Festivals - Fantasia 2020 : The mortuary collection , Quebec Premiere

By Mulder, 09 august 2020

The Mortuary Collection is an 2019 American horror anthology film written and directed by Ryan Spindell. It stars Clancy Brown, Caitlin Custer, Christine Kilmer, Jacob Elordi, Barak Hardley, Sarah Hay and Mike C. Nelson. It had its world premiere at Fantastic Fest on September 22, 2019.

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

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 : site offciel Fantasia 2020)