CEO of the Flies, or, One Thing I Love About Send Help

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.