The most impressive thing about Iron Lung, the claustrophobic then ultimately cosmic horror cheapie directed by, written, and starring YouTube personality Mark Fischbach (AKA Markiplier), is that it takes a while to fall apart. Fischbach’s self-funded film notably expands on its source material, David Szymanski’s well-liked indie horror video game of the same name, and adds a series of tortured narrative convolutions to its main character’s already harrowing underwater mission. As a performer, Fischbach’s frantic performance can sometimes be distractingly monotonous, but as a filmmaker, he has an impressive eye not only for compositional details, but also for how his images cut and flow together.
Trapped in an experimental submarine with no external visibility beyond black, white, and grey x-ray-style camera images, Fischbach’s desperate protagonist mostly struggles to navigate his deceptively confined space. His grip on reality gives way faster than the integrity of the ship’s hull though, so he eventually starts to look inward, which shifts Iron Lung‘s focus away from nerve-wracking B-movie peril and towards a more character-driven sort of psychological horror. Thankfully, by this point in the movie, Fischbach’s already paved the way for his adaptation’s inevitably chaotic, but potently upsetting finale.
For a while, Fischbach presents Iron Lung‘s single location like a nautical-horror-themed escape room as his character, the stressed-out prisoner Simon, explores the titular sub. An imposing narrator hints at a post-apocalyptic backstory involving a cataclysmic global event called The Quiet Rapture, which mysteriously leaves a sliver of humanity to fight for survival with precious few resources. Simon’s mission begins as a vaguely defined resource/data-collection mission, but soon becomes a solo fight for survival after he loses contact with Ava (Caroline Rose Kaplan), the impatient radio dispatcher who gives Simon his orders through a tinny speaker. Before then, Simon has to make do with limited resources and even less contextualizing information.
To his credit, Fischbach carefully threads the needle for Simon’s later collapse through a more introverted story about penance, and a pre-dive incident that not only led to his imprisonment, but also his spiritual and physical breakdown. That’s sometimes hard to appreciate as Iron Lung plays out, since Simon’s dialogue mostly consists of frantic questions and declarative protests (and sometimes both), like “How many times are you gonna use me before you let me go?” and, “Why is it so fucking hot down here?”
More convincing is Fischbach’s attention to fetishistic detail, like his extreme close-ups of blood-red condensation as it sizzles and beads before falling from a leaky overhead pipe or the blown-out audio quality on the sub’s radio speaker. Fischbach subtly develops his audience surrogate character on this foundation of tactile, analog-horror-friendly touchstones. You never have to wait too long for Fischbach to find new and compelling ways to reframe his character as a roaming plot device, who spends most of his time searching for the next hidden fixture or flickering light to futz with. It’s easy to imagine an even more intimately scaled B-movie where Fischbach just explores the main cabin, making important discoveries about his mission and how he can survive as he goes. But the time Fischbach devotes to letting Simon root around his ship effectively hooks viewers for what could have otherwise been a one-trick genre exercise. As it is, IronLung is distinguished by the same creative ambitions that ultimately make its ending seem like a watery solution after such an airtight setup.
This type of story has to have a big sweaty gear shift to be anything more than a cool concept in search of an idea, and with its trippy, body-horror-meets-Lovecraft conclusion, Fischbach swings for the fences in a way that feels both necessary and reckless. The film is an undeniable breakthrough for the filmmaker, even if he’s got both too much chutzpah and too little experience to stick such a tough landing. IronLung‘s not a flawless debut, but it has a bright future as a cult classic.
Director: Mark Fischbach Writer: Mark Fischbach Starring: Mark Fischbach, Caroline Rose Kaplan, Troy Baker, Elsie Lovelock, Elle LaMont, Seán McLoughlin, Isaac McKee Release Date: January 30, 2026
They are the latest Palestinians in Gaza to die since a ceasefire deal, which has been punctuated by deadly Israeli strikes, came into effect on Oct. 10, 2025.
We think we’ve found the cure for the Deep Hurting that’s plaguing society. Announced earlier today, the RiffTrax crew will be returning to the Satellite of Love for four brand-new episodes of Mystery Science Theater 3000. Mystery Science Theater 3000: The RiffTrax Experiments will celebrate RiffTrax’s 20 years of movie mockery by bringing Mike Nelson, Bill Corbett, and Kevin Murphy back to where their journey began, aboard a spaceship where they’re forced to watch schlock until they go insane. This also means the return of the original voices of Tom Servo and Crow, with Corbett and Murphy shoving their hands up the butts of their beloved plastic bots and controlling their characters once again.
Since the show ended in 1999, Mystery Science Theater split into various movie-commentary groups, including Cinematic Titanic, RiffTrax, and MST3K. RiffTrax launched in 2006, releasing movie commentary tracks as digital downloads, and MST3K returned on Netflix in 2017 for a few seasons before launching its own platform, the Gizmoplex, in 2021. Earlier this year, show creator Joel Hodgson sold the property to Radial Entertainment, the company formed by the merger of Shout! Studios and FilmRise. It had previously been owned by Hodgson and Shout! since 2015. “Creating your own comedic art form like MST3K is deeply fulfilling and fun—but that doesn’t mean I’m required to work on it every day for the rest of my life,” Hodgson said of the sale. “This move feels like the best way to encourage MST3K to find its future, while I find mine, including the chance to focus on some new and different projects with fewer moving parts.” Unfortunately, all this good news means there will be no RiffTrax live shows this year. Fans will have to settle for one of the new MST3K episodes landing in theaters as a Fathom Event later this year.
The tool lets ICE populate a map with potential deportation targets, bring up dossiers on each person, and view an address “confidence score” based on data sourced from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and other government agencies. This is according to a user guide for ELITE 404 Media obtained.
404 Media is now publishing a version of that user guide so people can read it for themselves.
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Do you know anything else about ELITE? Do you work at Palantir, ICE, or CBP? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at joseph.404 or send me an email at joseph@404media.co.
Catherine O’Hara has died. Best known for her blend of high-energy comedy and deeply felt humanity across the films of Tim Burton and Christopher Guest, O’Hara has been a staple of Hollywood comedy since her television debut in the late ’70s. Variety confirmed her death via O’Hara’s manager. The beloved star of Home Alone, Beetlejuice, Schitt’s Creek, and countless other hit comedies over the last four decades was 71.
Born in Toronto on March 4, 1954, O’Hara made her start in comedy as the 20-year-old understudy to Gilda Radner at the famed Canadian comedy theater The Second City. After Radner left for Lorne Michaels’ Saturday Night Live, O’Hara filled in and soon became a star performer. When the theater stage gave way to television, O’Hara was a creator, writer, and star of the groundbreaking sketch series SCTV, alongside John Candy, Harold Ramis, Rick Moranis, Joe Flaherty, Andrea Martin, Martin Short, and Eugene Levy, with whom she would remain a collaborator for decades. Impersonating Lucille Ball, Tammy Faye Bakker, Katharine Hepburn, and her old friend Gilda Radner, O’Hara demonstrated her range as a performer and her aptitude for high-status roles.
When SCTV ended in 1984, O’Hara hit Hollywood Blvd running, landing roles opposite Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep in Mike Nichols’ Heartburn and as an obnoxious ice cream truck driver in Martin Scorsese’s After Hours. Following Anjelica Huston’s reported exit from the production of Beetlejuice, director Tim Burton, coming off Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, wanted O’Hara for Delia Deetz, the film’s pretentious artworld matriarch. The actor initially declined the role, but after Burton hopped on a plane to meet with her personally, O’Hara relented. As the temporarily embarrassed urbanite forced to live with her thoughts in the sticks, O’Hara skewered the bohemians with magnetic charisma, keeping the film’s energy high long before Michael Keaton’s Beetlejuice makes his appearance. Not only did Beetlejuice give O’Hara her first iconic screen role, but it was on the set that she met her husband, Burton’s then-production designer Bo Welch, whom she married in 1992.
Following turns in Dick Tracy and Martin Short’s short-lived The Completely Mental Misadventures Of Ed Grimley, O’Hara signed on to play Kate McCallister in the family boobytrap Christmas comedy Home Alone. The role didn’t require O’Hara to throw paint cans or get electrocuted, but rather to give the film its emotional center as a mother desperately trying to get back to the son she accidentally abandoned. O’Hara instantly became one of cinema’s most revered fainters as her shriek, “Kevin!” became as familiar a holiday phrase as “’tis the season.” She’d return for the sequel Home Alone 2: Lost In New York, again hitting her famous faint and catchphrase.
Throughout the ’90s, O’Hara continued to vary her roles, playing Calamity Jane in Tall Tale and lending her voice to two characters in the Burton-produced The Nightmare Before Christmas: the mischievous trick-or-treater, Shock, and the romantic lead and sad ragdoll, Sally. In 1996, she reunited with many of her Second City alums for Christopher Guest’s Waiting For Guffman. Playing the delusional travel agent and community theater vet Shelia Albertson, O’Hara played off the unflappable Fred Willard in the first of four collaborations with Guest. 2000’s Best In Show allowed her to go even deeper into the mind of the downtrodden middle-class dreamer as Cookie Fleck, the optimistic owner of Winky, her beloved Norwich terrier and inspiration for the song, “God Loves A Terrier.” Paired with Eugene Levy, O’Hara grounded the film’s over-the-top characters as half of the put-upon couple facing perpetual inconvenience as they move up the ranks of the Mayflower Kennel Club Dog Show.
Levy and O’Hara would find even greater heights as Mitch and Mickey, the long-estranged folk duo from A Mighty Wind. The film’s emotional plot focuses on their performance of their ’60s hit, “A Kiss At The End Of The Rainbow,” culminating in a beautiful and heart-wrenching finale. Though the pair would again star in Guest’s For Your Consideration, Levy and O’Hara’s partnership didn’t become a national concern again until they both experienced a career revival as Moira and Johnny Rose on the unlikely deep-cable hit, Schitt’s Creek, which would net O’Hara her second Emmy. The show was a smash with critics and audiences alike, who were ready to elevate O’Hara to the highest tier of comedy stars. For their part, O’Hara and Levy worked magic as an eccentric but grounded couple on the series for six seasons, as O’Hara added new vocabulary words into the pop-culture lexicon.
“Eugene and I, without even talking about it, individually decided that we would be a solid, loving couple. So that was very nice to play,” she told The A.V. Club in 2020. “I don’t think they were going that strongly in this direction, but there were a few nagging jokes at the beginning, and we all worked against that, which was great. Because I think it was lovely having a solid relationship in the middle of all this madness and turmoil.”
O’Hara performed several other roles throughout 21st century, voicing characters in Where The Wild Things Are, Frankenweenie, and The Wild Robot, while appearing in the hit legacy sequel Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. She also had standout guest-star roles on Six Feet Under, Curb Your Enthusiasm, 30 Rock, and Modern Family. Last year, O’Hara earned her final Emmy nomination for Supporting Actress for The Studio.
O’Hara is survived by her husband and two children.
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