Writers/Directors Joe DeBoer and Kyle McConaghy’s lo-fi ’80s psychological thriller, Dead Mail, anchors its offbeat story, characters, and retro style around profound loneliness. Bloody Disgusting spoke with the filmmakers along with stars Sterling Macer Jr. and John Fleck at SXSW, where the film made its world premiere, about their unique approach to the genre-bender.

Dead Mail leans heavily into the ’80s analog aesthetic, delivering a unique crime thriller unafraid to get weird with its dark narrative.

In the film, “On a desolate, Midwestern county road, a bound man crawls towards a remote postal box, managing to slide a blood-stained plea-for-help message into the slot before a panicking figure closes in behind him. The note makes its way to the county post office and onto the desk of Jasper, a seasoned and skilled ‘dead letter’ investigator, responsible for investigating lost mail and returning it to its sender. As he investigates further, Jasper meets Trent, a strange yet unassuming man who has taken up residence at the men’s home where Jasper lives. When Trent unexpectedly shows up at Jasper’s office, it becomes clear he has a vested interest in the note, and will stop at nothing to retrieve it…”

Sterling Macer Jr. plays the captive Josh, with John Fleck as Josh’s captor, Trent. Susan Priver, Micki Jackson, Tomas Boykin, and Nick Heyman also star.

While Dead Mail takes its characters on a bizarre journey through keyboard synth and murder, the concept behind it is loosely rooted in fact. At least where dead letter mail is concerned.

Kyle McConaghy explains of the film’s origins, “Joe discovered that a version of it exists. We made a decision after that of, ‘Okay, we know this is a thing.’ We read a couple sentences on Wikipedia, but let’s make our own version of this. To the point of we tried to film in a real post office and they wanted to read the script. They read the script and they’re like, ‘No way. Our employees would never conduct themselves this way.’”

“’This is totally unrealistic,’ Joe DeBoer adds. “Yeah, the first thing we built was the whole system. Let’s make it so there’s a ton of dead letters, he can only investigate the valuables. and let’s make Jasper just a total savant. He should be a crime detective, and then let’s give him a Norwegian counterpart, get some of the info he needs. So, it was just really fun to build that.”

McConaghy and DeBoer bring a lot of style and creativity to capturing the ’80s and its lo-fi aesthetic, which is all the more impressive for a small independent production. For Sterling Macer Jr., who spends a large portion of the film chained and tormented by his kidnapper, that meant a less glamorous shoot that helped inform his character’s duress.

Macer Jr. explains, “The toilet wasn’t too far away from the sink, which made the whole thing seem to feel like a place you didn’t want to be on the floor of and yet there I was and at first you feel like, ‘Okay, well this is an acting gig. This is what you do.’ Sometimes I’ve been everything from dragged behind a horse to busting in the White House as an actor. That’s the gig. You’re going to be doing things that you just didn’t expect, but this, it had a weight to it emotionally because you’re bound, sometimes gagged, and the ties on your wrists are tighter than you would think they would be, but it’s appropriate. And because you don’t have all the accoutrements of a huge studio production, you don’t have somebody coming up and making sure you’re okay. You’re on the floor and you’re waiting for the camera to move, things to get adjusted, and so you have to live with that experience being bound and you can’t do anything about it and you’re here on this grimy floor. There was an emotional weight to that, which was good because it was useful.”

“When Sterling first came out chained up, I think we did have a plastic chain, but Sterling’s so committed,” McConaghy says of his star. “He always chose the more realistic option. So he had a real chain around him. He was all dirty when he came out. As his friends, it kind of broke our heart and it was like, ‘Man, is this okay? Have we gone too far? Man, this is not cool.’ But no, the commitment was impressive. I think you forwent knee pads a few times because you wanted the realism of it.”

“After a couple of times then I went with the pads. I’d like to be tough guy, but Charles Bronson I ain’t,” Macer Jr. cracks.

Opposite Josh is the villainous Trent, made surprisingly sympathetic by John Fleck’s performance. There’s a deep loneliness that drives Trent to committing terrible acts in the film, but was that the central trait that unlocked the character for Fleck?

Fleck tells us, “I would have to say it’s not so much the loneliness, but it’s sort of derived from it because Josh values and likes his loneliness, his solitary existence. I think the fact that Trent shows up in his life and all of a sudden the notion of partnership and working on, it’s a foreign notion to him, but he’s so naïve about it. That’s really what I liked about the character once I realized that it took a little while, but there’s the naivete of Josh is what allows for Trent to enter into his life the way he does. Then I realized, well, this is a character, something like I’ve never done on screen before. Play a character that is so unknowing and is so not this more aggressive nature.”

The gritty analog style in Dead Mail lends a period authenticity. When combined with its quirks and hyper specific detail, it’s easy to buy this thriller as rooted in fact. So much so that a text and photo epilogue could convince many that the events in Dead Mail drew basis from a true story, even when the end credits make it clear that it’s all fiction.

That final coda wasn’t initially planned, either.

DeBoer reveals how this serendipitous closing button came to be: “[McConaghy] was sending a draft and he threw that in at 4:00 in the morning one night. I watched the next morning and I was like, ‘This is amazing. We have to keep this in. And then we did.'”

McConaghy jokes, “It was more to test like, is Joe and our producer, are they getting sacked? Are they actually going to watch the whole thing? But it felt like, I mean we slogged through an edit. It felt like we need a pick me up, we need to do something here. It was intended just to be a stupid joke. But yeah, it stuck.”