Panic Fest: Dead Media is a loving ode to physical media, low-budget filmmaking and so much more
Dead Media. // Courtesy Panic Fest
Panic Fest 2026 just wrapped up at Screenland Armour in KC. The yearly homegrown genre festival is a delightful cavalcade of feature films hitting theaters soon, and some with releases further down the road. Read all of our coverage of these debuts.
Horror movies love love letters. Whether it’s adoration for a genre, a filmmaking movement, a location or (especially) dying viewing habits, taking a beloved insert-thing-here and wrapping it up in a campy, reference-heavy trapping is a way for artists to pay personal tribute to stuff they love. When done with care, tributes can be delightful considerations not just of pop culture artifacts gone by, but examinations of why we love those things, and sometimes how that dedication can hold us back.
Joseph Scrimshaw’s low-budget charmer Dead Media isn’t just a love letter but a whole volume of goofy-sweet poetic odes. Scrimshaw proclaims his love for a laundry list of topics, including physical media, 90s movies, shoestring budget filmmaking, the city of Minneapolis, and its entertainment community (the most recognizable to outside audiences being MST3K’s Bill Corbett). Dead Media is guilty of being too in love with its concept to the detriment of its pacing, but it’s hard to fault Scrimshaw too much — there’s a lot here to love.
It’s late October, and Maggie (Sammi-Jack Martincak) should be getting ready for her grad school audition. Instead, she’s doing what she always does: watching a movie with her begrudging roommates and her Gen-Xer Uncle Heppy (Sam Landman), who’s indoctrinated Maggie into his 90s culture obsessions. Tonight, he’s brought a DVD of Night of the Lurchers, a “cursed” 1999 horror movie that supposedly contains an easter egg to end all easter eggs.
When Maggie unlocks the easter egg, The Night of the Lurchers comes to life in her house, with various scenes and special features lurking behind every door. She also releases the lurchers, a soul-sucking breed of undead whose pace changes to match their prey’s. Move slowly, and they’ll crawl along. Do more than walk and they’ll be on you in a nanosecond. To survive the night, Maggie, Heppy and Maggie’s would-be girlfriend Brenda (Jessica Fenton) need the help of the movie’s director, Rita Nast (Anna Sundberg), who’s been trapped in the DVD since 1999.
Scrimshaw’s love for his subject matter is apparent in his attention to detail. It’s not strictly necessary, for instance, for the parts we see of Night of the Lurchers to have a different video quality than the scenes in Maggie’s house. But when Uncle Heppy fires up the disc, the movie-within-a-movie looks and sounds like a DVD transfer of a film shot in 1999. That remains true once the movie comes to life; when Maggie and Heppy open a door onto the film, the scene switches to a lower definition. Cult-favorite character actor James Urbaniak shows up as both a character from Night of the Lurchers and the actor playing that character, which leads to some pleasingly meta moments.
Scrimshaw creates a fun playground with lots of ideas to explore, but Dead Media runs into trouble when it goes full kid-in-a-candy store. The movie runs nearly two hours, but could easily stand to lose 15-20 minutes as the gags get repetitive, and the character beats are so clear they don’t need that much space around them to develop. There are far too many darlings here that could use a katana chop.
This is Scrimshaw’s first film as a writer-director, and as flabby as parts of Dead Media are, his enthusiasm is both understandable and infectious. This movie has a lot of heart and scrappy ambition and those elements, combined with an impressive commitment to quality, mostly deliver dividends. This film is clearly a passion project, and it’s worth paying attention to see what Scrimshaw gives us next.
