Human beings are the only species on Earth blessed (or cursed) with the power of storytelling. As far back as the writings on cave walls, we’ve had an obsession with passing down concepts and lessons through fables and tales. This has persisted into the modern day through our society’s obsession with various storytelling mediums. Books, music, theater, and movies all satiate our itch for narrative and as part of the social contract of these art forms, we the audience expect these stories to be told well and offer up a kernel of existential truth to go along with them. Ryan Spindell’s The Mortuary Collection, an ode to the horror anthologies that dominated the late 80s and early 90s, cuts to the heart of the horror genre in order to expose the ways in which stories interact with their audience – and vice versa.
Set in a small town gripped by a shocking series of murders known as the Tooth Fairy Killings, The Mortuary Collection’s frame story is a well-worn one that still manages to draw quite a bit of originality out of its cliched presentation. Clancy Brown plays Montgomery Dark, a morbid and secretive mortician who revels in the details of his profession, including the tragedies that lead his clients to their final resting place. His performance is delightfully ghoulish and his love for the material is obvious as he gives Sam (Caitlin Custer), a potential new employee, a tour of his workplace. Each corpse contains a different story, ranging from the slightly comedic to the downright haunting, but all of them have a tale to tell nonetheless.
With each story being set in a different decade, the movie’s cinematography and set design feel fresh for each era while maintaining a consistently macabre atmosphere, harkening back to the feel of projects like Creepshow and Tales from the Crypt. Like any anthology film, some of the shorts are stronger and more robust than others, but here each of them feels unique and unexpected, leaving the viewer waiting with bated breath to find out what secrets the next body holds.
What stands out in The Mortuary Collection is that each vignette feels like a bit of a cruel jape; violent supernatural retribution targeted at social deviants who’ve shattered the moral code established by the film. Spindell practically implores the audience to delight in the fates inflicted upon his characters: Euphoria’s Jacob Elordi plays a faux-feminist who receives a bizarre pregnancy scare after sexually assaulting a woman, while Barak Hardley plays a husband who spirals further into insanity and moral depravity after trying to euthanize his comatose wife.
As the film’s frame story continues towards an unexpected and shocking conclusion, Spindell’s curiosity towards society’s obsession with storytelling seems to take on a metatextual nature. The stories told by the Mortician come to life with haunting authenticity, distilling a corpse’s life down to the reasoning behind their death. To him, each story tells not only the “how” of a human being’s demise, but also the “why”. To this end, The Mortuary Collection asks its audience to interrogate the deeper meaning in all stories; nothing is as it seems on the surface. Horror movies like this one operate as a sort of modern day social fable, a vehicle by which to instill the audience with a set of morals and ideals by which they can avoid a fate similar to the ones met by the bodies within the Mortician’s collection.
Despite this, the movie never loses its grip on what’s important in a horror anthology: sheer entertainment. With his first Shudder original, Spindell isn’t content with just preaching to his audience, he wants to leave them horrified and spellbound. This is a filmmaker who understands the tenets of horror, and employs them to great success in order to make his viewers squirm. To that end, The Mortuary Collection is an exciting batch of delightfully twisted fables that provide audiences with nearly two hours of uncomfortable laughter and grotesque scares, all the while pulling viewers along towards a totally unexpected final twist reveal.
