Dead Mail Filmmakers Explain How Their New SXSW Film Came Together

Dead Mail, which premieres at South By Southwest this week, is an edge-of-your seat character study that deals with obsession. The movie, which hails from filmmakers Joe DeBoer and Kyle McConaghy, stars Starling Macer, Jr. (Bones) and John Fleck (True Blood) as a hostage and his keeper, respectively — with Macer’s character trying to win his freedom by sending out a desperate, bloody letter and the hopes for his survival falling on the shoulders of the local post office. The dead letter office, usually tasked with reuniting shippers with their lost, high-value parcels, is the potential last stop for his letter, and the tense, unsettling movie unravels from there.

The movie, set in the 1980s, is shot with a heavy grain that feels like something you would find on VHS at a Blockbuster of that era. It’s a highly specific movie in both its tone and its characterization, with the meat of the story centering on the incredibly niche world of electronic keyboard engineers.

“Kyle and I were really enamored with this idea of the dead letter office,” DeBoer told ComicBook.com. “That was kind of the impetus for everything. So we heard about this idea of lost mail that can’t find a home, and then we thought it would be just really fun to fictionalize, and build this sensational world, with this investigative character who can solve anything. We were obviously exaggerating probably the amount of dead letters and the stakes, and building in the piece of he’s only allowed to investigate valuables. So what do you do with a bloody help note? So that was the origin for us, and we were just really excited about building that world.”

“I think as Joe and I were working on this concept and had this framework of the dead letter office, that just kind of became a hit list of things that we’ve always wanted to see or create on film,” added McConaghy. “We love analog synthesizers, so that was fun making that kind of a piece of the film. We kind of wanted to capture some of the bland aesthetic of the Midwestern upbringings we had, where we always would joke around that whether it was 1977 or 1992, our families would look the same. Uncle Rick would look exactly the same except he had two pinkies in ’77 and only one in ’92. But yeah, I think just Joe and I just enjoyed creating this world and I think that’s kind of what drew us to it was this post office in the middle of a small town, Midwestern town.”

McConaghy said that the movie’s antagonist — Fleck’s Trent Wittington — was something else that came from his and DeBoer’s shared past: they based it, at least loosely, on the fraying psyche of one of their old teachers, and they knew they had their Trent when Fleck nailed the tone.

“I think so much of it was just a collaborative instinctual thing that happened from John,” McConaghy explained. “John’s take on Trent was much different. We kind of based the character of Trent on a real life teacher of ours. He was going through a troubled time, but now we look at John’s amazing performance and it’s so different than what we had written and thought of. So I think it’s, and all films are like this, but just such a conglomerate of ideas and people’s contributions. And with a low budget film, we just had to act quick and had to make decisions off the fly. So tonally, I think in some sense we got lucky. It just kind of came together and it was a world that we were excited to put on screen and with the music and everything else, but certainly think it’s just a collaborative effort of everyone from the actors to the cruise contributions.”

Here’s the official synopsis for Dead Mail: 

“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.”