The fun thing that we had sort of forgotten and then recently remembered was the end of the original [ Ready or Not] script. There was a tag that the writers, Guy [Busick] and Ryan [Christopher Murphy], wrote, which was a Le Bail conference that had a bunch of other families. It was percolating for a really long time.
When we last left our new bride, Grace, at the end of 2019's Ready or Not, she was smoking a well-earned cigarette, having survived a night of slaughter. She sat on a stone step as a mansion went up in flames behind her, her wedding dress ripped and caked with blood, dirt and grime (but mostly blood.)
It wasn't their first game, but exactly ten years ago the world was introduced to the Polish studio Bloober Team through Layers of Fear . On the heels of the heartbreak, 2016's Layers of Fear was a pared down, first-person psychological horror game concerning a painter suffering from a bout of Poe-inspired madness. Effective visuals and novel jump scares put Bloober Team on the road to a buffet of projects, including the 2024 remake of Silent Hill 2 .
The first thing you notice about undertone is how quiet it is; not just in its audio mix, but in how it's shot - primarily steady wide shots that slowly pan across empty rooms, allowing your eyes to frantically scan for something amiss. It's an understated form of filmmaking that allows for the movie's scares to hit all that much harder.
We're deep into Strangers lore now, but last girl standing Maya (Riverdale graduate Madelaine Petsch, who surely hoped this was her Neve Campbell moment) continues to scurry about a devout woodland community like a bloodied fieldmouse with resting iPhone face; the masked thrill-killers previously three, now two have now gained ulterior motives for pursuing her. Also present: tatted survivor Gregory (Gabriel Basso, who must have been hoping for more to do) and ever-shifty Sheriff Rotter (Richard Brake), whose link to the killers is finally made.
I'm talking about Iron Lung, a self-financed film by a beloved YouTuber named Mark Fischbach, who goes by the handle Markiplier, and who has more than 38 million followers to his name. The movie, an adaptation of an indie horror video game, had a budget of approximately $3 million-an amount that Iron Lung has already earned back seven times over, with a box office of $21.7 million worldwide.
Despite its lurid poster art, as an ursine rampage film this falls closer to the serious Grizzly Man/Timothy Treadwell end of the scale, rather than the Cocaine Bear one. Based on a freak August 1967 tragedy in which two women were separately mauled to death by grizzlies in Montana's Glacier National Park (described here as a trillion to one occurrence), Burke Doeren's debut grips in tooth'n'claw terms, but is considerably less sure-footed when it comes to people.
In 2006's Final Destination 3 the disaster is a high-speed roller coaster derailment, narrowly avoided thanks to a premonition experienced by high school senior Wendy Christensen (Mary Elizabeth Winstead). But as fans know, Death doesn't like being ghosted. One by one, the survivors are stalked and eliminated through elaborately staged "accidents" that turn mundane locations into Rube Goldberg-ian death traps.