The trailer for Netflix‘s Choose or Die has just dropped, and the film teases what looks to be a unique spin on the cursed media subgenre of horror with a retro text-based video game seemingly having supernatural and macabre consequences in the real world.
The film centers around a broke student, Iola Evans’ Kayla, who plays an obscure 1980s survival computer game in a bid to collect an unclaimed $100,000 prize. But after a series of horrifying moments centering around the answers to ultimatums presented in the game affecting the real world, she comes to the chilling realization that it isn’t money that’s at stake, but her own life.
Marking the directorial debut of Toby Meakins, the film also stars Ender’s Game actor Asa Butterfield, The World’s End actor Eddie Marsan, and horror legend Robert Englund, who played Freddie Kruger in A Nightmare on Elm Street. The movie also marks the feature-length film debut of The 100 star Evans.
Having wrapped production in London in April 2021, Netflix acquired the global rights for the film last summer, according to Variety.
Though it is now known as Choose or Die, the previous title for the movie was Curs>r, in an apparent reference to the text-based style retro video game the movie centers around.
The film will undoubtedly draw comparisons to a previous Netflix title, Black Mirror: Bandersnatch, which is also a horror film centering around a retro video game. In Bandersnatch, the experience was interactive, and the viewers could make decisions about the character’s choices that could affect the story one way or another.
With Choose or Die‘s emphasis on the main character making decisions with sometimes deadly consequences, you would think it would also take the interactive route in the same tradition as Bandersnatch. However, that doesn’t appear to be the case based on the lack of any mention of interactivity in the promotional material so far, as well as the fact that the movie had completed filming before the streaming service picked it up for distribution.
Choose or Die will haunt Netflix on April 15.
