mackerelgray | so Iron Lung is a cinematic masterpiece (Reply)

Written by Gavin Reed-Machina on March 4th, 2026.

Time for that stream-of-consciousness enthusiastic rambling! Woo!

(This post contains spoilers for Iron Lung (2026), do with that what you will.)

So I'm a big fan of horror stories, and I only realized this was a pattern after I went through The Magnus Archives, The Magnus Protocol, The Silt Verses, Slay the Princess, The Cabin in the Woods, Sinners, The Substance, and the unnerving half of Brian David Gilbert's Youtube channel - turns out there's a common theme in those things! I like the atmosphere of horror, the rising tension and discomfort. It's fun to see people being scared in a recreational way, and I think being freaked out together is a great bonding experience for the whole system.

So obviously, when we looked at our Tumblr dashboard and saw that Markiplier's hit new indie videogame horror film was crushing it at the box office despite the haters, we went to see it! And I watched the original Let's Play series Mark made about it the night before seeing it, so every time I saw some shit from the gameplay I was pointing at it like "I understood that reference! From your four-year-old video!" (wow he finally got to ram that thing like he wanted to do 4 years ago, too bad it's happening to Simon)

And YEAH I agree it's fucking great actually! It's fun, it's drip-feeding lore through the bars of your cage, it's not explaining the blood ocean or the eel or the fucking eye thing, it's got the atmosphere of creeping dread down! I don't know what the fuck critics were talking about when they said it dragged on, have they never heard of Slowly Building Suspense And Tension? This man is welded into a submarine, under an ocean of blood, and there's shit wrong with the sub - I was not bored during any of the quiet parts because I was constantly anticipating new ways for him to die! (And I was right, there were so many ways for him to possibly die down there! How did he live that long!)

Max watched some of A Heist With Markiplier before, like a year or so before Jude and I walked in here, and honestly Mark Fischbach's a great actor between all of these projects, I know he's mostly known as a guy who plays games on camera but he has plenty of other skills! He's doing a great job selling "guy under extreme duress who hates this shit"! He's doing all his own stunts! He's getting tossed around on-set and getting covered in gallons of fake blood in real life! He had to go to the hospital while filming because fake blood got in his eyes! Practical effects, babey! (i can see how Iron Lung broke the record for Most Fake Blood In A Film, you really build up to filling the sub with it)

Speaking of Youtubers, it's really funny to me that Jacksepticeye is in there for 10 seconds entirely to get blasted by radiation. He's a background character! You'd imagine "this film has Markiplier and Jacksepticeye!" would be good for marketing, but no, get in the radiation beam, it's fantastic.

I have more random commentary floating around in our friends' messages, but to end this off, I really want the director's commentary to have a little Markiplier cam in the corner. "Hello everybody, my name is Markiplier and welcome to Iron Lung, the movie I directed." I really hope this happens.