The run of films based in the grimy past of analog technology keeps rolling.  This week’s movie is a great example of another horror thriller that explores dated technology in fresh ways.  Most flicks that attempt to look back at the 1980s tend to do so through rose-tinted glasses, and focus on the neon and the crazy fashion.  Dead Mail (2024) looks back at the 1980s as I vaguely remember them—a drab post office in a small town.

Dead Mail focuses—initially—on a postal employee, Jasper, who is something of a savant:  he has a knack for tracking down the owners of missing packages.  Packages that get misdelivered, or are rendered undeliverable due to indecipherable or missing addresses, end up with Jasper, who ingeniously gathers information in a pre-digital age to find the owners of their packages.

Things get interesting when a note stained with blood and begging for help shows up at the post office.  Jasper begins an investigation into the note to see if it’s just a prank, or if someone might genuinely be in distress.

At this point, it seems like the movie has an interesting setup with a clear direction:  Jasper is going to hunt down a potential killer.  But the flick takes a hard turn when the killer shows up at the post office.

Then, the narrative jumps back to the killer at a very drab synthesizer convention (no joke), where he strikes up a business relationship with a synthesizer enthusiast who is trying to produce a convincing woodwind sound.  At this point (probably 1980), no synth manufacturer had managed to create a synthesized woodwind that sounded real, so the (at this point potential) killer and the synth nerd join forces to recreate an organ’s woodwind sound.

The horror in the film comes from the deteriorating relationship between the synth nerd and his possessive business partner (the killer).  As the synth nerd progresses on his quest to create the perfect synthesized woodwind, he gets an offer to move to Japan to work for a major synthesizer company there.  Initially, the business partner takes this poorly, but gets his hands on expensive Japanese transistors and epoxies, offering the synth nerd the opportunity to create the ultimate woodwind synthesizer, but at that point, the ball is rolling, so the business partner/killer locks the synth nerd in his basement workshop, taking him hostage.

In case you haven’t figured it out—and it’s no big spoiler or secret—the synth nerd manages to get a desperate note into a mailbox, and this letter is what ends up in Jasper’s hands.

Dead Mail is not exactly scary, but it does make you care about its characters, and I was sad when a character met a bloody end.  The body count is not high in the film, but it shows the odd, desperate, lethal interlinking of Jasper, the killer, and the synth nerd.  The story is very much like something out of a true crime podcast—a small town killer who isn’t out to kill tons of people, but instead descends down a dark path of obsession and murder due to his own latent mental instability and insecurities.

The real highlight for yours portly, of course, is all of the ancient and period-accurate synthesizers on display.  It’s wild to think about how primitive the technology was, but at the time, it was cutting edge.  The film even hired a “Synthesizer Consultant”—seriously, it’s in the credits!—to make sure they were portraying the technology correctly.

There are a few other characters worth noting:  two female postal employees, who both view Jasper with a sense of awe and respect; and a Swedish computer whiz who helps Jasper obtain phone numbers and addresses.  They each play their parts, but seem a bit underdeveloped overall.

Dead Mail is one of those movies that is more about inhabiting the world its director creates, rather than the plot itself.  That said, it was a gripping film, and I kept waiting to see where it was going next.  Also, the focus on a pre-digital world, one just dabbling in electronics and the digital realm, was incredibly fascinating.  It’s easy to forget what the analog world was like, but it wasn’t that long ago that we had to hunt down information at libraries, or call the National Weather Service for precipitation rates (as Jasper does in the film to figure out where a package’s address might have been smudged in the rain).  People used to call to get the weather!

Finally, the depiction of the post office is spot on—the poor, fluorescent lighting; the drab interior; the depressing decor.  I have an odd fondness for that kind of faded, 1970s Brutalist interior design, not because I think it is aesthetically pleasing—I find it quite abhorrent, and even immoral, in the way that it dehumanizes the people that used and interact with these buildings—but because I grew up seeing and going to these buildings.  It’s just how it was growing up in the late 1980s and 1990s.

Regardless, check out Dead Mail.  I highly recommend it.