’s sequences in the fashion of an old green-screen (think Amstrad CPC era) video game – one that sees Kayla try to save her mother from an invading giant rat, rendered in pixels on a screen like an old-school side scroller; and a second that sees Kayla and Isaac driving to their destination in top-down Grand Theft Auto style!
But the movie mostly uses its emptiness to its atmospheric advantage—it gifts its world the isolated feeling of J-Horror (I thought of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s masterpiece Pulse especially), where you have the sense that the planes are falling and the apocalypse is happening… you know, just outside.
The bulk of the story takes place some time after that, after game-designer Isaac (Asa Butterfield) and his working poor ex-classmate Kayla (Iola Evans) stumble into “Curs>r” and Kayla becomes its next player, facing one “Sophie’s Choice” after another.
Iola Evans plays a cash-strapped college kid named Kayla who gets immersed in a dangerous video game in “Choose or Die,” a frequently disturbing horror film with echoes of “Saw,” “Ready Player One” and “A Nightmare on Elm Street.”
Unlike, say, Ready Player One , Simon Allen’s light script doesn’t wholly worship at the decade’s altar.
The movie is Jumanji with a splash of Ready Player One and Saw thrown in.
As a result, films like Maniac , The Evil Dead , Cannibal Holocaust , and The New York Ripper were either cut, edited, or banned altogether.
As a result, films like Maniac , The Evil Dead , Cannibal Holocaust , and The New York Ripper were either cut, edited, or banned altogether.
But the movie’s opening scene, where the great British actor Eddie Marsan (from Happy-Go-Lucky and Tyrannosaur among many many others) plays a vintage-obsessed Gen-X collector who first dusts off the cursed tape and gets the horror ball a’rollin, presents its case smartly right upfront—it can be seen there smack-dab in his spoiled self-interest, locked away in his perfectly curated man-cave, as he without hesitation passes the evil off to those who come after, like its a game of hot potato with the nuclear football in hand.
Con guión de Toby Meakins, Simon Allen (“La Guardia”) y Matthew James Wilkinson (“Side By Side”).