The Iron Lung movie is scary — for audiences and for Hollywood

Mark Fischbach bypassed the movie industry with his surprising new film

But Fischbach’s extensive word-of-mouth campaign persuaded theaters it was worth taking a risk on an indie film from an unknown director with no studio backing, and Iron Lung opened in thousands of theaters on Jan. 30, rocketing to a $20 million opening weekend and a #2 spot in the box-office rankings. Early in the weekend, it seemed like it might come in at #1, outpacing Send Help, a horror-thriller-comedy from a major director (Spider-Man and Evil Dead veteran Sam Raimi) working with a major star (Rachel McAdams) and a major studio (20th Century Studios), all of which mean major marketing money.

It feels like both the film industry and film journalists are still trying to catch up. Iron Lung has only been reviewed by a few established outlets, and several of those reviews complain about the film as if it were a conventional horror movie made for a mainstream horror audience, particularly griping that it lacks tension or scares. They’re wrong. On both an industry level and an aesthetic level, Iron Lung is pretty frightening — and in both cases, that’s a great thing.

On a strictly aesthetic level, Fischbach — who also produced the film, co-wrote it with Szymanski, and stars in it — does a fine job of conveying the horror of the movie’s scenario. Like the game, the film version of Iron Lung centers on a terrifying future where most of humanity disappeared in a mysterious cataclysm, and the survivors are struggling for answers. When a horrific ocean of blood is discovered on an isolated moon, convicts are sent to explore the ocean in tiny submarines, with the expectation that they probably won’t survive. Simon (Fischbach) is one of those convicts. Accused of a terrorist act he says he didn’t commit, he’s been condemned to journey to the bottom of the blood sea in a tiny, creaky, slowly disintegrating capsule, where he’s ordered to bring back images from the sea floor.

Iron Lung is a claustrophobic movie. The close confines of the sub, with its limited lighting and haunting shadows, are oppressive from the opening moments. The game’s mechanics prevent the protagonist from seeing outside the sub, except via still-frame images taken by a camera. Fischbach expands that idea by keeping the sub’s interior unnervingly dark — when Simon starts to see figures lurking in the shadows, he has to use the flash of the camera to see inside the sub as well. The many unknowns he’s facing weigh on the story, and so does the indifference or hostility of his handlers. As his submersible and his mental state both disintegrate under pressure, the sense of dread and inevitability gets sharper and sharper.

It is true that the movie could use a more ruthless edit. Some of the many escalating threats start to feel redundant, even distracting, and there are so many ways for Simon to die in this scenario that few of them stand out as the primary source of fear. Everything in Simon’s world is breaking down, but the collapses build with excruciating deliberation. His in-person or radio-enabled conversations with other characters operate in loops of fear, anger, and disbelief that are understandable, but still repetitive.

But Iron Lung is an immersive experience. It traps the audience in a close, suffocating space with Simon and the seeming inevitability of his death, and the sense of terror is palpable and thrilling. It’s a slow-burn horror movie, but it certainly isn’t lacking in scares. It just isn’t aimed at the kind of fast-paced, jump-scare-strewn shocks that are considered standard issue for modern mainstream horror.

It’s much more of a slow-burn creepypasta story, aimed at capturing a feeling of late-night dread and viral curiosity — say, the kind of sensation someone might have while playing a horror game like Iron Lung alone in a dark room, late at night. It’s more immediate and rigorously story-driven than the muzzy, queasy likes of Skinamarink or We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, and the cinematography here is much sharper and high-resolution, with less of a dreamy, fuzzed-out look. But the late-night internet-horror vibes are the same, and it’s clearly coming from some of the same cultural perspective on horror.

But Iron Lung is also the latest project that’s likely to scare film-industry people, because it’s such a vivid example of a success story that bypassed them. In the same way Ryan Coogler’s reversion-rights contract for Sinners launched a wave of pearl-clutching and hand-wringing over the future of the studio system last year, Fischbach’s success with Iron Lung suggests that movie theaters’ ongoing financial struggles are opening up opportunities for unconventional film projects made outside the studio system.

Theater owners are looking for any way to boost attendance. The wave of repertory re-releases and stunty audience-participation theatrical events represent one gambit: catering to established fandoms. Fischbach called on his followers to spam theaters with requests for Iron Lung bookings, which was reportedly annoying to theater owners, but was also an indication of excitement and a willingness to buy tickets and show up on opening night. Theater owners are certainly willing to work outside the established distribution system if that helps their bottom line: It's happened more and more often over the past decade, particularly with faith-based movies or international imports targeting specialty audiences. Multiplexes in particular are constantly looking for creative ways to round out their offerings in an era when Hollywood is making fewer movies.

Fischbach’s model will be difficult for most other creators to emulate. His ability to compete with the big studios for screen time and audience attention is a direct result of the unusually vast personal following he’s built over more than a decade of streaming. But he’s not as much of an anomaly as he might seem. More and more popular YouTube personalities, from Shelby Oaks director Chris Stuckmann to Mr. Beast to Vivienne Medrano, are using their established fandoms to leverage mainstream film and TV projects. In some cases, conventional studios are just taking advantage of creators’ follower counts and online fame, using the internet as a way to find new talent.

But more and more, folks like Fischbach are finding they don’t need those existing structures and studios. They can bypass them, and maintain ownership of their creative rights and their profits instead of enriching massive companies that then own their IPs. That should scare studio executives a lot more than the prospect of being stuck in a rusty tin can at the bottom of a blood ocean.

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Iron Lung is in theaters now.