The best horror movies change the way we look at the world. Psycho made us scared of showers, A Nightmare on Elm Street made us scared to sleep, and Midsommar made us scared of all of Scandinavia. With his new thriller Sender, writer/director Russell Goldman hopes to make us scared of online retail.Goldman may very well pull it off, in part because Sender deals with a real-world phenomenon known as a brushing scam. “Someone, with really no rhyme or reason, will send you cheap objects, most likely related to your search history online,” Goldman explains to Den of Geek before Sender‘s premiere at SXSW. “They send it to your home so that they can write reviews in your name that are five stars, and those products can get boosted in the algorithms. It’s very circuitous, and it’s a way that people make money, but it makes you feel insane.”cnx.cmd.push(function() {cnx({playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530",}).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796");});Jamie Lee Curtis, who plays a supporting role in Sender and serves as executive producer, understands that sense of insanity because her sister was caught in a brushing scam. “When my sister Kelly turned 64 she called me and asked if I sent her walking sticks for her birthday as a joke. When I told her no, she tracked it down and found that it came from a post office box in Iowa somewhere.”She brought the idea to Russell, who works for Curtis’s production company, Comet Pictures, and who also had his own experience with a brushing scam. “I bought a Valentine’s Day gift for my now wife. It was a dress, and when I opened the box, I found muddied chin guards instead of a dress. They smelled foul,” he remembers.“This was near the end of COVID, so I was very particular about what was coming in and out of my home. The paranoia around that feeling was so funny and strange that I wanted to make a movie about it.”Curtis adds, “We talked about how creepy it would be for a woman basically trapped in her house to start receiving packages that she did not ask for. The information around what she gets and why she gets it is very personal. Paranoia and psychological torture occur.”Frightening as the premise is, it falls on Severance breakout Britt Lower to bring that paranoia to life as Julia, a recovering alcoholic. “Julia’s world has gotten much quieter in her journey to sobriety, so every detail of her life is hyper-focused,” explains Lower. “She’s getting a quick fix by ordering things online, and then these other things start coming in. She’s been addicted to something else, and all of a sudden she transitions to trying to quickly fix her life by ordering a bunch of stuff. It gets way out of hand.”Yet, for Lower’s co-stars, receiving mail is a pleasurable experience. Mostly.“My associations with getting packages are so positive,” raves Anna Baryshnikov, who plays Julia’s sister, Tatiana. “Around Christmas, my parents were always sent a popcorn tin that was divided three ways, with cheese and caramel. The idea of things arriving is so delightful to me, especially what it is yet.“It’s probably a testament to me not being famous, because I’m not scared about getting things I don’t know about. It’s usually something I ordered for myself that I forgot about,” she continues, laughing at herself. “I’m an emotional shopper, and I can really remember what mood I was in when I made a decision that silky pajamas were going to change my life.”Co-star David Dastmalchian has had far less positive experiences with the mail. “I got dirty underwear,” he admits. “I have a fan mail post office box, and I’ve received them a couple of times, probably from the same person.“My dear stepfather, whom I love so much and has been such a saint, said I had to stop looking at stuff when it came in. He’s my first line of defense, so anything that is scary or inappropriate never gets to me because he goes through everything. I get all the nice stuff. But when the underwear was there when I was picking up stuff myself one time, and it was accompanied by a really bizarre letter.”In light of Dastmalchian’s experiences, maybe Sender isn’t making deliveries scarier; maybe its just capturing the horror that’s already there.Sender premiered March 14 at the SXSW Film & TV Festival.The post Sender Cast On Turning Online Deliveries Into Existential Horror appeared first on Den of Geek.