Released Over 20 Years Apart, Why Send Help And Red Eye Are Perfect Companion Horror Movies

SPOILER WARNING: The following article contains mild spoilers for both Send Help and Red Eye. If you have not seen one or both of the movies and don’t want to know anything about them before doing so, proceed at your own risk!

In case you haven’t heard, Sam Raimi’s Send Help is fantastic. Fans of the Evil Dead legend have not seen a new horror film from the director since 2009’s Drag Me To Hell, but his latest contribution to the genre is a funny, gory, and impish delight. I hope all movie-goers are respecting the buzz and making a special point of going to see it on the big screen this weekend – and if that includes you, might I recommend pairing it with another excellent title from a little over 20 years ago to create what is an unintentionally perfect double feature: Wes Craven’s Red Eye.

The two films have an obvious connection in that they both feature Rachel McAdams in the lead role and have respected genre masters at the helm, but their connections go beyond that thanks to shared plot elements and themes. And, what makes the movies a great double feature is that while they have those elements in common, each takes a very different and very entertaining approach to them. Allow me to explain…

Mile-High Terror

“Would you ever get on a plane with Rachel McAdams?” On its surface, that isn’t much of a question, as while I can’t say I’ve had the pleasure of personally meeting the Game Night star, she seems like a perfectly pleasant person who I’d have a hard time imagining as the source of an airborne disturbance. If one were to take her cinematic track record into account, however, that might be a reason to be a touch concerned. Between Red Eye and now Send Help, McAdams has experienced her fair share of mile-high terror, and what’s particularly cool about the films as a pair is that they explore totally disparate aspects of that common fear.

The former is certainly the more subtle of the two in that it doesn’t actually conjure any scares from the flight itself. Rather, it’s about the horror that is being totally surrounded by people and yet left utterly helpless. I often like to think of planes as safe environments thanks to a kind of panopticon effect (in such an intimate space, there is a sense of everyone watching everyone), but Red Eye perverts that security with McAdams’ protagonist, Lisa Reisert, publicly taken hostage by Cillian Murphy’s assassination coordinator Jackson Rippner. Any effort to impede his plans of organizing the death of the United States Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security means a hitman getting the green light to execute her father (Brian Cox).

Send Help offers a more traditional exploitation of aerophobia – albeit in a private plane instead of a commercial one. As terrifying as it would be to be silently taken captive while in the air, that fear isn’t nearly as prevalent as the idea of mechanical failure leading to disaster, and that’s exactly what McAdams’ Linda Little undergoes in the new Sam Raimi release. It’s not just an incident of engines dying and the aircraft plummeting down into the ocean: because this is a Raimi movie, that means we get bouncing bodies, characters screaming while they cling for dear life, and plenty of splatter.

The fact that both movies explore separate material within the same fear arena makes for a fun connection in consideration of a Red Eye-Send Help double-feature (albeit with very different levels of focus, as it’s only one sequence in the latter film), but the really good stuff that makes the titles a natural pair comes from the dynamics established between their respective main characters.

Gender Dynamics Influenced By Past Trauma

Settings and specific details create some distance between the two films when one is taking a simple view of their plots, but analysis reveals a shared core: an inter-gender relationship that develops an extreme power dynamic between the protagonist and antagonist.

In this respect, Red Eye is the more traditional movie. The first move that we see Jackson make is seduction, coming to her aid trying to calm an irate fellow passenger, getting quickly personal and playing a game of “bet I can guess your drink” at the airport bar, and that proves to be an effort to simply disarm her. Once he reveals his true mission, his entire effort becomes about domination, and while he wears a mask of professionalism, it’s not subtle that he is very much enjoying his control.

Lisa, revealed to be the survivor of a past assault, is the proverbial fly trapped in a web and quietly works to save the lives of both the DHS secretary and her dad.

The first act of Send Help uses the same clay to mold a different shape. Threat of death isn’t a part of the relationship between Linda and her sexist, entitled, nepo baby boss, Bradley (Dylan O’Brien), but her livelihood is. Her career aspirations are put in his hands after Bradley’s father leaves him his company, and he opts to willfully exert his power over her just because he doesn’t like the way she looks or the fact that she eats tuna for lunch – first passing her over for a promotion and then making plans to fire her.

Of course, that all changes after the plane crash. Like Lisa, Linda also has a past as a victim, and when she is given the opportunity to subvert that kind of pain, she takes it. Her extreme survivor skills cause her relationship with Bradley to invert when they are stranded on a deserted island together, and in the antithesis of the Lisa/Jackson conflict, the thrust of the story becomes the effort to maintain this new status quo (with delightfully horrifying results).

It’s a bit oxymoronic, but this contrasting match is what makes Red Eye and Send Help a great pair.

Which Should You Watch First?

This feature was partially inspired by the fact that I opted to give Red Eye a rewatch in the aftermath of going to see Send Help, which helped reveal their interesting commonalities, but my personal recommendation would be that you flip that order to get the most out of the double-feature experience.

There’s obviously no canonical connection between the two movies, but if you want to witness the more obvious progression for “Rachel McAdams characters with names that start with L,” it makes more sense to start with the 2005 Wes Craven film: Linda’s rule feels properly situated following Lisa’s fight.

While Send Help is now playing exclusively in theaters, Red Eye is an easy film to find and watch in the comfort of your own home: it’s presently available to stream if you have a Paramount+ subscription, it’s available for digital rental and/or purchase from all major online outlets, and physical media fans can pick up copies on 4K UHD and Blu-ray. Just time out an hour-and-a-half before you have to leave for the cinema and you’ll be in horror cinephile heaven.