Festivals - Fantasia 2020 : The mortuary collection- Ryan Spindell’s press roundtable

By Mulder, Canada, Quebec, 25 august 2020

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

Q : so my question for you is can you talk a little bit about the inception of the film and the challenges you faced in getting it all made and how you overcame those challenges.

Ryan Spindell : Yeah I mean if I were to get into the details it would take us about 4 days I need to like to figure out what the contrast version of this whole thing is going to be but yeah essentially I wrote the script with back in 2012 just sort of they've been watching a lot of movies and I'm just always been a huge fan of the short format I love short stories about like Stephen King was sort of my favorite writer then again it's Richard Matheson Ray Bradbury they were not there as I've always been a fan of the short format and sort of wanting to try to find a way to get up I was making shorts and I was realizing that the only people especially at the time you could see the shorts are people were going to film festivals there wasn't really any way to get this kind of content to serve the general public and the result was that I feel like the general public and kind of lost their sort of taste for the format so I kind of thinking of these different stories they're kind of milling around in my head and so I'm trying to figure out a way can I package all of these together into something that sort of tricks people into thinking they're getting what they're used to but then kind of sneaks the shorter short format that I log in under the door and that's where it all started and I wrote the segments and that's your road to wrap around it all came together and then I was really wanting to make something and I was served pitching the surrounded people really loved the script but across the board and the general consensus which I think is still the consensus now on its third mainstream Hollywood is that marketing people don't know how to sell an anthology and therefore no one really wants to take the swing on it but I'd written a script and I was really passionate about it so I basically took one of the shorts are which is the babysitter short that fourth one in the movie and that it was the most contained of the group and so I sort of pulled it out and said look I know how to make short films I can sort of get my friends together we can raise more money Kickstarter we can actually make one of these to show people how cool this could be and so we made the babysitter murders and we sort of did the festival run with that one in 2015 and it went really well and I sort of had a lot of meetings in Hollywood and people are very excited they said well what do you want to do I said I want to make this feature and they all said anything but this feature we're still not doing anthology features and so I was I can get to this point where I you know we kind of pushed it really hard me about recent partner Justin Ross about a year and one weekend we're together we're just like basically like let's retire we're gonna going to retire this year to put it away find something else and it will come back to it later and I got a call from this woman Alison Friedman who I'd met kind of in a general meeting while I was sort of doing the rounds of Hollywood and she said Hey I found a little bit of money do you want to make this feature and so everything shifted pretty hard core from there and we quickly realized that we did how the program on the money to make the feature in the traditional way the normally what would that would these line producers and allied producers basically person it sounds like you know what your budget I'll tell you what we can get for that and everybody with that would basically set. It is 4 times as much money just a bass line to make this movie and we're kind of sitting around thinking what we know we can do this we've been doing shorts like this in the past and I feel like if we don't make a place soon we're going to lose this investment and so we just in a matter of sort of one week we turned everything around so let's just start making the shorts the way we know how to we've been short in the past and chip away at this until we have a movie and basically that began about a 2 year process I'm starting shooting editing going back to our day jobs shooting another piece editing and it even came down to the point where we were doing these little sort of splinter shoots we just made my producer Justin and some stand in actors and a fog machine Cameron the woods served on a slider just catching shots are we had a puppet monsters in my living room we go to piece of floor Republic monsters and just kind of really sort of stealing and building each local part of this very piece by piece until it was done which in retrospect I would never recommend anybody do you but I think the 9 tales you that we had going into it allowed us to sort of go in for boulder about until they turned back on until we got to the movie that you guys not today or whenever you watch that.

Q : What is there anything that you wanted to do that you claimed because of money or time or with anything deemed too intense ?

Ryan Spindell : I mean I would say I don't think there's anything that we had to eliminate from the project because one of the first things I did when I sort of set up to make the movie why is that I knew I wanted to make something that was a very practical effect heavy movie as a matter of fact I would have done 100 percent practical effects if we had sort of went back to some quarters at the end of production sort of forced our hand but one of the first things I did was and this was sort of an advantage of having the short film done before going to production but I was able to sort of take that and send it out to people who normally would be out of our league and say like Hey we're making this movie and this is actually what it's gonna look like and so that actually ended up getting us into this company called out the media design a dynamics which is Albany dynamics (ADI). I can remember precisely. Anyway they're amazing. Basically one of my favorite special effects companies. But I've been following since I was a little scared they did starship troopers and tremors and they're just these like amazing people in a warehouse up in certain northern Norco moved north to California and they just do big projects but we sent them the project and they loved it and we sort of went in and. you know we talked about it they were very excited the US where budget wise I told them they got real sad for a minute and then I turned around he said you know what we're gonna make this work you're free because we love the project and said those guys. right off the top and we made sure that we gave them even though we give that back so nothing to do it we give them enough to sort of pull off all the gags that we sort of wanted to do so I think a big part of that which is having an emphasis on it because I remembered a big sort of inspiration for this movie was Creepshow obviously creature was this. Weird horror hybrid movie that I was obsessed with as a kid and the fact that had sort of this animated intro even when I was younger member I'd seen it like 50 times but every time I started watching that movie I would forget that was it as an adult movie actor because the kids will be like well this is a kids okay this is Jake this is gonna be fun and then when the gore would happen it would surprise me so much that really affected me and I think I kind of wanted to do that with this movie I wanted to kind of create something that feels a bit more like a fun fantasy it began really goes there and so I think the only thing it doesn't sense any areas where we sort of our budget restrictions dramatically words in the end with the serve on dead puppets I think normally you would kind of set aside a good solid week they'd have a bunch of professional puppeteers animatronics kind of working that and instead like I said we were in my living room would like a piece of floor and a piece of my accent wall in my friend's kid kind of like doing puppet stuff and so I think like you know it in a way it kind of adds to the charm I think of the movie it's a small movie it as sort of like this small. Perfect charm to it but obviously I think if I had all the money in the world would probably be something else entirely. It's an interesting choice that we made up the top because. I think we went into that knowing that it was going to alienate some people because I think there are a lot of people out there who want their genre movies one way they have a specific idea of how it should look at how should feel and they I don't think they really respond well to sort of genre blending but I think we also do the top like if we can find the people that also responded to find are people who like that sort of genre using like. Keeping you on your toes about what kind of movie it is if we can make it work for them that would be successful.

Q : I want to ask how was it working with Clancy brown and how did you first approach him for the role ?

Ryan Spindell : Clancy was another get based on having the short. He's just a huge genre fan. His preferred genre is sci fi but he also loves horror and so what we did is I sort of you know basically made a list of the people I would dream people to work with he was at the top of the list the second short did expect to hear back did you hear back he was interested. But I had to do this thing which I'd never done before my life which is I had to sort of go and meet with the celebrity aspect especially somebody who I sort of looked up to my whole life and try to convince them that I was capable of directing a movie with Eminem and it was our it's a scary thing because he's like 12 feet tall and he's a giant person and a giant personality but within minutes of Sir sitting down at this diner in north Hollywood we clicked right in that we can tell we're both are geeks at heart and it sort of went swimmingly from there and it's interesting too because he's one of these guys who's worked with the best directors on the planet Cohen brothers, Steven Spielberg.. His career is insane and so you can't help but get a little bit self-conscious when sort of going on set somebody like that but instead of being sort of an antagonist and anyway he was a total allie who sort of came out he said he was very giving to the other actors less experienced people to serve help them into the scenes fans would stop I said you give them towards a he's literally one of the goals guys I've ever met and that we got so lucky to find him.

Q : I wanted to just touch on the visual style you have going on it has very stylized small town America look how did you come up with that style and how did you execute on as you mentioned a limited budget ?

Ryan Spindell : Thank you. . I think a lot of it comes from. In the. I talked about this before but when I was young I was really scared of horror movies and my only outlet for scary content was the original Twilight Zone series because my dad had, we had most of the episodes on VHS and so I watch it with him and it kind of became this father son bonding thing it was sort of like my go to for all things creepy or side by and I think that really left an imprint on even as a small child that this idea of the short. The search time with stories kind of work for any generation and so I think as we went into this I didn't want to really set this in it what anyone specific time and I think all horror filmmakers can have to deal with the cell phone problem. I don't cry technology to be very scary just in general and so we quickly realized that really interesting way that we can approach this movie was just sort of throw any specific time period out the window and just kind of make it an amalgamation of all these different things so that each of the stores could kind of exist anywhere we know what it is the planet earth but beyond that are we don't know when and that was sort of intentional and there's also a lot of sort of this aspect of you know these all the stories are being told by storytellers and so to what degree do the people who are telling the stories are influenced the aesthetics of the things you're seeing by what I'm reading is a very old man who's telling the sort of antiquated stories and so we sort of watches stories I think through his own lands to some degree but I mean I think that's the fun part about anthologies having the complete freedom to sort of go there are and then and then just sort of like really committing to it and I think as far as the challenges of doing something like this I don't even know where to begin it's i every single thing is a challenge from a car in the streets to an exterior of the building to a costume but someone in the background it's a lot of it came from just having made a lot of shorts and really kind of having being able to serve going to the community and the sort of work with people I know that we shot the wraparound and most of the exteriors in Oregon which is where they shot the Goonies and that's a sort of small town that's very much off the beaten path so I don't have a huge film industry there and so the people are really receptive to start having a big movie coming to town and kind of showcase the town and so what my so we had a few scenes at the end of the movie where we're not gonna be the end of the production issue where we had to get the big exterior shots with the sort of cars and vintage costumes and extras and we didn't have any money left and so my producer Justin Ross he'd sort of the whole time we're in a story he kind of branched out really bad a lot of people community to become friends with the chief of police and the sort of a city commissioner and it really sort of you know generally made bonds are these people and he sort of made a call out he's like look we need to do some exterior shots we really don't have any money but we're looking for vintage cars are we looking for extras were look for people to come and come out and help and just look this good used local radio station did a call out to the classic car club and the police came and they shut down the roads and all of these locals came under British cars are parked along the streets and we're shooting is exterior shots with this amazing production value that that literally just came out of being good people it's sort of a meeting and sort of connecting which is sort of the best part about the filmmaking process and something that I think you kind of lose as your budgets get bigger you kind of slip into the more you know traditional infrastructure and so I think that those days are you know we had some bigger days we had some very small days but those days in particular with the community coming out with the days I remember that with the fondest memories and those are the days that kind of reinforced why I was doing it.

Q : Your direction actor is very inspiring what can you tell us about your collaboration with Caitlin Custer and Christine Kilmer ?

Ryan Spindell : So Caitlin was the lead of the babysitter murders that's the short film that we made initially to raise financing and she came through a friend of mine who is an actress I was talking to and I think I'm having a really tough because back then when it was just a babysitter murders there was no wrap around to get to know her so it was just this one segment involving a girl in a house who couldn't really talk because she had no one to talk to and so I remember I walked over to one of my acting friends and I was like I need somebody who looks very traditional and very cute but also has this edge that can sort of come out and she was like I take class with this girl okay Custer you have to be she's the one and I was like I don't know. Slow your roll I'll meet with their art and as soon as I met with her I knew that she was awesome and so we immediately serve walked her down did the short with her arm and then said she went off and then it took a few years to get the movie made again so in between the time when she we made the movie and we came should wrap around she basically had gotten married had a baby and that she just had a baby we shot again and so she had a baby shop the pet shop the wraparound left sat got pregnant again and then had another baby right when we right before we shot our final pick up to the movies so this actually one scene in the movie where she goes from no child and husband through a door to one child and pregnant through another door to 2 children in the matter one scen and I think it's a testament to how she has the changing face she was able to pull that off. She's incredible and then Christine just boast of the people aside from a few key casting sort of plays on the movie our friends of mine that I just know in Los Angeles and so when we're writing this movie we're kind of understanding that it was going to have a big cast and it was going to be very tricky we had a bunch of divas on sat or we're gonna need people that are very flexible I basically wrote most of the roles for the people I knew I just kind of made a list of my favorite actors and then wrote roles for them we did the movie and so that's how Christine came on board.

Q : Do you have any special attachment to any particular segment and if so why ?

Ryan Spindell : I've been asked that question once before I cannot answer it's like asking me which one of my children I like the best. And it has been. it is shifted from the screen writing phase to the production phase and even in watching people are right about the movie and respond it is sort of an always shifting thing I think I will say that I love them all equally I can't pick. But it has been incredibly interesting to watch the movie get write ups and to see the movies people like because there isn't really a consistency I I was reading reviews the other day we got 3 in a row and the first review was Clearly till death is the sort of penultimate. Segments and everything is building towards it and then the next review said I love them all but till death was definitely the weakest are not my favorite . and then the next one said well babysitter is clearly to stand out on but the rest are good and it's. At first you know you kind of as the creator you kind of get a little bit sort of protective when somebody's or bad miles one of them but then it becomes really cool because you realize that you know you can't make a movie like this and please everybody it's impossible especially if you're going for variety if you're going for different towns I know I did. All the different subgenres that I loved I'm so it works for me and maybe it will work for people that my exact taste but I think if there's one piece that people really love that is it not I think to have accomplished something interesting so it's just like a still evolving thing for me kind of try I always ask people which ones they like best which was like the least because just ends the interest.

Q : What is your favorite scary movie and why ?

Ryan Spindell : You guys are asking the real tough ones. I don't know if I can pick up their scary movie right now but I can give you a top 5 it's like in my search shifting . I'm very much into I think as you can probably tell from the film a very much into armed the more stylized directors data directors who served a lot of into the mess on scene in the shop design production design I think that all those components I like to see all those components come together to sort of transport me someplace else so with that in mind I would say Peter Jackson's the Frighteners is a movie that I watch a couple times a year home, Poltergeist. Delicatessen I don't know if that's a scary movie necessarily but that the job here's Jean Pierre Jeunet French film I think it is horror elements. I feel bad putting two Peter Jackson's on the list but I'm going to do I also get your Braindead that's the movie that made me want to make movies and The fly.

Q : In the context of coronavirus, what will the state the independent horror filmmaking will be do you think it could be easier maybe cheaper to create then told you type films in the future ?

Ryan Spindell : That's a good question. I think we talk about this a lot. Just within my circle of friends who are all independent filmmakers. wish it wasn't happening but if I'm gonna have to silver lining it I would say that it would be nice if the service will situation kind of create a reset in the surf Hollywood structure and kind of open up more options for independent filmmakers to make projects that are 0 budget projects because I mean I mean the server weird places independent filmmaker because my tastes sort of lie in the search and not higher. Should valued the Amblin and the sort of spectacle pro it's the sort of caramel Toro style I can't believe I've never given a tour of the list by the way but my tastes tend to gravitate towards that sort of content and that sort of content is incredibly incredibly hard to pull off without money and so what I love is there to serve peace and more opportunities for independent filmmakers to have just a little bit more money so we can sort of reach a little bit further and some of our content some people don't need it some people make the most amazing things with $0 I'm so jealous of those filmmakers because they can sort of very light on their feet but what I would hope is that you know that. The Hollywood system would break down a bit and some of that money would trickle into sort of smaller projects I guess that's about like 3 times in a row but still sort of working through it.

Q : I just wanted to quickly touch on some you really unique can complexion from the elevator kind of slow motion scene was one of them how did you achieve that did it did it Come out as you would dream dresser hoped in the final product ?

Ryan Spindell : I would say as far as like pulling it off there's never. I can't think of any time in the film when we had the fancy toys to do things the right way like you see what you're talking about what is essentially the most simple way you can imagine we had we had we shot in slow motion we had fans blowing her hair and we just had the 2 actors pretending to be floating and we shopped their legs off screen and then we do like insert the actor speak you know kind of rising up which is just two grips like basically picking the actor optically it was a very low fi. Project in that way but I think we started to sort of role lean into that throughout it because we knew we wanted the big things we knew we could afford better thanks so kind of became a challenge like how much spectacle can we get with the most old fashioned like home video camera search techniques and of course is a little bit of CGI this is CGI swirling stop in there but that's also just like a layer you plop on top that's nothing. Nothing super fancy. I mean I'm proud of it and I think there is a certain points on where it's sort of click send and then you're okay with it but now I mean I think the doctor does kind of sequences in my mind are always these amazing spectacle I wanted to do this one thing actually that I sort of I didn't think of until we're like too far in but I wanted to sort of have the 2 of them since floating in the middle of the elevator swirling around and I want the camera to start pulling back and actually one of the pieces of the elevator like break away and took like chunks of kind of well into like a black void to assist them in the middle of black Ford which is like ridiculous but I think that's the best of that sort of problem slash. Super power we have is that whenever we think it is ridiculous things like well now we have to do because we should so now we have to. I luckily came up with that we're too late to actually get my crew to try to put into practice but I but no I don't think I think there's a there's a lot in the movie that you know doesn't meet what I would like in my mind but that's I think that's how every goal is and it is kind of nice when you sort of give up on that dream and you can appreciate it for what it is awesome.

Q : What are for you the main ingredients for a good horror movie ?

Ryan Spindell : Many gradients. I mean this is gonna sound really cliche but I think it's great characters that's the thing that is missing so often or I think horror is a really fun genre to work and to play and then if you're a fan it's very easy to get caught up in this sort of. The visuals in the gags in the sort of big ideas and forget that stories no matter what the genre they're always sort of reliance on interesting people or characters reconnect with that sort of follow through and so I think that now early in my career I was very much a visual person I started and I was a photographer for a while and I I used in the production designer for a while Sir that was my focus but now that sort of thing and it comes easy and it's how do you make an audience connect with somebody and they can actually care that's the challenge and in particular we are making a movie like this one where you know these movies but the longest one I believe is 24 minutes which means your have about. 3 to 5 minutes to get an audience to quicken with a character and usually that's one or two scenes are and that's when your when your house especially in some instances when we created this really robust backstories the challenge is like how do you get that across in 3 minutes and so I can get away with making it and starting in shorts and sort of graduating that features that can be an advantage because it's really teaches here. How to sort of get these ideas across the quickest way possible so you can sort of get into it.

Synopsis :
A young woman, Sam (Caitlin Custer) attends the funeral of a small boy, approaching the mortician Montgomery Dark (Clancy Brown) afterwards about a job opening. She challenges him to tell her the scariest stories about death that he has witnessed in his position. What follows is four short stories. The first about a '50s housewife who discovers something disturbing in the bathroom. Following that we learn about a slimey college boy in the '60s who gets his comeuppance. Next we meet a man in the '70s who must make a tough choice about his ailing wife. Throughout the stories, Sam criticizes their predictability and tameness. She tells the final tale set in the '80s, titled "The Babysitter Murders".

The Mortuary Collection
Written and directed by Ryan Spindell
Produced by Allison Friedman, T. Justin Ross
Starring Clancy Brown, Caitlin Custer, Christine Kilmer, Jacob Elordi, Barak Hardley, Sarah Hay, Mike C. Nelson
Music by Mondo Boys
Cinematography : Elie Smolkin, Caleb Heymann
Edited by Erik Ekman, Joseph Shahood
Production companies : Trapdoor Pictures, Glass Eye Pix
Release date : September 22, 2019 (Fantastic Fest)
Running time : 108 minutes

(Source : Fantasia 2020 official website)