After a fierce battle between executives and legal teams, the 2026 indie film Iron Lung is finally available for digital purchase on YouTube, four months after its initial theatrical release on Jan 30. While wildly successful in theaters—taking the #1 spot for the entirety of its opening weekend, grossing over $50 million worldwide, and even breaking the record for most fake blood used in a film—the path from theatrical release to digital was a rocky one.
Iron Lung is the three-year-long, passion project of Mark Fischbach, more commonly known as Markiplier on his YouTube gaming channel. With a $3 million budget (which in Hollywood is practically nothing), it borrows from other Indie Horror films like Saw and the Evil Dead franchise in which the entire film takes place in a single location, which in this case is a rickety iron submersible. The film is an adaptation of the horror game of the same name (which is still available for purchase on Steam), with the game developer David Szymanski co-writing the screenplay, and both film and game share the same premise: within a grim-dark sci-fi universe where the stars and habitable planets have mysteriously disappeared due to an event known as The Quiet Rapture, a convict is welded inside a rudimentary submersible nicknamed “The Iron Lung” to explore and document the mysterious blood ocean moons that have been found. In exchange for going on this highly dangerous mission, the convict will receive their freedom among the survivors.
Within the game it is the player who is the pilot, however that would make for a dull film—so instead of a nameless numbered convict, Simon (played by Markiplier himself) is the prisoner, pilot, and protagonist. The entire film centers primarily upon Simon as he slowly navigates through the bottom of the blood ocean within the sweltering claustrophobic metal womb as it rattles and leaks around him. The sound design within Iron Lung is a big highlight, as there aren’t just the sounds of metallic grinding, but more mysterious noises from outside the submersible itself.
A big draw of Iron Lung (besides the ocean of blood) is that the submersible does not have any kind of porthole or windows to see through, because the construction of the sub is so sub-par, the amount of pressure from the depth Simon is chugging around at is so great that it would break the windows and flood the hull. The only mode of navigation is through latitude and longitude readings, provided by a physical grid map of the surface, as well as a black and white camera. There is no way to know anything about what is going on beyond the walls of the submersible, which is where the real terror of the film lies.
To say Iron Lung is “thrilling” would be a lie. There are only two actual jump scares in the entire film, the rest of the horror comes from the atmosphere. It builds slowly over the course of the runtime, yet right at the start it’s obvious that this experience will be deliciously unpleasant as the audience watches the submersible descend into the crimson waves. Iron Lung operates in the same slow filmmaking language that David Lynch films are a staple of, while also blending the nostalgic hammy dialogue style of classic 80s sci-fi like Escape from New York and The Abyss. The film is not trying to be “mainstream,” opting to deliberately keep its audiences in the dark about its world building and characters, even leaving the viewer with more questions than answers by the end. It is within the small visual details of the film that the answers can be found, giving the film replay value as the audience can always spot something new on each viewing, be it in the set design, costumes, dialogue, or soundtrack—harkening back to blockbusters of old in its wonderful vagueness.
As narratively grim as Iron Lung is, its success and reputation are built off the love of a dedicated fanbase. Because Markiplier fans called their local AMC, Regal, and Cinemark locations enough—we here in Columbus were able to have a theatrical experience rarely ever achieved. A totally self-funded indie film was shown nationwide, all because of the collective effort of 38 million people.
Markiplier has been a staple of many Gen Z childhoods, known mostly for his Five Nights at Freddy’s content (and the memes that have come out of it). But he has kept his content relatively unchanged since 2012. Unlike many other gaming channels of his day, he has constantly supported many indie game developers, as well as many charities and nonprofits. Even setting up a blood drive to promote Iron Lung and stopping production during the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike. With the digital release of Iron Lung, he hopes to extend accessibility to filmmakers through YouTube, and pave the way for more indie film projects and an end to the decaying tyranny of big film studios shoving slop down the modern audience’s throat.
