💫 hollow 💫

The more discussion I see around Iron Lung, the more that tweet rings true. People complaining that the eldritch elements are “confusing” feels like this: “I see the food is labeled spicy. I eat the spicy food. Then I ask why it’s spicy.” That’s the genre. Eldritch horror is supposed to be confusing. It’s built around the idea that there are things so vast, alien, and incomprehensible that the human brain literally cannot process them cleanly. If everything is neatly explained and wrapped up with a bow, then it stops being eldritch horror and just becomes sci-fi with a creepier coat of paint. What Iron Lung does really well is refuse to over explain itself. It trusts the audience to sit with discomfort and uncertainty. The horror comes from not knowing, from piecing things together. That’s the point. But the general audience increasingly needs everything to be explainable and spoon-fed to them. If the movie doesn’t pause to spell out exactly what’s happening, why it’s happening, and how they should feel about it, they reject it outright. It’s like they need a Subway Surfers clip playing in the corner while big flashing text and text-to-speech narrates every plot beat, otherwise the hamster on the wheel in their brain stalls out and dies.