My Shudder Pick of the Month is the Rock-Solid 2019 Horror Anthology The Mortuary Collection
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.
I recently posted my first Silly Little Show-Biz Club piece in about a year. That’s because my AU-DHD brain developed a special interest/hyper-fixation on EC Comics, the iconic publisher behind Tales From the Crypt, The Haunt of Fear and The Vault of Terror.
It wasn’t enough for me to read one or two of these collections; I had to read every horror and science-fiction comic book EC Comics put out. Needless to say, I am VERY excited about January 21st, because that’s when the fifth volume in Dark Horse Book’s lovingly curated Tales From the Crypt series comes out.
I became obsessed with Tales From the Crypt as a 13 year old on a perpetual hunt for naked boobs. I remain obsessed with the HBO series, films (both British and American), animated show and comic books as a forty-eight year old who, full disclosure, is still really into boobs.
I am perpetually on the hunt for entertainment like the Tales From the Crypt television show and comic book. I am a horror anthology fiend, so when I saw that a 2019 fright flick called The Mortuary Collection scored an impressive 95 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, and was available for streaming on Shudder, I was intrigued. Then I was impressed.
The Mortuary Collection does a lot of things right, beginning with the casting of Clancy Brown as Montgomery Dark, a larger-than-life mortician who figures prominently in a framing device that finds him sharing a trilogy of terror tales to a mysterious woman responding to a “Help Wanted” sign.
Brown isn’t just a popular or prolific character actor: he’s a horror icon with a presence at once singular and towering. Casting Brown as a dark and menacing gentleman is lazy yet effective.
I’m a creep connoseieur, an expert on ick. I’ve spent much of the past month binging the lesser films of Stephen King for a Nathan Rabin’s Bad Ideas project where I’m writing up all of the legendary author’s films.
Being an anthology buff, I got to Creepshow, Creepshow II, Cat’s Eye and Tales From the Darkside: The Movie early.
Tales From the Darkside: The Movie’s framing device involves a little boy reading stories to distract a witch played by Debbie Harry who is intent on serving him as dinner to her coven.
The Mortuary Collection has a similar framing device where Montgomery shares stories involving some of the corpses in his gloomy place of business.
Having spooky characters tell stories is a horror anthology convention because it works. It’s not original or audacious, but it is effective.
Caitlin Custer plays Sam, the young woman morbid Montgomery shares his tales of suspense and horror with. She’s the audience surrogate, a thoroughly modern gal who offers the spooky older man unsolicited criticism on his morbid morsels.
She is underwhelmed by Montgomery’s first story, a Lovecraftian nugget about a swinging sixties pickpocket who is dragged away by a tentacled monster through a mirror for being too short and lacking a twist, but she’s also critical of the twist in the much meatier and longer following tale.
Dreamy Jacob Elordi, who stars in Euphoria and Priscilla and will be playing Frankenstein’s Monster in Guillermo Del Toro’s Frankenstein, stars in “Unprotected” as Jake Matthews, a womanizing frat boy in the 1960s who cynically tries to convince beautiful co-eds that the best way to rebel against conformity and patriarchy is by having casual, no-strings-attached sex with him.
Unlike his less confident frat brothers, Jake is so attractive and charismatic that he doesn’t need to resort to cheap psychology to get women to sleep with him, but he’s all about quantity as well as quality.
At one debauched soiree, Jake seduces a mysterious beauty. He promises to use the condom she gives him, but in the heat of passion, he throws a prophylactic he never planned on using away.
In classic horror tradition, he ends up paying a terrible price for his sociopathic selfishness. An evening of unprotected, acrobatic sex leads to an unplanned pregnancy of an unusual variety.
The universe punishes Jake by making him pregnant. The results are like Junior re-imagined as Cronenbergian body horror.
Elordi adds an unexpected element of pathos to a character that easily could have come off as one-note. The acting in The Mortuary Collection is uniformly excellent. That certainly cannot be said of all, or even most, or even some, low-budget horror anthologies.
The actors find humanity in their characters. This includes Barak Hardley, who stars in the next segment, “Till Death,” as Wendell Owens, a depressed man married to Carol (Sarah Hay), a beautiful but catatonic woman.
The unhappy hubby’s life is one long, grueling set of obligations toward a partner doing a tragically convincing impersonation of a mannequin. Wendell loves his wife but is exhausted and depleted.
So when a doctor tells Owen that Carol is in such bad shape that she’ll die if she’s given a few painkillers, he’s intrigued. The painkillers promise to kill Owen’s pain along with his wife’s. Her life is so grim, and joyless that ending her life quickly and painlessly qualifies as a mercy killing.
Carol dies, but that is only the beginning of Owen’s problems. He dismembers his wife’s corpse and stuffs her body in a marital chest, only to get stuck in his apartment building’s elevator.
The Mortuary Collection subscribes to the idea that horror means more if you sympathize with characters, even when they do unforgivable things for understandable reasons.
In the final segment, “The Babysitter Murders,” the tables turn, and Sam tells the morbid mortician a story about a babysitter and murder.
In an unsurprising development, Montgomery and Sam are not what they appear to be.
The Mortuary Collection uses tropes and conventions in a way that feels like a loving tribute to horror history. It’s nothing revolutionary, but it delivers its scares with artistry, intelligence, and class.
Brown won a Fangoria Chainsaw for Best Supporting Actor. The movie picked up additional Best Streaming Premiere and Best Makeup FX nominations.
I was thoroughly impressed by The Mortuary Collection. Unevenness is endemic to the horror anthology, but this is surprisingly solid from start to finish. I’m excited to see what its writer-director does next because this is an extraordinarily promising debut.
Nathan needed expensive, life-saving dental implants, and his dental plan doesn’t cover them, so he started a GoFundMe at https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-nathans-journey-to-dental-implants. Give if you can!