There’s something uniquely unsettling about the spaces we navigate every day suddenly becoming portals to the unknown. Director Rebekah McKendry understands this intimately, and her 2023 horror film “Elevator Game” attempts to transform one of the internet’s most persistent urban legends into a feature-length nightmare. While the results are mixed, the film offers an interesting case study in how modern folklore translates to cinema and the challenges of finding genuine terror in familiar spaces.
The Legend Behind the Horror
The Elevator Game isn’t McKendry’s invention—it’s a real ritual that has circulated online for years, part of the broader ecosystem of creepypastas and urban legends that have flourished in digital spaces. The game involves a specific sequence of button presses across multiple floors, performed alone in an elevator, supposedly allowing the player to access another dimension. What makes this particular legend compelling is its accessibility; unlike stories requiring remote locations or specialized equipment, elevators are everywhere, making the temptation to try it both immediate and dangerous.
McKendry’s film centers on Ryan Abe (Gino Anania), a socially awkward teenager whose sister Kris vanished after attempting the ritual. Ryan’s journey from skeptical observer to desperate participant forms the emotional core of the story, even as the film struggles to maintain momentum around its central conceit. The setup is inherently sympathetic—a young man willing to risk everything to save his sister—but the execution often feels constrained by the very limitations that make the urban legend effective in short form.
The Challenge of Confined Horror
McKendry has built her career around finding horror in unexpected, intimate spaces. Her previous work demonstrates a clear fascination with psychological terror that emerges from claustrophobic environments. “Elevator Game” represents both the potential and the pitfalls of this approach. Elevators are inherently unsettling spaces—confined, controlled by forces beyond our immediate influence, and temporary prisons between destinations. They’re perfect for short bursts of anxiety, but sustaining that tension across a feature film proves more challenging.
The film’s most successful moments come when it leans into the mundane horror of the ritual itself. There’s something genuinely unnerving about watching someone methodically press buttons in a sequence that feels both arbitrary and loaded with meaning. McKendry understands that the real horror of urban legends often lies not in their supernatural elements but in their psychological impact—the way they transform ordinary actions into rituals of potential doom.
However, the repetitive nature of the elevator sequences, while thematically appropriate, creates pacing issues that the film never fully resolves. The button-pressing that works as a brief, anxiety-inducing sequence in a short story becomes almost meditative when extended across multiple scenes. It’s a fundamental challenge in adapting minimalist horror concepts to feature length, and one that “Elevator Game” doesn’t entirely overcome.
Digital Age Folklore and Human Connection
What “Elevator Game” does accomplish, perhaps more successfully than its surface-level scares, is capturing something essential about how we interact with digital folklore. The film understands that modern urban legends aren’t just stories—they’re participatory experiences that blur the line between fiction and reality. In an age where we’re constantly connected to information and misinformation, the appeal of forbidden knowledge accessible through simple actions resonates deeply.
Ryan’s motivation—using the same dangerous ritual that claimed his sister—speaks to very human patterns of grief and desperation. People have always sought impossible solutions to impossible problems, and the film’s exploration of this theme feels genuine even when its horror elements falter. The relationship between Ryan and Kris, revealed through flashbacks and his memories, provides the emotional weight that keeps the story grounded when the supernatural elements feel less convincing.
The supporting cast, including characters who have their own complicated relationships with the legend, adds layers to what could have been a simple story of supernatural revenge. These characters represent different responses to the unknown—skepticism, curiosity, obsession—and their varied fates suggest that the real danger might not be the supernatural realm itself but our willingness to sacrifice everything for the possibility of accessing it.
Technical Craft and Atmospheric Building
From a technical standpoint, “Elevator Game” demonstrates solid craftsmanship within clear budgetary constraints. The film makes effective use of its limited locations, and McKendry’s direction maintains visual interest even during the more repetitive sequences. The sound design deserves particular credit for creating an atmosphere of dread around something as mundane as elevator buttons and mechanical humming.
The film’s visual approach to the “other world” accessed through the ritual takes a restrained approach that works in its favor. Rather than relying on elaborate special effects, McKendry uses subtle environmental changes and lighting shifts to suggest otherworldliness. This restraint keeps the focus on character reactions and psychological horror rather than spectacle, though it also means the film sometimes lacks the visceral impact that horror audiences might expect.
Where the Film Falters
Despite its strengths, “Elevator Game” struggles with several fundamental issues that prevent it from achieving its full potential. The pacing problems mentioned earlier are compounded by a script that sometimes feels stretched thin across its runtime. The film works best in its quieter, more character-driven moments, but feels less confident when it needs to deliver traditional horror beats.
The ending, while thematically consistent with the film’s exploration of cycles and consequences, may leave viewers feeling unsatisfied. This isn’t necessarily a flaw—horror films often work best when they leave questions unanswered—but the resolution feels more inevitable than earned, as if the film is following the logical conclusion of its premise rather than building to a genuinely surprising or emotionally resonant climax.
Additionally, while the film’s restrained approach to supernatural elements has merits, it sometimes works against the basic requirement that a horror film should, at minimum, generate sustained tension. The repetitive nature of the ritual, while thematically appropriate, creates diminishing returns in terms of genuine scares.
The Human Element in Modern Horror
What ultimately makes “Elevator Game” worth discussing, despite its flaws, is its sincere attempt to find humanity within a concept that could easily have been exploited for cheap thrills. McKendry’s film is interested in why people seek out dangerous experiences, particularly when those experiences promise connection to something beyond the ordinary world.
Ryan’s journey isn’t just about supernatural horror—it’s about the lengths we’ll go to maintain connections with people we’ve lost. The elevator game becomes a metaphor for the risks we take when we’re unwilling to accept that some losses are permanent. This reading gives the film’s quieter moments more weight and makes the horror elements feel like natural extensions of the characters’ emotional states rather than arbitrary supernatural intrusions.
The film also captures something essential about how urban legends function in our digital age. They’re not just stories we tell—they’re experiences we can access, rituals we can perform, boundaries we can cross if we’re willing to accept the consequences. “Elevator Game” understands that the real horror of modern folklore lies not in the supernatural entities it describes but in our compulsion to test whether the boundaries between the possible and impossible are as solid as we assume.
Final Thoughts
“Elevator Game” is an imperfect film that nonetheless demonstrates a clear understanding of what makes modern horror effective. While it doesn’t entirely succeed in translating its central urban legend into sustained cinematic terror, it offers enough genuine insight into human behavior and digital age folklore to justify its existence.
McKendry’s commitment to finding horror in intimate, everyday spaces continues to be her greatest strength as a filmmaker, even when the execution doesn’t fully live up to the concept. The film works best when it focuses on its characters’ emotional journeys and the psychological impact of engaging with dangerous folklore. When it tries to deliver conventional horror beats, it feels less assured.
For viewers interested in horror that prioritizes psychological exploration over jump scares, “Elevator Game” offers enough to warrant a viewing. It’s a film that’s more successful as a meditation on grief, risk, and the appeal of forbidden knowledge than as a straightforward supernatural thriller. While it may not deliver the scares you’re hoping for, it provides something potentially more valuable—a thoughtful examination of why we seek out fear in the first place, and what we’re really looking for when we’re willing to risk everything for the possibility of transcending the ordinary world.
In an era where horror often relies on escalation and spectacle, there’s something refreshing about a film that’s content to explore the quiet terror of pressing buttons in a specific sequence, hoping against hope that the doors will open onto something other than the world we know. “Elevator Game” may not be the horror film we expected, but it might be closer to the one we need—a reminder that the most effective scares often come from the spaces between what we know and what we fear might be true.
Rating: 6.5/10
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