For this week’s Infinite Scroll column, Alex Barasch is filling in for Kyle Chayka.
Horror is a genre of upstarts. Many of its strangest, most striking films, from “The Night of the Living Dead” to “The Blair Witch Project,” come from first-timers working on shoestring budgets—and these days the first-timers can be found, increasingly, on YouTube. In 2018, Kyle Edward Ball launched a channel where he released videos based on users’ descriptions of their nightmares. The entries, with such deceptively simple titles as “sound in the hall” and “grandma,” are lo-fi, no more than a few minutes each; they dial into dream logic, primal dread, and a viewer’s instinct to fill in the gaps, a grainy shot of a bedroom door inviting the question of what’s waiting on the other side. The shorts paved the way for Ball’s experimental film “Skinamarink,” which became a word-of-mouth phenomenon in 2022. That same year, a teen-ager named Kane Parsons began posting a series of creepy, atmospheric clips set in the Backrooms, an endless, harshly lit liminal realm drawn from the crowdsourced mythology of the internet itself. (The look and vibe influenced the TV show “Severance.”) A24 is now producing his début feature, aptly named “Backrooms.” The studio has also partnered with Danny and Michael Philippou, who were vloggers before they broke out with “Talk to Me,” a movie that intimately understands the perils of a viral challenge: the inciting incident is a demonic possession documented on a dozen smartphones. Curry Barker, meanwhile, established himself on YouTube as a sketch comedian before playing a murderous influencer in “Milk & Serial,” an hour-long slasher which he uploaded directly to his channel; his first full-length film, “Obsession,” will be released by Focus in May. And then there’s “Iron Lung,” the new movie from Mark Fischbach, which reached theatres in a far more unorthodox way.
When Fischbach started shopping around “Iron Lung”—a self-funded horror film based on an indie video game of the same name—it was effectively turned down by every major U.S. distributor. He reasoned that the thirty-eight million YouTube followers who know him as Markiplier could fill at least fifty theatres, and decided to negotiate a limited release himself. After he announced the plan on his channel, noting that fans could also request showings at their local multiplexes, they did so in such numbers that some business owners apparently suspected bots. Fischbach and his wife fielded queries and handled bookings directly; Regal Cinemas’ head of content, Brooks LeBoeuf, lobbied by Markiplier subscribers on his own staff, eventually agreed to carry “Iron Lung” nationwide. Other chains followed. In the wake of interest from abroad, Fischbach had to text the game’s developer to check that he had international rights. Soon, “Iron Lung” was slated for four thousand screens. Since it opened, on January 30th, it’s earned upward of forty million dollars—trouncing another, far costlier horror movie of a sort, “Melania.”
Unlike other YouTube creators turned filmmakers, Fischbach made his name online not through sketches or shorts but via “let’s plays”: a genre in which someone runs through a video game for an audience, their face visible in a corner of the screen as they narrate and react to the proceedings. Fischbach rose to fame navigating indie horror games like Amnesia: The Dark Descent, usually with jokey commentary punctuated by jump-scare-induced exclamations of “fuck!” He played Iron Lung in 2023, and the film he’s produced is remarkably (and perhaps regrettably) faithful to his experience with the source material. The movie’s opening voice-over explains an event known as the “Quiet Rapture”: the day the stars winked out and whole planets disappeared, leaving a handful of humans to settle on a distant moon. Fischbach plays one of the survivors, a convict deemed expendable and thus dispatched to explore an ocean of blood in a rickety submarine. For long stretches of “Iron Lung” ’s hundred-and-twenty-seven-minute running time, he’s the only person onscreen, attempting to reach a series of coördinates and taking X-ray images of what lurks beneath the depths. Seeing a skeletal creature materialize in the darkness is ominous; returning to the site to find that it’s disappeared is even worse. As his oxygen supply dwindles, he searches for answers and sketches out a crude map with such landmarks as WEIRD TUBES and ALIEN SHIT. Occasionally, we get hints of a larger, more complicated universe. Mostly, we hear Fischbach saying, “Fuck that,” “Fuck me,” or “I’m fucked.”