The Stay Awake

5/17/2026

**_An all-night fundraiser at a Catholic girls’ school turns horrific_** This is a slasher reminiscent of the Italian "StageFright" from several months earlier (also known as "Aquarius”), which involved actors stuck in a theatre facing a slayer. It’s a great basic plot for a slasher, but “StageFright” is quite a bit superior. What went wrong here? To start, the exposition on the American serial killer in the opening is lacking. It’s insinuated he’s possessed by a demonic entity, but why does this being wait almost twenty years to strike again? And why a girls’ school across the Atlantic Ocean in the generically cited “Europe”? I suppose such distances wouldn’t matter to a malevolent spiritual entity and it’s simply interested in easy feminine prey. Speaking of which, Shirley Jane