Review: Finding The Easter Egg to Life in Joseph Scrimshaw’s ‘Dead Media’

Joseph Scrimshaw’s Dead Media uses nostalgia and our love of the familiar to look at the ways in which we keep ourselves frozen in time, unable to leave our comfort zones to strive for something better.

The story begins with an all too familiar occurrence, as three friends sit on a couch struggling to pick a movie to watch from the massive library of a fictional streaming service. The trio debates options and agree that whatever movie they pick needs to top out at 90 minutes because Maggie (Sammi-Jack Martincak) has an audition for grad school in the morning. They settle on an obscure horror title called Night Of The Lurchers that was recommended to Maggie by her movie-loving uncle, and as she is about to text him to brag about her discovery, her friend Brenda, who knows from experience that the text will result in Maggie’s uncle rushing over and turning their movie night into a movie all-nighter, cautions her not to. She’s texts him anyway in a move that makes it clear that Maggie is in self-sabotage mode, and before long her extremely enthusiastic Uncle Heppy (Sam Landman) arrives, disc in hand, insisting that they watch the film the way it was intended to be seen, in glorious 480p DVD resolution. Hopes of an early bedtime fade away as Maggie and her uncle start wading through the disc’s extensive special features and begin to search for a rumoured easter egg on the menu screen that will reveal the mystery of the film’s purported curse. Maggie is about to take Brenda’s advice to get some rest before her big day when a flash of inspiration sends her running back to the DVD player to test one last theory, which results in the merging of her reality and the reality of the film in a turn that is equal parts Demons (1985) and Stay Tuned (1992). Maggie and her crew will need to team up with people from the DVD, including the film’s director who shows up because she was interviewed in one of the film’s special features, to do battle against the Lurchers.

Dead Media is a film bursting with ideas that elevate it well above the sort of low budget, straight-to-streaming fare that the movie winks at in its opening scene. What on the surface seems like it could just be an appeal to Gen Xers like me looking for something to put on that feels comforting and familiar, reveals that it is much more interested in the ways in which we use nostalgia to put our lives on pause, spending an eternity going through the special features of our own personal stories rather than moving on and chasing our dreams. Almost every character has something that they truly want in life that hangs in limbo while they waste their lives flipping through menu screens instead of preparing for an audition or watching “making of” features instead of making a movie themselves.

At one point Uncle Heppy, in an attempt to ingratiate himself to the film’s director, tells her that the filmmakers of today have abandoned film in favour of using their phones, but instead of sharing his disgust she instantly sees the potential in this new technology and immediately starts making another movie within the one they are currently living through. Shooters shoot, as the saying goes, and Uncle Heppy is too enamored with the past to see that he could have had everything he needed to make a film in the palm of his hand, if he hadn’t hung onto that old flip phone all these years. This film made me take a hard look at the piles of physical media I surround myself with, and question what I’m avoiding when I pop in my well-worn DVD copy of Poltergeist for the umpteenth time. Hopefully it doesn’t take getting pulled into an alternate reality for me to figure it out.