2026-02-13 09:30:43
Last night we went to Appleseed Avenue, a puppet-themed escape room in Santa Clarita, California, and it was an absolute blast. I knew coming out of it that it was easily one of the best I’ve ever done, but the more I think about how well-designed and -executed it is, the more impressed I am with it.
It takes groups of four or more humans, traveling from the human world to the puppet world via the Puppet and Human Association of Recreation and Transportation. (Pronounced “pea-heart,” just as you’d expect). It’s one of the last chances to do so, because Lee DePuppet, the current mayor of Puppet Town, plans to shut down the connection as soon as he’s re-elected, and break ties between humans and puppets.
You’re split into two teams, visiting the office of either the chief detective or medical examiner, to learn how they solve crimes in Puppet Town. (Before you enter, you’re warned that you’ll also have to take over in the event of a real murder, but the odds of that happening are so low, it’s hardly worth mentioning).
Obviously, Appleseed Avenue is inspired by the Muppets, but it isn’t an official Muppets production; it’s by a very small independent team. So I was really impressed by just how much they got the tone exactly right for an escape room aimed at adults.
I’ve never seen Avenue Q, or any of the Brian Henson takes on “adult Muppets,” because no matter how much funny material might be hiding inside, they’ve already lost me as soon as I hear the pitch. The gag is always they’re puppets, but they swear and talk about sex and violence and shit! Can you even believe it?! I supposed it’s possible that all the edgelord stuff is just in the marketing, or on the surface, but it seems so lazy that I can’t be bothered.
So I immediately appreciated that Appleseed Avenue doesn’t try so hard. They know that you’re already on board with the concept when you come in, and that puppets are inherently funny and charming. They don’t need to blow your mind with how shocking and outrageous they can be.
And as a result, everything feels like it’s nailing the vibe in the best Muppets stuff — constantly dancing across the line between corny and clever. Taking the concept “what would a murder mystery in the puppet world be like?” and running from there, instead of, “how edgy can we make these things?”
You do get to interact directly with a few of the puppets (along with several seen in video or on posters), and it all is a ton of fun and relentlessly clever. The experience is never, ever, above making the corniest pun possible, usually in the names, but it’s always in service of a really fun and engaging story.
It felt1 to me like they took the opposite route of the “edgy Muppets” stuff I’ve seen, not trying to shock you with how far they can take these cute characters, but using the cute characters to take the edge off of a Law & Order/CSI-style murder mystery and add some humor to it.
Every bit as impressive is how the experience design solved a lot of my biggest problems with escape rooms.
One of the most persistent problems that can dull one of these experiences is quarterbacking. It’s rarely the fault of the person doing it; it’s just a side effect of throwing a bunch of disparate personalities into a space with time pressure and an agenda. Some people are just more outgoing than others.
But by physically dividing up the spaces, they made it so that everyone gets to play according to their own style, but nobody gets entirely left out. The teams are initially put in separate rooms with no communication with each other besides an intercom, and you’re immediately given a task to compete against the other team. (We got the recommendation to split up couples across the teams, which I think was definitely a good call).
And the space you’re exploring is divided up, so that individuals can — and likely, have to — go off and look for clues on their own. It seemed that everybody in the group got to have the a-ha! moment where they found an essential clue.
There were also plenty of world-building details scattered throughout, along with several red herrings in the puzzles themselves. They had the effect of making the entire experience feel bigger than it actually was. It was a satisfying story that had a few moments that required actual deduction, but it wasn’t so complicated that we ever got stuck or ran out of time. Instead, there was always the suggestion that there’s a ton more out there than the small part you’re seeing.
I was really surprised to see the entire experience credited to just two people, since nothing about it felt small or amateurish.2 It feels like a city street crammed into a small space, and the rooms you spend the most time in have the most details.
I’ve done several escape rooms where you can tell that the designers were particularly pleased with a certain gimmick or a certain effect, and it draws attention to itself. Here, there are pieces of tech and show design scattered throughout, and they were done exactly right. Computer screens that drive everything, “scanners” that feel fun and silly but still sell the effect, sound and music played through speakers mounted throughout. And little touches and details that didn’t need to be automated, but the effort was well spent, like the dial that shows you transitioning from the human world to the puppet world.
The only reason I say Appleseed Avenue might be the best escape room I’ve ever done is because the Palace Games in San Francisco are so impressive. They have some that transform the entire space, with a genuine wow moment in every one that I’ve done.
But I can say definitively that Appleseed Avenue is the most fun I’ve ever had doing an escape room. Charming, funny, and clever throughout, with some fantastic story moments that were played for laughs but genuinely tense at the same time. Exactly my sense of humor, with exactly the right kind of puzzles that feel funny, clever, and perfectly integrated into the story.
I recommend it without hesitation to anyone even slightly interested in escape rooms or immersive entertainment. Even if it takes a drive to southern California to do it! The only people I’d not recommend it to are those who’ve never done an escape room before; I honestly do think it’ll set your expectations too high for any one you did afterwards.
2026-02-11 08:14:53
This is my husband’s birthday week, so I want everybody to send Positive Birthday Energy his way. I’m doing my part by making a two-fer starting with one of his favorites: “Happy Birthday” by Altered Images.
It’s tricky (to rock around and) build a playlist of birthday songs, because it seems like every musician ever saw how much money Mariah Carey has been raking in, and they want to corner the market on birthday greetings. Not all of them are solid, though.
My favorite has always been The Beatles’ version, but it’s kind of overplayed at this point. Stevie Wonder’s “Happy Birthday” is a close second, but ever since I found out it’s in honor of Dr Martin Luther King, and not universal well wishes, it feels like appropriation. And The Sugarcubes’ “Birthday” is one of their best songs, but a large part of it is about a woman killing and connecting bugs and worms, so it doesn’t feel very festive.
I think K-Pop has delivered another banger, though: I only just found “Birthday” by Red Velvet, and this video has everything. The gang infiltrates some kind of private freakshow led by a Gingerbread Man and apparently consisting of the band Miike Snow from the “Animal” video, with a Yeti housekeeper, a giant cat, and a dragon.
Pop pop the champagne! Dream bigger, birthday party!
2026-02-09 08:48:13
This was initially prompted by a video by Bill Fairchild on his Nerd Nest YouTube channel, titled “Can Valve fix this?” The thing that Valve was being called on to fix was the problem of discoverability on the Steam storefront. There are so many games being released all the time, and it’s gotten harder and harder for independent devs to break through at all.
The phenomenon isn’t unique to Steam, of course; it’s true of just about any digital storefront that has a big enough user base to generate a breakout hit.
Years ago, I signed up for the Apple Developer program specifically to release a game for the iOS app store, and by the time I was ready to get started on it, people were already reporting in overwhelming numbers that there was no way to make a dent in the app store; you might as well not even try.
The first half of that Nerd Nest video focuses on numbers, in particular the increasing number of games that released on Steam every year, and the percentage of games on the store that have fewer than 10 reviews.
If you’re an independent developer, it seems really daunting. The market is already over-saturated, and it’s just increasing almost exponentially (logarithmically? I remain bad at math). It’s highly likely that you’ll pour a ton of effort into creating a video game, release it on Steam, and no one will even play it!
And that might very well be the case, but I can’t help but think of Sturgeon’s Law and remember that there’s always been shovelware. The volume has certainly increased, since it’s gotten easier and easier to develop games over the years, but I’m skeptical that the ratios have fundamentally changed. It’s not a level playing field, because a huge number of the developers putting stuff in the store don’t pour a ton of effort into creating their games.
Which doesn’t do a lot to change the discoverability issue, of course. When I started working in games, the shovelware was usually sequestered into vinyl sleeves of CD-ROMs on spinner racks, kept comfortably apart from the real games in boxes on shelves. Now, it’s all mixed together on the Steam front page. Your earnest and heartfelt independent game about dealing with grief, or dealing with a metroidvania except it’s a roguelite with deckbuilding elements, is being presented alongside Hentaisland 5: Revenge of the Ninja Sluts.1
It is a little less discouraging to remember that, though, if you’re optimistic (or arrogant) enough to believe that it’s still a meritocracy on some level. That quality games will be able to find an audience that’s more sustainable than quick impulse purchases.
I thought the more interesting idea in that video, which I hadn’t considered, is the Steam backlog. You’re not just competing for attention against the thousands of new games being released all the time, but against the hundreds of games people already have in their library, but haven’t played yet. Sturgeon’s Law doesn’t apply here; the resource you’re fighting over isn’t attention or money, but time.
Still, it’s made me wonder just how different today’s market is from the way it’s always been. And I think the most fundamental difference is something Bill mentions towards the end of his video: it’s not just that the number of game developers has exploded, but the number of people covering games has, too. And they’re now subject to all the same issues of discoverability and fighting for attention.
That’s not an entirely new phenomenon in itself: retailers had to prioritize shelf space, magazines had to prioritize the games that would get the most attention for their covers on news stands, websites had to fight for release-day coverage of the most popular games to get the most views.
It’s always been the case that games coverage is subject to marketing, too, which means that the games that get the most attention are the games which are already getting attention. There’s not much money to be made promoting games that are only going to appeal to a niche audience. The rich get richer, the biggest games keep getting bigger.
I think what’s fundamentally changed is the “elimination of the middle class.” Instead of a couple dozen publishers competing for coverage across a dozen or so major magazines or websites, it’s now a many-to-many situation, with hundreds or thousands of developers trying to get the attention of hundreds of video creators and streamers. All with a very small number of platforms consolidating all the “power” by deciding how things are promoted and what gets attention: Steam, YouTube, Twitch, etc.
Everything I say about the business side of game development has to have a ton of qualifiers applied: I have yet to release a game on Steam (or the iOS App Store), and even as someone who plays games, I’m probably not a “typical gamer” by any measure. I’m so dang old in video game terms, for one thing. And I’ve never been very interested in AAA games, almost always preferring independents or the types of games that appeal to niche audiences.2
But I will say that the question of “discoverability” is a little baffling, since I can’t recall ever buying a game or app after seeing it on a digital storefront. Not just Steam, but the iOS app store, or the Nintendo or PlayStation versions. I always already know what I want before I’ve reached the store’s front page.
That’s not to say that concerns about discoverability are wrong or even overblown, of course; just that I don’t get it.
In my mind, the key is to do exactly what Bill does at the end of that video: give personal recommendations to under-seen games. I recently started watching Jason Evangelho’s YouTube channel Linux for Everyone, and he started something similar recently, regular videos giving attention to some of his favorite games for the Steam Deck.
There’s something immensely appealing about getting away from The Old Ways, concentrating on a few big publishers and a few big gaming sites, and working towards a new model that’s more like dozens of community-driven book clubs. For as long as I’ve been working in games, at least, there’s always been a strange disconnect: this business of buying coverage for a game that was purely marketing-driven and transactional, even though there were genuine enthusiasts on either side of that.
In my own experience, it created situations where getting negative coverage from a single website would be devastating for us, since there were so few places covering the types of game we were making. I got the sense that there was an inverted power dynamic that not everybody was aware of — the site giving us negative coverage probably saw themselves as the scrappy underdogs.
While I’m optimistic and naive to a fault, I’m still not suggesting that a more community-driven approach to promoting and marketing games will solve all of the problems. One good thing about consolidating coverage into a single magazine or website is that they’re obligated to make a declaration of their standards and ethics. We’ve already seen tons of cases where influencers have been doing paid advertising without having to acknowledge it as such.
But I am optimistic and naive enough to believe that treating it as a meritocracy will result in the most ethical people doing the best work also earning the best reputations. You can usually tell when someone making a video is talking about something they genuinely enjoy, vs that dead-eyed look when they’re talking about some mobile free-to-play game they’ve been paid to advertise.
Over the past few months, as I’ve tried to be realistic about my chances as an independent developer, what assets I have vs what limitations, I keep thinking about the same thing: sustainability. The most discouraging stories I’ve heard are from people trying to start a studio, not independent developers. And most of the talk about “discoverability” seems to revolve around solo or very small teams having a breakout hit on the level of Stardew Valley or Vampire Survivors. The topic I hardly ever see — probably because it’s not exciting, and it’ll never get as many views on YouTube — is just what it takes to have enough.
There’s always been a tension between the idea “video games are creative works that often have to make a concession to being economically viable,” and “video games are commercial products that often can allow for creative expression.” That’s true of any medium, but I think it’s particularly pronounced in video games, since the start, there was this idea that they were toys instead of works of art.
The entire idea of games as creative works never occurred to me until I first saw how Electronic Arts marketed them. (Especially remarkable considering the kind of company they eventually turned into). The whole idea was selling them as if they were record albums: not just in the packaging, but in promoting them as the work of artists. They leaned heavily into the idea, not just putting the primary creators’ names on the cover, but running ad campaigns that seeded the (soon-to-be toxic) idea of “video game rock stars.”
I was at LucasArts when they started to make the transition away from putting the project leads’ name(s) on the box. I’ve still got mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, it was part of a move away from treating them as artistic works and towards treating them as commercial products. But on the other, it was getting increasingly unrealistic: Hard Hat Mack and Pinball Construction Set might have been the work of a few people, but by the late 90s, it was almost unheard of to have a commercially viable game made by fewer than at least 20-30 people.3
Of course, it’d be foolish to be too romantic about early Electronic Arts. The company had a significant amount of money behind it, and while stressing the games as creative works may have been entirely genuine, it was undeniably part of a marketing strategy. But it also seemed to strike the right balance between art and commerce: using the idea of promoting artists as branding could be cynical, or it could be one of those vanishingly rare cases where everybody wins.
Whatever the case, it’d be a mistake to get too nostalgic about those old days, for a few reasons. Those games were not only competing for shelf space, but still trying to elevate an entire medium, in much the same way as the Vertigo imprint was used by DC Comics to assert that comic books were too for grown-ups, actually. That seems like an argument that nobody really needs to make anymore.
And we saw what happened when game companies took the “game devs as rock stars” idea too far, and it was insufferable. We probably should’ve settled for “game devs as creative people trying to make a living doing what they love.”
I have to wonder if lowering the bar on game development and distribution, making it more accessible to more people, actually helped bring about today’s shift back to product — focusing on breakout hits, sales, placement on digital storefronts, reaching influencers, etc. Removing the “gatekeepers” in publishing and promotion means that more people are having to be hyper-conscious of the business side of game development. Fewer people have the luxury of concentrating solely on the creative or technical side, but also have to be more acutely aware of what sells and what doesn’t, getting as many sales as possible at launch, securing coverage from influencer channels, etc.
Whatever the case, I’m still optimistic that there is a path to sustainability, even if it doesn’t guarantee becoming rock star famous and pulling in rock star money. And I’m optimistic that it comes from promoting the things we love, building more niche communities of people getting really excited about games that directly interest them. Not just games that are so huge and expensive that they have to appeal to literally everyone or they’re considered not worth the investment.
(And I’m going to resolve to practice what I preach and keep promoting independent games that are interesting. The problem there is that, as I mentioned, I’m kind of old, and I just don’t play that many games anymore).
2026-02-04 02:00:00
In Send Help, there’s a montage sequence that’s set to “Theme” by Moondog, aka Louis Thomas Hardin. I was a little bit embarrassed to be the only one in the theater vibing hard to it. I was already fully on board with the movie at that point, so to hear a familiar track being used so effectively was like overkill. Stop, I’m already too into this.
I was only familiar with it because Carter Burwell used Moondog’s track “Stamping Ground” in the soundtrack for The Big Lebowski, and that prompted a quest to find out everything I could about this fascinating musician.
He seemed eccentric in the best possible way: going around New York City in a cape and horned helmet, writing poems and songs praising the hobo lifestyle, incorporating street noise and waterfront sounds into his recordings. And his music synthesized Native American rhythms, European folk songs and formats, and jazz, into something wholly unique.
I prefer the orchestral arrangements (the above two tracks, plus “Bird’s Lament,” are probably his best known), but it’s really interesting to hear how prolific he was with simple variations and rounds.
I’m completely charmed by the catchy earnestness of his round devoted to “Coffee Beans,” suggesting that Moondog was a man after my own heart.
2026-02-03 02:00:00
Reading back over my thoughts about 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, I’ve been frustrated that I can’t adequately describe exactly how the climax of that movie felt like multiple channels of information converging into one, sending a shockwave backwards and improving everything that came before it.
My friend Jake put it exceptionally well, so I’m going to steal it: “the final act of the movie was like a lens had been creeping towards me and suddenly a bunch of things crisply snapped into focus.”
For me, what was so remarkable was that it wasn’t just a sense of, “oh, I get what this movie is trying to say now,” but also, “I get how these movies work and why they tell their stories the way they do.” Things that I’d spent a long time dismissing as nothing more than stylistic flourishes suddenly seemed essential. They’re what make these movies have depth beyond stylish zombie thrillers, turning them into stories worth telling.
But how to describe in a blog post something that’s conveyed through flashes of jarringly incongruous imagery, old film clips, sound design, music choices, and editing? The phrase “dancing about architecture” came to mind, even though I’ve always thought of cinema and writing as being closely related, instead of completely disparate art forms.
At least on the “main” channel. I tend to think of movies as being narratives first, which are supported, clarified, refined, intensified, or occasionally subverted by everything going on in all the other channels available to cinema: cinematography, editing, sound effects, music, and so on.
Even when everything that’s going on in the “side” channels ends up being more interesting or impactful than the narrative. Until 28 Years Later, my favorite Danny Boyle movie had been Slumdog Millionaire. But my key memories of that movie have little to do with the love story at its core. Instead, they’re all about emotion: speed, determination, drive, celebration. I’ve always seen it as an example of how Boyle’s flourishes are what make it memorable at all. It’s a pretty straightforward story delivered with such energy and sentimentality that you feel it as much as you understand it.
And I’ve always thought that 28 Days Later was essentially the same thing: it’s a zombie story, and it has a strong sense of setting, and it’s intelligent, but what ultimately makes it interesting is all of the cinematic style applied to it. An elevated zombie thriller, but still more or less an iteration of the formula. All the familiar elements are there: societal breakdown, a group of survivors having to band together, suspicion and paranoia that someone is secretly infected, the cruelty of humans when society’s guard is down, etc.1
That’s why when I’m talking about “the 28 Days Later franchise,” I’m not including 28 Weeks Later. Not just because that was made without Boyle and Alex Garland’s involvement (by every account I’ve seen), but because it just didn’t seem to have any intention of being more than an iteration on stylish zombie suspense thriller. I enjoyed it a lot! I just didn’t get any indication it fit into what they’re trying to do with the new trilogy.
What I think they’re trying to do is present 28 years in an alternate timeline of the UK, and make it an allegory for the past almost-28 years in our universe. Going deeper into the ideas about societal breakdown common to zombie stories and post-apocalyptic stories in general, and coming up with a hopeful (at least, at the time I’m writing this) sense of coming out the other side.
Which means considering 28 Days Later as an integral part of the story the new trilogy is telling. Not retconning it exactly, so much as re-contextualizing it. Even before Cillian Murphy shows up in the coda of The Bone Temple, you’re already thinking of these three, soon-to-be-four movies2 as a single work. So the most distinctive and memorable images and ideas from the first are now swirling around along with the other images and ideas of the past, which are constantly surrounding all of these characters.
An eerily empty London in broad daylight. A virus bringing about the fall of an entire society. The virus created by government/military forces, but unleashed on the world because of animal rights activists. And the virus itself, which causes uncontrollable, unstoppable rage.
Even back in 2002, it wasn’t exactly subtle imagery: rage tearing down society. Taking down the established order, overthrowing a corrupt and sadistic military, a kind of social revolution that could only come from destruction and anarchy. When we come back to that time in the prologue of 28 Years Later, it’s all shot with the same visual language, and I think it’s significant — more than the obvious significance of setting up the story of the Jimmy cult — that we see kids watching television and the infected destroying a church.
But we also see that, 28 years later, the rage has mostly burned itself out. Almost all of the anarchic, millennial energy is gone, replaced with lumbering husks of former people, reduced to crawling through the forest eating bugs. And society hasn’t rebuilt itself; nothing productive came out of the rage and destruction. It’s just isolated communities stuck in survival mode with nothing more than their memories and traditions.
I have to wonder whether the subplot about the UK being quarantined from the rest of the world is a direct commentary on Brexit and isolationism, or if it’s a less pointed and more universal idea of trying to safely contain the fall of civilization inside a single place, like Escape from New York and Escape from Los Angeles. Desperately hoping to stave off change, confine it elsewhere, and continue living in the normal and familiar.
Even the visual style of 28 Days Later, which was so novel and distinctive at the time, has been woven into the visual language of the new movies. After I watched The Bone Temple, I mistakenly thought it was a half-hearted attempt to fit a Nia DaCosta-led movie into a series previously defined by Danny Boyle, a stylistic flourish done out of obligation. Now, though, I think it’s used in much the same way as the footage of medieval and early-20th-century warfare in 28 Years Later: it’s part of the memories of this place. The style of the first movie has become as much an indicator of “early 2000s” as Duran Duran songs are of the early 1980s.
Notably, it’s used whenever there’s an attack by (or an attack on) the infected (or, in the case of Samson, both at once). Who are themselves literal manifestations of early 2000s rage.
I also said that much of The Bone Temple was filmed “like a documentary about a gang of sadistic Satanists,” which I meant as in comparison to the flourishes of 28 Years Later, but even with that qualification, is still not right. The scenes with Dr Kelson and Samson still have the dreamlike quality of much of 28 Years Later, with shots of the countryside set to music, and long shots of the two of them incongruously sitting together or getting stoned together, or “happy together” montages. It’s only because so much of the story involves the Jimmy gang that the style seems so restrained and straightforward.
Which to me suggests the idea of the banality of evil. At the end of 28 Years Later, the gang is a bonkers surprise, and it’s all being seen from Spike’s perspective, so we get a lot of disorienting quick cuts. In The Bone Temple, the perspective has shifted to that of a dispassionate observer. We’re no longer seeing the world from Spike’s viewpoint, but switching between multiple stories, and Spike is the most sympathetic (and passive) participant in one of them.
The torture scene seems to go on for so long partly because it’s treated so matter-of-factly. We get a few gruesome close-ups, but none of the flashy editing or stylistic work that the series is more or less known for at this point. It feels like the movie flat-out refuses to let the audience romanticize any aspect of this violence. No “bullet time” shots like with one of the infected getting killed, and not even the brutal energy of an earlier scene where Samson rips a guy’s head and spine out of his body. There’s nothing exciting about any of this; it’s just horrible.
And the mutilated bodies are left hanging there for the rest of the scene. So long that the movie no longer seems to be emphasizing the horror of it, but just the pointlessness of it. Even while Jimmy Ink sits outside with Spike, having lost interest in what’s going on, casually commenting on the nature of the screaming. It’s not even that she’s numb to it by this point; it seems that she’s actually bored by its emptiness.
She doesn’t have the same psychotic bloodlust as the rest of the gang. She doesn’t need to lord power over people like Jimmy Crystal does. We’ve seen her effortlessly kill zombies, so she doesn’t need to do this to survive. We can infer that at some point in the past, she bought into the promise that they were serving some higher power, and that there was a real purpose to what they were doing, but now she’s realized that it’s all a lie. She was born into a world that had already fallen apart, with no sane person around to suggest that there’s any alternative.
So it’s perfectly fitting that there’s no sense of “magic” in the scenes with the Jimmy gang. They’re a cargo cult built around a psychopath’s childhood memories of a pedophile. They don’t represent anything beyond murder, destruction, and lies. There’s not even the hint of heavy-metal allure that was in Dr Kelson’s display.
Meanwhile, Dr Kelson is probably the sanest and most sympathetic character that we’ve seen in the trilogy so far. But the Duran Duran songs, and the nostalgic snapshots, drive home the idea that he’s not that different from the other survivors we’ve seen: locked inside memories. In retrospect, I probably shouldn’t have needed to hear “Girls on Film” and “Ordinary World” to get this, considering the man lives inside a monument made from the bones of dead people, which is the title of the movie, and he repeatedly says “remember we will die.”
28 Years Later makes a lot of the contrast between the security and safety of Spike’s home village, and the orange-colored man living alone amidst towers made from dead bodies he renders down to bones and ashes. It’s key to the story of that movie: this is Spike’s idea of normal, and it’s very similar to ours, and it’s surprising that he’s shown the most kindness and compassion by the person who seems to be the most dangerous and insane.
The Bone Temple follows that contrast by showing how they’re actually similar. Kelson spends all of his time remembering the past and trying to honor the dead. The village spends all of its time inside a “Wee Britain:” recreating a society based on romanticized memories of tradition and culture, right down to recreating all of their faults. They’re driven by war and honor, isolating themselves on a small island and driving away any hostile intruders.
It’s fascinating that The Bone Temple‘s climax cuts between Kelson’s version of Old Nick, and Samson regaining his senses. I have no idea if this is the actual plan, or if it would even work in terms of story, but the end of The Bone Temple vaguely suggests that this is a zombie story where the hope for the future isn’t in the survivors, but the zombies.
His words are the first suggestion that something has actually changed, something new has actually happened in this world, after 28 years of being locked in rage, murder, and false memories. His fighting his way out of the train car feels like more than just survival, but breaking free.
And Jimmy Crystal’s vision of a blood-soaked Samson as Satan, and his calling out “why have you forsaken me?” isn’t just one last bit of self-important blasphemy. It’s an omen. Samson really does have the potential that Jimmy Crystal always lied about, of bringing about a new world from destruction, and the final insult is that he’s going to have no part in it.
The coda shows Cillian Murphy’s character and his daughter (?) living in safety and presumed security, but I thought it was notable that all of their dialogue is about history. And that he’s both her tutor and her teacher, implying that they either live alone or in a very small community. The feel of the scene is safety, security, and serenity, but we’ve already seen that in this world, that also means stagnation.
The very end suggests that the next part of the story is going to be about how their peaceful existence is going to be upset by the arrival of Spike and the former Jimmy Ink. I’m a lot more intrigued by the suggestion that they’re all unaware that somewhere out there, there’s a nude giant who’s about to change the world.
2026-02-02 05:52:41
Over the past couple of years, I’ve gotten better at desensitizing myself to horror movies. I rarely sit down in the theater anymore with the rolling-stomach sense of dread in my core that I’m going to see something that’s so gross or so intense that it makes me pass out. I hardly ever feel my watch going off every few minutes with a notification that my heart rate has gotten too high.
But I still haven’t been able to address how easily emotionally manipulated I am. Anything even suggesting cruelty or harm to animals — as I found out with Good Boy and Primate — is going to make me viscerally miserable. And I still can’t handle scenes of social awkwardness or bullying without wanting to crawl inside of myself. I laughed maniacally through all the carnage of Final Destination Bloodlines, but I’m staying safely away from Friendship.
Which means that after the trailer for Send Help, I had less trepidation about seeing the gore of Evil Dead, or the schlocky gross-out gore of Evil Dead 2, than I did about seeing the kind of “ceaseless abuse callously rained down on a basically innocent person” of Drag Me to Hell. As much as I like that movie, it’s got an undeniable nastiness at the core of it; even though Justin Long appears throughout, I couldn’t stop myself from trying to take it at least a little bit seriously.
As it turns out, I didn’t need to worry, since not only are the workplace-bullying scenes necessary to establish the premise mercifully short, but they’re done with all the restraint and naturalism of Darkman. In other words: they turn up all the dials to maximum and just let it cook.
It’s all so full of uncomfortably extreme close-ups on characters’ faces, and benign workplace grossness like a tuna salad sandwich, that you could miss how every single detail was meticulously chosen for maximum effect. The office itself isn’t attention-grabbingly Joe vs the Volcano-level awful, but it is designed efficiently to deliver exactly what the scene requires: desks that combine the most soul-crushing aspects of both open office plans and cubicles, a long path to the corner office perfect for a humiliating walk while being stared and laughed at by coworkers, populated with characters that tell you instantly what they’re all about based solely on their appearance.
It was quiet genius to cast Dennis Haysbert, a man whose sheer presence immediately suggests a gravity and earnest seriousness to everything, even before he starts talking, for a small part in what is essentially a live-action Ren & Stimpy cartoon.
But the plane crash sequence! Surely that’s where the gloves are going to come off, and Send Help is going to go all-out in making me squirm. You’ve got a bunch of douchebags in a plane that we know from the premise is going to go down horrifically, making fun of seat belts, pointedly all out of their seats to circle around a laptop deliberately to make fun of our hero — this is going to be gruesome!
And even that is played for laughs to such a degree that I was starting to wonder what kind of movie I was even watching. Is it even a horror movie, or a suspense thriller? Is it like Drag Me to Hell, or low-budget splatter horror like Evil Dead, or campy comedy-horror like Evil Dead 2, or over-the-top comic book storytelling like Darkman? Is it a full-on comedy, or suspense, or revenge-fantasy thriller, or horror?
As it turns out, the answer is “yes.” And for me, the moment where I finally got the message to just shut up and watch is the scene where Rachel McAdams’s Linda decides she wants to try and kill a boar.
It is violent, and funny, and tense, and gory, and exhilarating, and so spectacularly over the top that it commands you to stop second-guessing and just be completely immersed in the movie. Not “turn your brain off” so much as “turn off the part of your brain that insists on over-thinking everything.”
On Letterboxd, I described it as “the purest essence of horror comedy,” but that’s not really accurate. It’s more like the purest essence of movies. It doesn’t really slot comfortably into any one genre, because it’s not really iterating on any particular genre. It’s more like a mash-up of everything that Sam Raimi likes, in a movie that only Sam Raimi could or even would want to make.
I’m always dismissive of auteur theory, and Send Help lets me stay dismissive of it, despite being one of the Sam Raimi-est movies you’ll ever watch. Because it simply doesn’t work without Rachel McAdams, too.
She is, as always, innately and unavoidably likeable and relatable, which becomes increasingly important as the story takes her character into darker directions. And she’s so fully committed to both the movie and to her character that she goes to the wildest extremes and you still think not only “yeah, that tracks” but also “and I still like her.”
It’s a great example of that idea of “glamour as drag” that McAdams excels at, where you see her go through the extremes of lovably awkward dork, to hair-down Blue Lagoon thriving, through the climax, to the very end, and it all feels like the same person. Remarkable in a movie full of broad stereotypes and gleefully dated cliches of what Hollywood considers hot.
Dylan O’Brien is outstanding as well, and it’s remarkable for how he leans so hard into making a character that’s an irredeemable asshole, and yet still manages to win the audience’s sympathy at key moments.
There’s a surprisingly good interview on IGN with the leads, Sam Raimi, and producer Zainab Azizi, where they talk about exactly this. McAdams’s complete commitment to what makes the movie work, and O’Brien’s choice to ramp up how reprehensible his character Bradley is. It’s also enlightening in terms of auteur theory, where the aspects of Send Help that I would’ve assumed were 1000% the product of this being Sam Raimi’s “vision,” were actually from the actors or the editor.
That whole question of playing off the audience’s sympathies is one of the most interesting aspects of Send Help. There’s a scene where Linda and Bradley are giving each other more of their back-story, and it explains how they got to where they are at the start of the story. It was jarring for how sincere it seemed to be, in a movie that had so far been completely unconcerned with anything other than being absurdly visceral and fun.
During the moments of highest pathos in that scene, the score asserts itself with lines of piano that almost seem to be lifted directly from the most maudlin, late 80s, made-for-TV movie. Even in “just shut up and watch” mode, I still had trouble reading it. Was the movie making fun of itself? Was it pointing out the absurdity of putting an emotional scene in a movie as bombastic as this?
Watching the end credits, I was surprised to see that Danny Elfman did the music for Send Help, since it’s understated almost to a fault and, apart from that one scene, never drew attention to itself. But in retrospect, it makes perfect sense. Elfman’s immediately-recognizable style is a little like Raimi’s, in that they’re both bombastic and attention-grabbing, making everything heightened and unreal. But I’d been more or less putting both of them into an easily-understood box, looking at them with anticipation and saying “Say the line! Say the line!” Just like I expected Send Help to be an iteration on Drag Me to Hell.
I think what I hadn’t appreciated is that the best artists develop a recognizable style out of the result of doing great, memorable work, not just for the sake of creating a style. I don’t think the soundtrack for Beetlejuice was the result of “I’m going to make an even wackier and darker version of what I did for Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure,” so much as “I understand exactly what tone this movie is going for.”
And the whole scene in Send Help is like that: I’ve been locked into this idea that a movie can’t include a scene like that without either embracing it fully as a moment of true, raw, emotion; or making some kind of self-aware comment on it. But that’s a pretty shallow and reductive take. I think the scene is there and was played like that simply because the story needed it. It was necessary to set up the extreme reversals and twists that were to follow, without having the characters become completely absurd cartoons. It wasn’t camp; it was to keep the movie from turning into camp.
And sometimes artists put stuff into their work not to make a comment on it, but simply because they know how it works, and because they like it. That’s evident throughout Send Help. It’s pure storytelling, and everything is there to tell the story in the most visceral, impactful way.
When I was still trying to classify what this movie is, exactly, I wondered whether it was going to be like Spider-Man 2 and Darkman, and be Raimi’s take on comic books-as-movies. After rejecting that idea and settling onto the theory that this was obviously going to be Raimi’s take on Stephen King instead (in particular “Survivor Type” crossed with Misery), he threw in a curve ball with a couple of scenes that could’ve been lifted directly from EC horror comics.
One has Bradley making a gruesome discovery on the beach. It is shot so exquisitely that it made me laugh out loud: a single arm jutting out of the sand, the hand perfectly posed for maximum emotional impact. It felt exactly like the climactic panel of a story in Eerie or Creepy; I could immediately imagine how it would’ve looked had Jack Davis drawn it.
And my absolute favorite moment in the movie involves a jump scare, but I’ll try to avoid spoiling it entirely: A creature attacks, screaming. It’s extremely well-executed, but what makes it masterful is that it looks directly into the camera and keeps screaming for a second or two before it cuts away.
It’s such a perfect moment from a horror comedy, included not because this is a horror comedy, but just because this is really funny. Just like it includes horror comic imagery even though it’s not a comic book movie. It’s all stuff that’s in the movie just because they love it, a swirling mass of heightened, unrealistic images. A face hitting a window. A diamond ring in extreme close-up. A Gilligan’s Island-level of craftsmanship in a hat thatched out of palm leaves. A lavish sashimi dinner. An X of crossed rocks seen on a distant mountain. A narrow path along a cliff face that looks as if it were shot on a film set in the 1960s.
It’s tempting to think about Send Help as a story about female empowerment, or an “eat the rich” revenge fantasy, or a psychological suspense thriller about manipulation and shifting sympathies. And I’ve already seen reviews of Send Help that were of the format “I saw this plot reveal coming from a mile away” or “it would have been better if it did this.” But I think they’re missing the point, as much as if you tried to write a think piece about class dynamics, or an academic critique of storytelling structure, based on a night’s performance at Medieval Times.
Not that I think Send Help is shallow, but just that it’s not something that demands to be processed or analyzed or interpreted. It’s pure, old-school, visceral storytelling, masterfully executed by people who are masters at what they do, sharing the kinds of storytelling they love.