why did markiplier choose iron lung

Markiplier chose Iron Lung because it fit his interests, his fears, and his filmmaking goals unusually well, and the game’s simple structure gave him huge creative freedom to build his own story on top of it.

Why Iron Lung Caught His Eye

• The core concept is intensely atmospheric: a lone pilot trapped in a tiny metal coffin of a submarine, navigating a blood ocean on a doomed mission.

• The horror leans on dread and isolation rather than just jump scares, which aligns with the kind of story-driven horror Markiplier likes to create in his content.

• The setting (the “Quiet Rapture,” empty universe, desperate human remnants) is weird, original sci‑fi horror that’s easy to expand into a full movie universe.

Many fans point out that Mark has a well-known love for horror and a deep fear of the ocean (thalassophobia), so Iron Lung is basically his nightmare scenario turned into the perfect horror project.

Creative And Practical Reasons

• The game is short and relatively contained, with a strong premise but not an overloaded lore bible, which gives Mark space to flex his own writing and directing without being chained to a super-dense canon.

• Working with the original indie developer David Szymanski is far simpler than dealing with a big studio IP; it lets Mark coordinate directly on story, legal details, and game-to-film changes.

• Because the core idea is so strong, the movie can stand on its own merits instead of needing huge franchise branding; this lines up with Mark’s desire to prove that a YouTuber-led film can succeed as a real theatrical release.

Fans in forum discussions often describe it as a “smart” pick: small enough to be producible, but conceptually big enough to carry a full-length horror feature.

Personal And Career Context

• Mark has talked about wanting to move deeper into filmmaking and narrative projects, and Iron Lung is his first fully self-driven theatrical horror feature where he directs, produces, and stars.

• He reportedly turned down appearing in the Five Nights at Freddy’s movie to prioritize Iron Lung , signaling that he believed more in building his own project than being a side character in someone else’s.

• His history with loss and personal struggle has also made darker, emotionally heavy stories resonate with him, which slots naturally into a bleak survival-horror concept like Iron Lung.

In other words, Iron Lung sits at the exact crossroads of Markiplier’s tastes (space, cosmic horror, oceans, dread), his fears (isolation, deep water), and his ambition to show that a creator-driven YouTube filmmaker can make a serious, theatrical horror film.

TL;DR: Markiplier chose Iron Lung because it’s a compact indie horror game with a powerful, expandable premise, deeply tied to his favorite themes and fears, and it gave him the freedom and control to make the exact kind of horror film he’s been aiming for.

Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.