The Mortuary Collection (2019)

Montgomery Dark (Clancy Brown, very much made up as an elderly Angus Scrimm), the somewhat creepy owner of the mortuary of one of those horror movie typical US small towns – in the 80s, I believe – looks somewhat surprised when a young woman named Sam (Caitlin Custer) enters his mansion/mortuary to answer the “help wanted” sign hanging outside. While introducing Sam to the innards of the house and the peculiarities of the – highly peculiar – business, he tells her that he is also a collector of the stories of the dead he is taking care of. The house is indeed full of books of these stories, suggesting that Dark is even older than he looks. Because this is a horror anthology movie, Sam wants to hear some of these stories. Each one is going to take place in a different decade.

The first one is a short ditty about a female thief, a bathroom, and why you shouldn’t open every door you see, unless you’re really into tentacles. A rather nonplussed Sam is then told segment number two, about a frat boy (Jacob Elordi) with dubious ideas about consent experiencing the joys of pregnancy in form of some spectacularly icky effects.

This is followed by the sad tale of one Wendell Owens (Barak Hardley) who is slowly despairing at taking care of his comatose wife Carol (Sarah Hay). She’s never going to come to, apparently, so Wendell’s compassionate doctor prescribes some medication for Carol that is very easily overdosed and apparently not leaving any traces in the body. What starts as an attempt to end a loved one’s suffering turns into a bloody series of darkly humorous events.

The final segment concerns Sam herself. It’s the age old tale of a babysitter, an escaped mental patient with a history of murdering baby sitters and the sitted, and a slasher movie named “The Babysitter Murders” playing on TV.

Having barely made it through the flabby and blandly directed nonsense of that new Books of Blood anthology movie, one could despair at the sad fate of US-style horror anthologies (British style ones have been dead for decades, so). Fortunately, along comes The Mortuary Collection as directed and written by Ryan Spindell, a film that isn’t only a very convincing anthology movie in the American style, but a loving homage to all things horror (the slasher in the final segment being named after the initial version of Carpenter’s Halloween script is most certainly not a fluke), as well as a playful commentary on genre tropes and audience expectations.

Unlike other meta horror projects, this one actually does something more interesting than just point and laugh at tropes and clichés. Indeed, while there’s a large streak of often very gory humour running through the film, pointing and laughing at genre isn’t at all its game. Instead, the film embraces genre conventions to then give them wonderful little twists that satisfy any horror lover’s joy at tradition well repeated but also changes and enhances these conventions to give them new life and breath, criticising implicitly but using this criticism to achieve the same effects the traditional tropes had in more contemporary ways, embracing the tradition while changing it. The best example of this is the way the final segment plays without our expectations about how the babysitter versus killer game has to play out, but that’s so cleverly made and well-timed, I can’t bring myself to spoil it here.

There’s so much that is clever in the best possible meaning of the word here, like the way the stories increase in complexity (on a plot as well as an emotional and thematic level) and length as the film goes on, the film completely avoiding the flabby middle of many anthology movies by escalating like you’d do in a film with a single story. Or take the way how the framing story here is actually a worthwhile and important part of the movie, really not just introducing the tales but turning them into parts of a whole.

Turning meta commentary into actual tales is only one of the film’s virtues. Spindell’s simply great at playing things straightforward, too, making the film a fun horror film as well as a fiendishly clever one. Spindell’s wonderful at timing, be it of suspense and the gorier moments, or of the sometimes broad, sometimes subtle dark humour. The actors are playing Spindell’s game wonderfully, too. Brown (always a well-liked guy around these parts) in particular recommends himself for all kinds of future horror roles of the sort I haven’t seen him do before through a lovely combination of traditional horror overacting, and wry humour. But everyone else really seems to be fully on the film’s wavelength too, in the quiet as well as in the loud moments.

Just as praiseworthy are the technical aspects of the production, all of them fully in the spirit of horror traditions but never ending up just copying for no good reason. Indeed, many of the myriad of little nods and homages to horror of all kinds and all ages in the production design, the colour scheme, even the camera angles turn out to be surprisingly meaningful for the film at hand once one thinks about them, the film doing the same on the visual level it does in its script, all the while also just working as a deeply satisfying, and very, very fun, horror film.

In my book (tee-hee), The Mortuary Collection is one for the pantheon.