Mark Fischbach’s unlikely box-office hit Iron Lung caught the conventional film world by surprise. An adaptation and expansion of David Szymanski’s short, vibes-driven indie game of the same name, the sci-fi horror movie was self-financed, self-distributed, and marketed largely through Fischbach’s YouTube channel (under the alias Markiplier, he has more than 38 million subscribers) and his popular podcasts, Distractible and Go! My Favorite Sports Team.

But Fischbach’s extensive word-of-mouth campaign persuaded theaters it was worth taking a risk on an indie film from an unknown director with no studio backing, and Iron Lung opened in thousands of theaters on Jan. 30, rocketing to a $20 million opening weekend and a #2 spot in the box-office rankings. Early in the weekend, it seemed like it might come in at #1, outpacing Send Help, a horror-thriller-comedy from a major director (Spider-Man and Evil Dead veteran Sam Raimi) working with a major star (Rachel McAdams) and a major studio (20th Century Studios), all of which mean major marketing money.

It feels like both the film industry and film journalists are still trying to catch up. Iron Lung has only been reviewed by a few established outlets, and several of those reviews complain about the film as if it were a conventional horror movie made for a mainstream horror audience, particularly griping that it lacks tension or scares. They’re wrong. On both an industry level and an aesthetic level, Iron Lung is pretty frightening — and in both cases, that’s a great thing.

On a strictly aesthetic level, Fischbach — who also produced the film, co-wrote it with Szymanski, and stars in it — does a fine job of conveying the horror of the movie’s scenario. Like the game, the film version of........

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