Sometimes it helps to go into a movie blind. Perhaps there's something to be said for having no more than the bare minimum of background information and context to hang your expectations on, at least when it comes to watching certain types of film. That was more or less my own experience of the recent sleeper hit
Iron Lung. Directed by Mark Fischbach, known also as the internet personality Markiplier, and created and developed by David Szymanski,
Iron Lung functions as a film adaptation of the indie Horror game of the same name. That was just about the extent of all I knew going into this movie. I had a few more bits of knowledge, most of which I owed to
the review of YouTube critic Ryan Hollinger. However, aside from that one note of good press, I had very little else to go on. My own experience with Markiplier, for instance, is very close to that of Hollinger. He was just one of those names you're bound to run into when looking up clips of various video games online. That's pretty much all that happened, really. Fischbach's online name and videos were tossed up by a friendly algorithm, and he remained an on-and-off presence in my search history here and there on occasion. I can't recall even watching much of his stuff in the lead-up to realizing the film had an honest to goodness theatrical release. If I'm being brutally honest with myself here, it's probably telling that my initial impression to news that Markiplier, of all people, was making a movie based on a video game, existed somewhere on a limited spectrum, one that ran from muted, to mixed, to nothing at all.
It was just another one of those bits of passing trivia that you can't help running into sooner or later, because the Web never exists in a vacuum, and stuff like this is bound to make the rounds. I think the initial coolness I had to the idea was bound up with a lot of personal experience that I'd had with movies at the time. It's no secret that Hollywood seems to be going through a creative drought period. There's a lot to complain about with the way Tinseltown has been handling both its new material and its legacy media. I'd gotten so used to not getting worked up about the latest film announcements, even if it was something I liked, that I more or less automatically assumed the same arrangement with Markiplier's efforts in his big screen debut. My overall reaction at the time was at least a bit understandable. It also turns out to have been very unfair to both of the artists involved, and I'll explain why later on in the review proper. Before we get there, however, I've since learned at least something about the nature of, as well as the context behind the making of this film and its source material. Giving newcomers at least some background information about the thinking and culture that exist behind Iron Lung can go a long way to explaining both what the movie is trying to achieve, as well as my own critical reactions to it.
In order to do that, we have to say a brief word about the true creator behind
Iron Lung, and the artistic milieu his efforts emerged from. If I knew just the bare minimum about Markiplier before I watched this film, I knew even less about David Szymanski, the video game developer who got this whole project started.
Iron Lung began its life as an indie console title that slowly became something of an overnight sensation in both Gamer and Horror circles. We'll get further into the thought Szymanski put into the game, and how that all translates to the screen in a minute. For now, it's enough to state the bare facts. Dave seems to have been a gaming enthusiast from an early age, and its a passion he shares with his brothers John and Evan, both of whom have created their own well known Horror game title with
My Friendly Neighborhood. In addition to liking video games, David seems to share an equal passion for works of Gothic Fiction, with critics like Hollinger pointing to what appears to be a clear influence of H.P. Lovecraft on the nature of
Iron Lung as both a game and film. There seems to be a bit more to it than that, yet before we dive into the movie's storytelling mechanics, there remains just one final background component to talk about, one that kind of helps establish the context of this movie.
In many ways, it helps to see
Iron Lung, whether as a game or film, as the product of a still ongoing process of creation and discovery within the modern Horror genre. I don't know how many in the audience have been keeping track of this, yet there's a process of creative and artistic experimentation that's been ongoing in field of Things that Go Bump in the Night for some time now. It seems to have got started with not just the release of
The Blair Witch Project, but also it's somewhat innovative use of viral marketing. It's been cited as the first instance of a successful ARG, or Alternate Reality Game. While it's a mistake to claim that
Blair Witch was a complete trailblazer in any of these storytelling tactics, it was the one to bring a lot of the techniques we now associate with un/fiction into a broader pop-culture awareness. It was the cultural mainstreaming of these hybrid styles of storytelling performance that allowed a slew later talents to be Inspired by the Folk Horror brainchild of Eduardo Sanchez and Daniel Myrick. It's like the makers of
Blair Witch touched a nerve in similar creative types in a way that acted as a form of giving permission, for lack of a better word. It showed indie filmmakers and artistic talents everywhere that, yes, you can realize the projects and dreams in your head. No matter how crazy or obtuse they may seem, there's an audience out there waiting for it all.
The result seems to have been one of those creative wellspring whose various elements and products are only now starting to be realized by most viewers and readers as part of a much larger, and still ongoing creative development within the realm of Horror. Thanks to the success of Blair Witch's ARG approach, there have been countless others that have followed in its wake. In the process, artists like Kris Straub and Kane Parsons have taken up the mantle set down by Sanchez and Myrick, and expanded it into the realms of the subgenre now known as Analog Horror. The fact that the format itself seems to be reaching a point of coming full circle with the successful release of The Backrooms might point to the small Renaissance started in the backwoods of Burkittsville as starting to gain some kind of further mainstream traction. In addition to the various shared breakthrough efforts featured on movie screens or the internet, it seems as if the un/fiction tropes spotlighted by the Blair Witch franchise has also managed to find its way into the realm of the written word. Starting out with a simple subreddit dedicated to telling scary stories in a style similar to that of Found Footage films, the efforts of a just a bunch of folks chilling together and entertaining one another with who can tell the best twisted tale has since morphed in The NoSleep Podcast, thanks to the efforts of creators Matt Hansen and David Cummings. Other writers like Craig Groshek have started their own Simply Scary anthologies.
The major consequences of endeavors like these have been the creation of what's often known as Creepypasta storytelling. All it amounts to is the old practice of Urban Legends transferred to the electronic, digital campfire. It's where authors like the aforementioned Kris Straub got the idea for "Candle Cove" and
the larger Analog Horror series that has spun off from it. Dave Szymanski's place in this ongoing proliferation comes from the world of video games, and the effect that this underground, New Wave Horror Boom has had on the format. The trends appears to have reached even into the gaming sphere, as we've seen Analog Horror artists Remy Abode take his
Gemini Home Entertainment series and craft an actual game set in the universe of his online ARG. The developers of an upcoming title known as
Giggleland, meanwhile, have
resorted to Analog Horror/ARG in the marketing of their product. Szymanski belongs to this same cadre of indie devs who are busy trying to see how well they can craft games that share an equal amount of art with the usual sort of entertainment that most players still expect from any halfway decent platformer. In Szymanski's case, that's meant crafting a series of dark secondary worlds beset by various types of terrors, many of which owe their Inspiration to Gothic masters of the Weird such as H.P. Lovecraft and filmmakers like Tobe Hooper.
In terms of overall game aesthetic, David tends to design his titles in an intentional kind of throwback style. His games tend to harken back to the type of visual design that was most prevalent during the early 90s, with some 80s arcade influences thrown in to the mix. He's basically a fan of the retro gamer approach to platform design. You can expect most of his output to at least look like it was designed at or around the time that, say, the original Alone in the Dark was released for Mac and PC. Iron Lung proved to be David's big breakout title, and as of this writing it still seems to be the game he's most known for. Before we proceed any further, all that remains to be said by way of introduction is that the original video game incarnation quickly became a major favorite in YouTube's endless supply of Let Play streams, with professional platform players like JackScepticEye recording their playthroughs of Szymanski's major mainstream hit. This created the kind of feedback loop you might expect, where the more internet personalities showcased them game on their Lets Plays, the more they all just served to boost Iron Lung's popularity, and sooner or later Szymanski found that he had a hit on his hands.
It was the experience of one online player in particular that seems to have started the gears in the back of his head turning, and that lead to a surprising amount of first personal, and later on an even greater deal of shared ambition and collective drive to see how a game like this could be fleshed out. All that happened was surprisingly simple, at least to start out with. Markiplier heard about the game like everyone else, and he decided to record his own playthrough, complete with the usual amount of hilarious and comedic actions that he was best known for at the time. What I don't think any of us expected was for Fischbach to be so taken with Szymanski's quasi-Lovecraftian, yet otherwise very simple platform release to the point where he soon developed the enthusiasm to see if he could turn it all into an actual, legitimate Horror film. What happened next has become something of a legend in itself. For the longest time after that initial moment of Inspiration, Markiplier was very much living an underdog story where it was just him and his friends and family chipping in to help make this dream a reality. When you go back and find out about all the heart and soul the man poured into this project, you tend to feel bad for being so dismissive in the first place. All that is getting ahead of things, however. The point is, Markiplier and Szymanski got their film made, and now here are the results.
