Official selection
Fantastic Fest, Toronto After Dark, Fright Fest, Paris International Fantastic Fest. Lund International Fantastic Film Fest, Shivers, Bucheon International Fantastic Film Fest, Haapsalu Horror and Fantasy Film Festival, Cordillera International Film Festival, Maskoon Fantastic Film Festival, Fantaspoa International Fantastic Film Festival
Honors
Toronto After Dark: Audience Choice Best Feature, Best Horror Film, Best Editing, Film Most Want to See a Sequel to
Shivers: Audience Choice Award
Haapsalu: Audience Choice Award
Director
Ryan Spindell
Writer
Ryan Spindell
Cast
Clancy Brown, Caitlin Custer, Jacob Elordi, Barak Hardley, Christine Kilmer, Mike Nelson
Cinematographer
Caleb Haymann, Elie Smolkin
Sound Designer
Juan Campos
Composer
Mondo Boys
Editor
Eric Ekman, Joe Shahood
contact
Trapdoor Pictures
At Raven’s End Mortuary, Montgomery Dark (Clancy Brown) presides over the funeral rites of corpses whose histories he keeps recorded in the countless books on his shelves. One day, a young woman named Sam (Caitlin Fisher) answers his Help Wanted sign, and her curiosity about death and his past “clients” leads him to relate a few of the most bizarre tales. As the stories come to life on screen, we witness a pickpocket receiving her comeuppance; a frat-boy seducer receiving a graphic lesson about the importance of safe sex; a husband serving as caretaker for his catatonic wife who takes a drastic action with very unpleasant consequences; and a variation on the classic horror-movie trope of a babysitter terrorized by an asylum escapee. None of these end as you might expect, and after the last one is over, there’s one more surprise in store…
Writer/director Ryan Spindell has been working to realize THE MORTUARY COLLECTION for quite some time; he presented it at Fantasia’s Frontières Marketplace in 2013, and shot the babysitter story as a stand-alone short that played festivals two years later. Now it has emerged as a full-blooded feature in the great tradition of the ’70s Amicus anthologies, with a lush score by Mondo Boys and colorful cinematography by Elie Smolkin that eschews the drained, muted look of so much current genre fare. At the same time, Spindell drops in occasional modern-meta discussions of horror storytelling, while lacing the overall ghoulish mood with bursts of humour and moments of pathos, all “hosted” with deep-voiced panache by the heavily made-up Brown. Most notably, THE MORTUARY COLLECTION is more than the sum of its individual segments, offering the pleasure of a complete narrative brought to its inescapable, and bloody, end. – Michael Gingold
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