Ryan Spindell's horror anthology The Mortuary Collection, which premieres on Shudder on October 15th, is a rollercoaster of an experience. For the first 40 minutes or so, it seems almost tame. Then, just when it looks like the whole thing might be heading towards the dreaded PG-13 territory, it takes a sudden hairpin turn into some surprisingly extreme body horror and gets much more gruesome and intense from there.
According to Spindell, who wrote and directed the anthology, the slow start was at least semi-deliberate. "I don't know how consciously I did it," he says. "When I was a kid, Creepshow was the only horror movie I was able to watch, because I was a wimp. Every time I watched that movie, because it opened with that sort of Saturday morning cartoon animation, and because it had kind of a fun, whimsical quality to it, it would always trick me into thinking, 'Oh, this is for kids. This is okay for me to watch. This is safe.'"
"It wasn't until I was about halfway through the movie," Spindell continued, "when there are suddenly adulterers, murders, and beheadings, when I was like, 'Wait a minute. I'm in a horror movie. What happened?' Of course, I loved it, because it sort of eased me in. When I sat down to write the opening [for The Mortuary Collection], it's like the queue in the Haunted Mansion. It's scary, but it's not too scary. 'Come on in. Get in line.'"
There's a lot of DNA from old EC horror comics in The Mortuary Collection, from its atmosphere to its tone to a love of dark irony. It's R.L. Stine for the first 20 minutes and Eli Roth in its back half, with each of its four short films progressing through vaguely-defined eras of horror history. The first two are the kinds of gruesome morality tales that old horror comics specialized in; the third is pure dark irony; and the fourth is a warped take on the '80s slasher flick formula.
Its protagonist, funeral home director Montgomery Dark, played by veteran actor Clancy Brown (Highlander, Thor: Ragnarok, Warcraft), looks like he's probably poker buddies with all of the EC horror comics' gruesome narrators. Nothing shocks him, everything seems to vaguely amuse him, and thanks to an impressive makeup job by ADI, he looks as much like a corpse as the people he's embalming. From the moment he comes onscreen, delivering a visibly unpopular eulogy at a child's funeral, Brown as Dark isn't so much chewing the scenery as low-key menacing everything within his line of sight.
"I'm having a lot of fun with it," Brown says. "I'm basing a lot of [Dark] on Ryan's script, on his drawings of the character, and of course, what we all know are the iconic storytellers of horror. There's an obvious similarity to the Crypt Keeper, to Angus Scrimm [who played the Tall Man in the Phantasm films], to all those guys. That's part of the point, that we're familiar with all those characters as a narrative device, but now we're going to find out a little more about what those iconic characters do when their doors are closed, when they're confronted with their own rationale for being."
The Mortuary Collection's connective story comes from Dark, who's telling his new employee Sam (Caitlin Fisher, Teen Wolf) about some of the stranger encounters with death that he's heard of over his years as a mortician. Unimpressed, Sam eventually responds with a story of her own, which ends up being more relevant to Dark himself than he'd expected.
"Sam shows up and she's challenging [Dark] from the beginning," Brown says, "and he's excited to talk to her. You see a different side. I wouldn't say more human, but definitely more personality than usual."
Spindell has been working towards making and funding The Mortuary Collection for years, and in the meantime, has filmed multiple horror shorts set in the same universe through his indie production company TrapDoor Pictures.
"I wrote the whole thing as a cohesive whole first," Spindell says, "because that was always the intention. I always knew I wanted to make an anthology movie, as kind of a throwback to the movies I really love like Creepshow. When we were trying to send it out and see if we could get some money for it, it turned out that nobody will touch anthologies with a ten-foot pole, especially any studio-based companies with real money. We'd made 12 shorts prior, and we decided, well, we know how to make those. Let's take the most contained ones with the least amount of cast members and make a sort of proof of concept to show people that it can be more fun than they might be thinking."
The result was Spindell's best-known short up until now, 2015's The Babysitter Murders, starring Fisher. It won several awards on that year's film festival circuit, including Best Short Film at the 2016 Dead by Dawn Film Festival in Scotland. The Mortuary Collection is Spindell and TrapDoor's first feature-length film, made on a shoestring budget, with a slightly edited version of The Babysitter Murders as the final story in the anthology.
"[Babysitter Murders] did really well," Spindell says. "It traveled, played a lot of festivals, got a lot of love, but the fact remained that people still just couldn't invest in anthologies [at the time]. The reason was, which I understand but still kind of bump against, is that they're impossible to market. They don't make them like this anymore, so people don't really know what they are when they sit down to watch them.
"What we ended up doing was that Alison Friedman, one of our producers, found a little bit of independent money on the side, and said, 'Do you guys want to make this movie independently?' ...That was a two-year process of making a short, regrouping, saving up money, doing another one, shooting all the monster puppet shots in my living room... I think we shot the movie on 10 to 12 different cameras, any camera somebody would let us borrow. It really was a hand-built labor of love that took forever to make."
"I don't think people realize how long the process takes to make a film," Fisher says. "This is definitely one of those situations where you have people that were super passionate about the project, and about the material. They did anything and everything they could to get it made, and maybe once in a million times, that happens. The statistics of actually getting a movie made, of actually following through with it, and doing what [Spindell and his crew] did on the budget... it's incredible to me. I always love talking about that part of the film, because it's really incredible what was achieved. No one ever gave up."
The resulting movie is carefully constructed, to the point where it's difficult to discuss at all without spoiling the entire thing. (This is a problem when one is interviewing Fisher in particular, as any real talk about her character has the unfortunate side effect of ruining both the entire movie and The Babysitter Murders.) The Mortuary Collection is the kind of film that rewards an immediate rewatch, as its ending places everything that happened beforehand into a new, alarming context.
"You can only see a horror movie for the first time once, right?" Brown says. "Then you sort of get the jokes. If it's a good horror movie, then you can go back and really pay attention instead of just being scared. I think that's what makes especially anthologies so much better. You start seeing the connective tissue and how deep the stories actually are, even though they just appear to be cartoon panels. It goes much deeper than that. You're at a disadvantage if you've only watched [The Mortuary Collection] once. You have to see it a couple of times to really understand how talented Ryan is."
The Mortuary Collection premieres on October 15th as an exclusive on Shudder.