Streaming Shuffle
A horror-comedy that succeeds at both of its aims. My nose hurts looking at this picture.
As soon as someone coined the term “livestream,” it was inevitable that someone else would direct a horror movie called Deadstream.
It was not even remotelyinevitable that it would be good, but husband-and-wife directorial team Vanessa and Joseph Winter defied the odds and crafted this funny, scary, gross found footage piece with both verisimilitude and verve.
Winter mari plays the lead: Shawn, a live-streamer who has fallen on hard times and is now hoping the right One Weird Trick—filming his night in a semi-infamous haunted house—will revitalize his career. Shawn is one of the most obnoxious people alive. Because I did a long-distance watch of this with a friend, I can tell you that less than a minute passed between us hitting play and both of us near-simultaneously saying, “I hate this guy already.”
But what’s important is not that Shawn is obnoxious, but that he’s a specific, well-observed type of obnoxious; he’s played with so much consistency and commitment that he becomes an established fact, not a cheese grater sliding merrily across the surface of your mind. I’m not going to go so far as to say that he embodies “YouTuber specializing in annoying, over-the-top stunts” with the archetypal precision of a Michael Mann character, but you know what? The comparison at least occurred to me. It definitely feels like the Winters thought through what kind of person would ever do this shit and then naturally followed their answer wherever it led. Shawn’s full of cheesy, offensive cringe comedy, and he likes to ham it up for the cameras, but he’s also a guy whose fragile bubble of fame has burst once before and who knows his professional life, such as it is, will only offer the briefest possible window for a comeback. He’s desperate to make this night work.
He also gets the occasional beat that’s just offbeat enough to get a real laugh—to do exactly what character-based comedy does best and express his essential nature in an unexpected way. We know he’s shameless and willing to humiliate himself for views; we also know that (paradoxically) he’s as thin-skinned as most very minor celebrities. But it’s still a delight when a viewer asks him if his acne scars mean he got called “crater face” in high school, and he responds with a Napoleon Dynamite level of huffy irritation: “No, ’cause in high school, it was still acne.” The aggravated “God!” at the end is implied.
Everything about his legally-not-YouTube livestream and its chat rings true, too. Shawn self-censoring to avoid getting demonetized, the constant stream of criticism and keysmash reactions and non sequiturs, the apology videos everyone knows aren’t genuine ….
Of course, no one’s picking up Deadstream just for a surprisingly accurate, characterful portrayal of one of the more desperate “look at me!” corners of YouTube. That’s what I can talk about with minimal spoilers, but it’s not the wet, dripping meat of it. This is also a strong, effective horror film. Horror-comedies can wind up diluting themselves, but this one achieves a rare solid B, at worst, in both fields. Its haunted house horror has a Raimi-esque sensibility—as Conor, who recommended it to me (and thanks again, Conor!), put it, it’s asking, “How much mental and physical damage can we put this idiot through?”, and it’s answering that with a lot of goo. I appreciate goo. I also appreciate specificity in my gross-outs, and—as this header photo will indicate—Deadstream offers that in spades. If you want to see a man pull a ghost’s broken, yellowed fingernail out of his nostril, have I got the picture for you.
Over and over, when I try to describe how this movie is fun and worthwhile, I keep coming back to the words “committed” and “specific.” Those are two attributes all low-budget genre filmmakers should keep in mind. Don’t just have a gun, have a potato gun. And then fire it through a ghost.
Deadstream is streaming on Tubi.
About the writer
Lauren James
Lauren James is a writer who wears many different hats (and pen names). She lives in Connecticut with her wife and two cats.
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Anthologized
Dan Duryea gets a shave and a second chance.
Anthologized
A little slice of American folklore that feels like it's been here all along.
Streaming Shuffle
You make your royal bed, and you lie in it.
Anthologized
Alone in vast space and timeless infinity: one man in a ghost town.
Department of
Conversation
What did we watch?
Justified, Season Four, Episode Four, “This Bird Has Flown”
Very Shield turns here, with one plot wrapping up quickly as a distraction from the fact that another has escalated; surprisingly un–Justified in that the plato escalates by someone managing to survive something they should be dead from, simply because their killer hesitated long enough for them to figure out what’s happening. I definitely didn’t expect Billy to be dead already; he’s a red herring setting off Ellen May actually being the protagonist.
Justified is about degrees of stupidity; Randall, for example, is one of hundreds of guys I’ve met who aren’t stupid because they’re simple, they’re stupid because of their emotional fragility. Ellen May is stupid, and now Boyd and Ava are working out what kind of stupid she is; naive, willing to believe anything she’s told (up to a point, apparently), and prone to impulsive behaviour.
Biggest Laugh: No Art again. Which only bolsters my belief he’s gonna do cool shit later in the season.
Biggest Non-Art Laugh: “Randall, I know ya shackled and that ain’t half-fair, but you say one more word about chickens, I’m gonna shoot you again.” And then he follows through.
Top Ownage: Raylon politely interrupting Randall with beanbag rounds. This was a good episode for ownage in general though.
Does Art eventually get the laugh line of the season? I’ll let you decide– if you know it when you hear it, then that’s a yes.
No question.
The Practice, “The Thin Line” – Bobby’s trial. Which takes place really quickly. I hadn’t really noticed just how fast things go from arrest to trial here. Add it to the list of things fiction rarely gets right. Anyway, I would argue that the evidence should have gotten Bobby convicted, but I can’t imagine that David E. Kelley wanted to send Bobby to prison with a very pregnant wife. Maybe if Kelli Williams weren’t pregnant, things would have been different, but who knows? Also, Eugene is just a better closing argument lawyer than Bobby (or rather Steve Harris is better than Dylan McDermott). Weirdly, they chose this episode to introduce Lucy becoming a rape crisis counselor, which feels at odds with the rest of the episode, but they needed a B plot. And then a posthumous tape recorder from Michael Emerson with a bomb in it arrives, boom. Did I say we are in melodrama land now? (And yet most of this is still well done, go figure.)
Frasier, “The 200th Episode” – Frasier has his 2,000 episode, with special guest Bill Gates Jr. (hey, I remember him). And we learn that he has a tape of every episode in a cabinet in his bedroom. Only one goes missing and Frasier obsesses over finding it. After discovering the station does not in fact save old episodes, he manages to find a totally obsessive fan who might or might not teach Frasier a lesson on obsession. Adam Arkin guests stars as the fan and gets his third Emmy nomination. And Bulldog returns, but now working as the station’s archivist for some reason.
Hung out with a friend and watched in succession (1) Ziwe’s Adam Pally interview, which gets her to break character a bit, in part because Pally is obviously a friend whereas Kevin Hart is more of a colleague and she rightly holds him in visceral contempt. (Hart was also egotistical and stupid enough to go on the show without knowing the format.) (2) This inspired me to put on the Happy Endings S2 premiere, a show she’d never seen and enjoyed. It’s 2011: 1920’s parties and slightly more gay jokes than you’d probably do now. “Damn it, I am White Darrell!”
This made us muse about how much darker British sitcoms get compared to the American counterpart. My muted retort was that there’s bullshit like Are You Being Served? that Anglophiles stateside don’t talk about as much, and that there’s a place for the static happiness of the situational comedy here. I might send her Dan Harmon’s take on this with “Cougarton Abbey” in Community, where Britta thinks a six episode show is superior to one where you can spend hours and hours with characters you enjoy.
Happy Endings never gets old.
I have further thoughts on the sitcom of course, but I am tired and they will have to wait. Generally agree with you here.
The Mist — Frank Darabont as always is very faithful to his muse Stephen King, I haven’t read the novella in ages but could still recognize whole hunks of dialogue making it from page to screen and Darabont is very underrated in his ability to do this (King’s dialogue is extremely idiosyncratic and weird in its slangy skewed normality, getting actors to deliver it well is no easy task). Until that infamous ending rolls around, Darabont also remade The Blob and that pokes through here not just in the bloody carnage — which absolutely rules, superb monster work and Bernie Wrightson is spotted on design in the credits, hell fuckin yeah — but in the misanthropy. A nihilist would view the ending as a joke but it scans more as punishment, in particular because of a certain character briefly seen, and this makes the movie oddly and uncomfortably align with Mrs. Carmody’s religious mania. The film itself despises her and rightfully so, but it still comes around to her point of view in a way that feels more cruel than ironic. But who said Frank Darabont is a loving god.
Toolbox Murders — the credits for this are written in two fonts, a Twisted Metal-style edgy graffito and that Comic Sans Marilyn Manson creepy smear, and the theme song is performed by a nu-metal band called “Shithead,” we are in 2003 pretty fucking hard right now. But here with us is Tobe Hooper and he turns this slasher remake into a nasty piece of work with the help of Angela Bettis’ lead and DP Steve Yedlin along with an ace set and art decoration crew — endless ugly hotel hallways becoming charnel houses and camera angles that are always a little skewed from the basic expectation. The story involves a maniac doing some see title in an old Hollywood hotel, movie star black magic intriguingly comes into play but the actual killer does not make a damn lick of sense, feels like something was edited down a lot. That isn’t what’s important, what’s important is drills and saws going through heads and Bettis’ increasing terror at the way this place is just Bad, maybe more than Texas Chainsaw Massacre this recalls The Funhouse or Eaten Alive, ostensibly normal locations revealed to be death houses full of depravity and violence the normal eye slides over until it is too late, and Hooper’s eye for this is unparalleled. On Criterion (really!) for one more night, for anyone looking for an appropriate sendoff to 2025.
Fuck yeah, The Mist. You’re spot-on about how good he is at directing Kingian dialogue. It’s been too many years since I’ve seen this, and I need to give it another go. What a good, bleak time. Referenced it just the other day, too, when my wife and I were on a misty road and I was legally obligated to say, “There’s something in the mist!”
Hahahaha there is absolutely no way around it but this is definitely one of those works where it’s impossible not to yell “Hey, that’s the title of the movie!” whenever it’s dropped by a character. But on a nicer note, the mist itself is very well deployed here! Solid (heh) effects work of revealing and mostly concealing. And I can’t praise the creatures enough, there is some straight up puppet work but also a fair amount of CGI that is noticeable but not bad at all because the designs are so gnarly — these fuckers are nasty! They got weird heads! It is cool and fun and creepy to look at them, and that makes them real when they are clearly not. And on the human side there is a lot of classic “find the right face” actor work here — Andre Braugher is probably the biggest pull in making the cranky asshole neighbor a real (yet still cranky asshole) dude, but Toby Jones (more like Toby OWNS) and Bill Sadler and Melissa McBride and others are all here creating reality as well.
Was looking for a last movie and this might be the ticket tonight.
Nice! Although I would not recommend watching with a friend unless you know that friend can handle the hard stuff.
Alright! Such a fun movie, impressive that they did this all of this on what was probably a shoestring budget and with practical effects. Some great shooting work too, taking advantage of headlight-style POV cameras at one crucial point for Shawn.
Yes! It makes great use of some of the shot compositions, too, where we see “backgrounded” things that Shawn either can’t (legs in the ceiling!) or isn’t paying attention to at the right time (people in the chat trying to give him information).
Mild spoilers, but the old woman in the chat reacting in real time gave me the biggest laugh here. (“Oh shit, you’re gonna die, dude.”)
Throwing all my header images in the trash and storming off in a rage. Superb choice, and the movie sounds great too.
It’s completely the movie captured by the header image, too! Which is to say that if one wouldn’t want to watch it, they’d know it from this picture, and if they would, they’d know that too.
Yeah, a whole movie that feels like that header image is a nope for me.
Year of the Month update!
Here’s the movies, albums, books, TV, and games from 1985 for you to write about next January.
TBD: Ruck Cohlchez: Tim and/or Fables of the Reconstruction
Jan. 2nd: Gillian Nelson: Return to Oz
Jan. 5th: Tristan J. Nankervis: Rambo: First Blood Part II
Jan. 9th: Gillian Nelson: Advice on Lice
Jan. 16th: Gillian Nelson: The Wuzzles/The Gummi Bears
Jan. 19th: Tristan J. Nankervis: The Breakfast Club
Jan. 23rd: Gillian Nelson: The Golden Girls
And coming February 2026, we’ll be looking at 1957, including all these movies, albums, books, TV, yadda yadda.
Feb. 6th: Gillianren: The Story of Anyburg, USA
Feb. 13th: Gillianren: The Truth About Mother Goose
Feb. 20th: Gillianren: Our Friend the Atom
Feb. 27th: Gillianren: Sleeping Beauty’s Castles