Arguably kicked off by the runaway success of Stranger Things, it’s no secret that we’re in something of an 80s nostalgia craze—particularly in the realm of horror. Between the “satanic panic” in America and the “video nasties” in Britain, there’s truly no better genre to pay homage to the decade that brought us The Shining, Poltergeist, Friday the 13th, A Nightmare on Elm Street, The Evil Dead, Hellraiser, and countless more.
As with any trend, some fans are tired of the throwbacks and have developed a bit of 80s fatigue. I was certainly skeptical of yet another 80s homage, but I was thrilled to find Dead Mail far exceeded my expectations.
The film opens with Sterling Macer Jr. as Josh Ivey, a terrified man frantically army-crawling towards a USPS drop box. His painfully bound hands clutch a bloody scrap of paper, a long chain dragging behind him. Just as his captor catches up, he narrowly manages to stuff the paper into the box.
From here, we follow the note to its destination at the post office, where it’s marked undeliverable and subsequently examined by the dead letter investigation team. Deeming it a particularly tough case, Ann (Micki Jackson) and Bess (Susan Priver) hand it over to the best mind in the biz: Jasper (Tomas Boykin.) What follows is a story that’s grounded and realistic, yet impossible to predict.
The acting is excellent across the board; John Fleck in particular delivers an outstanding performance as Trent Whittington, a genteel loner with a synthesizer obsession. The directors’ extensive musical background and their own passion for synth shines through the beautifully interwoven score. The cinematography is surprisingly mature for a sophomore effort, and the 16mm film lends a period-appropriate grain that never feels overdone or distracting. The whole production is filled with brilliant little touches— I was particularly impressed by the choice to use highly reflective glasses for Josh while he’s working, the glint of the lenses obscuring his eyes and giving him the appearance of a mad scientist. It’s a movie made with care and flair, and it manages to carve its own niche in an oversaturated subgenre without resorting to the outrageous.
WARNING: THE FOLLOWING CONTAINS SPOILERS.
Despite its punny title and an opening sequence promising slasher schlock, Dead Mail is restrained and subtle in every respect. An excellent example is the narrative handling of Jasper, who— despite his unexplained “in” with some sort of foreign hacker-spy— is ultimately just another postal worker in a small Midwest town. His coworkers may treat him with borderline reverence, extolling his achievements in hushed tones, but he isn’t much of anyone outside the office.
His minor celebrity status at work is quietly, but powerfully, contrasted against his humble living situation at a men’s home. “Enigmatic savant with a secretive past” is a character easy to mythologize, yet here he is, unassuming and unmistakably human. Of course, nothing quite solidifies his humanity and subverts the “reclusive genius” trope like his anticlimactic demise early on, a brave and impactful choice by the filmmakers that leaves the whole movie feeling depressingly real.
In many ways, Jasper’s story is representative of Dead Mail as a whole. It often feels like a neo-noir in muted miniature: an intriguing but insular mystery in a claustrophobically small world. The setting is a purposefully mundane landscape of peeling paint and flickering fluorescents, not unduly dour but certainly not glamorized, either. We root for Jasper, Josh, Ann, and Bess, but we’re never particularly attached to them. And while we dislike Trent, we understand and even pity him.
Trent is a serial killer by circumstance. Sure, he feels “off” from the start, but it becomes apparent as events unfold that he didn’t set out to hurt anyone. He pulls out all the stops in an attempt to keep Josh from moving, finally resorting to imprisonment at the peak of his desperation. He accidentally kills Jasper when attempting to knock him out, and in the subsequent panic he kills the person who discovers the scene in order to cover his tracks and escape. He’s deeply rattled by the murders, blaming Josh for the bloodshed in his reluctance to fully face what he’s done.
This brings us to what might be the most interesting element of Dead Mail: rather than the grief of the bereaved or the fear of the victim, the killer’s own internal conflict is the emotional core of the film. We know nothing of Josh apart from his skill as a synthesizer engineer, his dream of creating the perfect woodwind patch, and his reverence for Japanese manufacturers. We know precious little of Jasper, even less about his foreign contact, and least of all about Ann and Bess. We learn much more about Trent: his backstory and his motivations, his hopes and— most important of all— his fears.
Trent constantly battles with his own violence, acting with shocking cruelty at one moment and walking it back the next. At one point he adheres Josh’s entire right arm to the bathtub using epoxy, a move which primes the audience for a stomach-churning, skin-ripping payoff— yet our expectations are subverted when Trent later returns to douse the arm in vinegar, dissolving the epoxy and leaving Josh relatively unharmed. His initial plan to kill Josh (cooking poison into his favorite dish) is extremely tame by horror standards, and he carries out his preparation with an odd tenderness. Then, when Ann comes a-knockin’, Trent tries his hardest to psych himself up to bash her over the head with a hammer only to find he can’t go through with it. Instead, he lets her find and free Josh while he eats the poisoned chicken himself.
Trent’s semi-redemptive end is deeply intertwined with the homoromantic undertones of his relationship with Josh. Early and often, Trent refers to Josh as “my partner” and to their venture as a “partnership.” Trent also takes on a domestic, almost wifely role from the beginning. He keeps house and dotes on Josh, bringing him tools, cooking his favorite meals, and showering him with praise. He seems just as, if not more, concerned with making Josh personally happy as he does with facilitating Josh’s work. This isn’t entirely lost on Josh, whose discomfort and attempts at redirection are clear, but Trent is undeterred.
At one point, Trent redesigns Josh’s original business name, Ivey Analog Synthesizers, to read Ivey-Whittington. Though never directly addressed, this subtle change reinforces the increasingly blurring lines between business partners and life partners, their hyphenated last names alluding to a marriage of sorts. When Trent “snaps” at Josh’s attempt to leave, we understand his anguish not as a reaction to the loss of an investment, but as a symptom of unhealthy attachment from a man with severe abandonment issues. His attitude towards the company hiring Josh is that of a jealous lover towards a rival: Josh’s attempts to explain that Trent also stands to benefit from the move fall on deaf ears. Trent’s meltdown isn’t about losing the prototype— it’s about losing Josh.
This is proven when Josh purposefully starts a fire in the basement. Trent rushes into the smoky room, falling to his knees when he finds his captive passed out on the floor. Trent crouches over him, repeatedly crying out his name and cradling his face, screaming “No!” in a broken voice as Josh remains unconscious. The scene then fades to Josh as he wakes chained in the bathroom, head carefully cradled by a pillow; while we know Trent did salvage the synthesizer prototype, it’s obvious that he made no attempts to do so until he dragged Josh to safety.
When Trent first imprisons Josh in his basement rooms, Josh huddles with his back turned to the skylight (installed, notably, in Trent’s bedroom) and refuses to respond to Trent’s cajoling over the mic. On the verge of tears, Trent begins to tell Josh about his boyhood, comparing his social isolation to a man in a barrel. He recounts the first time he ever emerged from that barrel: his sophomore year of college, when he met a fellow student named Reggie. He describes how he and Reggie became “instantaneous loyal companions,” language which, like “partner,” feels deliberately ambiguous. Though Josh never sees it, we understand Reggie to be the young man in an old photo at which Trent repeatedly gazes. Reggie, like Josh, is black, suggesting that part of Trent’s infatuation is rooted in the memories of what we can understand as his first love.
Trent goes on to describe Reggie’s eventual departure: “My instinct was to plead with him, ‘Don’t go. Don’t leave me.’ But no. I remained passive, and then a few weeks later, Reggie flew off to Helsinki, and then I crawled back in to that oil drum.” From there, Trent explains that he turned to music as a coping mechanism. Voice filled with passion and grief in equal measure, Trent tells Josh “I see you,” and that Josh is the most talented synthesizer engineer he’s ever seen. The next day, Josh is back to work, implying that he was moved by Trent’s words to some degree.
At the end of the movie, as Trent sits down to eat his poisoned last meal, he hesitates before standing to play a tape recording. To his surprise, it begins with a brief voiceover from Josh, explaining that he’s sharing an updated version of the patch— which he has named the Whittington Woodwind, after Trent. Visibly moved by this dedication, Trent finds the strength to eat, bringing the story to a close.
Like everything else in the film, Trent’s relationship with Josh is understated and layered. It might be one of the best portrayals of dangerous obsession I’ve personally seen in a horror movie, simply because of its realism. Trent isn’t straightforwardly evil, though he does indefensible things. His behavior follows a logical escalation that makes for a dread-inducing buildup— it makes sense, so we see it coming. But rather than lean in to the carnage as we’d expect a killer to do, Trent struggles with his own actions at every turn, ultimately choosing to self-destruct rather than add to his sins. Dead Mail is, in many ways, simply the character study of a complicated man. It doesn’t moralize, because it doesn’t need to; it doesn’t over-explain the moving pieces, because it trusts the audience to fill in any blanks. It’s a horror movie with much more than meets the eye, and I’d recommend it to anyone looking for a thoughtful, melancholic journey through a small town tragedy.