To whom it may concern

Combine twentieth century period aesthetics with a smattering of practical effects, soak it in Gothic atmosphere and apply a liberal sprinkling of body gore galore and you have the ingredients of pretty much the perfect horror film for this particular film critic. And like a beautifully-packaged and well-timed Halloween gift, those happen to be the precise ingredients that make up The Mortuary Collection coming to Shudder this week. It is a portmanteau centred around the Raven’s End Mortuary, where Clancy Brown’s Montgomery Dark tells aspiring apprentice mortician Sam (Caitlin Fisher) various spooky tales that have led to some of the more memorable corpses he has worked on.

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n the best tradition of The Twilight Zone, Tales from the Crypt or Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (or my childhood favourites Eerie, Indiana and Round the Twist), The Mortuary Collection uses the classic horror trope of telling scary stories ‘around a campfire’ and upping the ante with each one, trying to outdo the last. It also features twists and turns and it is unclear who to side with or trust out of the central duo of Montgomery Dark and Sam. I personally preferred the individual stories more than the sinew that ties them together (the mortuary-set scenes), but it is all highly enjoyable.

Veteran actor Clancy Brown (Shawshank Redemption, Starship Troopers) sinks his teeth into his role and is almost unrecognisable as the creepy mortician. Caitlin Fisher also gives an interesting performance as seemingly a bland blonde, but with more going on under the surface. If you are familiar with Jacob Elordi’s two best-known characters – Noah and Nate – seeing the particular flavour of revenge that befalls him here is decidedly delicious. Barak Hardley is a stand-out for his role as the desperate husband trying to do the right thing.

What Ryan Spindell has achieved here, for a first feature, is really impressive. He has created a world that has depth and richness to it, with detailed period production design and fantastically gory practical effects. If you like your horror on the fun and enjoyable side, rather than the relentlessly traumatic and harrowing side, then this is the Halloween treat for you. One of the best Shudder offerings I’ve seen in the last year or so, make sure you don’t miss The Mortuary Collection.

From this Thursday evening until Saturday night the GFF ventures into the darker side of cinema with its annual Arrow Video Frightfest takeover. Over the course of the two and a half days, the event will host a total of thirteen movies that cover all facets of genre cinema. One such film is The Mortuary Collection. Screening on Friday 6th March at 10:50 PM, the film is the first time feature from writer-director Ryan Spindell.

Despite being his first feature-length film, Spindell has been steadily working in the world of short films for the last few years. In fact, one of his shorts, The Babysitter Murders, forms part of The Mortuary Collection which in itself is a portmanteau anthology. The film begins in a funeral home, the perfect setting for hearing some scary stories, and sees Clancy Brown’s Montgomery Dark recount some rather disturbing tales to a prospective co-worker. It’s a movie that taps into the magic of the bygone era of great anthology films; the ones that had a single mind at the helm, rather than being a collection of cool shorts from new filmmakers.

Ahead of the screening at Frightfest, we took time out with Ryan to delve a little deeper into the production process, lament the lack of child-friendly horror shows, and bond over an appreciation of Pet Sematary 2.

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I thought the world and concept of The Mortuary Collection was great, a little bit like a darker Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. Would you ever consider returning in the future to expand upon it?

I would love to. It’s interesting that you talk about that too because I don’t know if I intended it to be this way, but The Mortuary Collection has a bit of a kitchen sink to it. In that, I kind of threw everything I love about horror into it. I think maybe that was one of the things that was appealing about doing an anthology – being able to do a monster movie, do a slasher movie, do a ghost story, and to play in all these areas.

But I also just love Are You Afraid of the Dark, I love Goosebumps. I love that younger kind of fantastic horror that we don’t see that much. So I stuck that in there too. You go into making a movie and you put all of your heart, and all of these things that you love into it, but you don’t really anticipate, “oh is this going to work for a general audience?” Am I getting too niche? Or disperse with all these different types of ideas that are going to throw people off. I think sometimes it does. I think there are a lot of horror fans, and I have a lot of friends, who like their horror one way; they like it very straight and scary and very dark. It’s kind of a risk to make a movie that has fantasy elements, and things that are a little bit more ‘spooky’ as opposed to scary. That’s something that we’re learning as we roll out with this film, how do you market a film that taps into all of these different sub-genres within the genre, beyond just the people like me that just like everything. I just like anything that’s different. Whenever I start to see the same thing, again and again, I think, “what’s a different way to see this.” I want to be surprised a little bit.

The original seed of it was that I wanted it to be an ongoing series. I moved to LA and I wanted to get the rights to make Creepshow or Eerie, Indiana, or Tales from the Crypt, or Twilight Zone. I wanted to go after those shows. I was knocking on these doors, trying to find out if there was any way to do it and everybody was, “look, kid, no one’s going to give you one of these huge IPs. You’re a nobody”. So I thought maybe I can make a movie and create something of my own, and use that to spin-off into a series. That was the initial thrust for making it.

I have so many of these stories on my computer just gathering dust. It’s kind of a bummer to be so passionate about short form, because right now – and this might be changing – but for right now there’s not really any place to actually make those things and survive as an adult doing so. You kind of just have to save up all your money and you make them, then you do the film festivals and you meet a bunch of cool people, and then you go back to your day job. The idea of an anthology TV series is the ultimate dream. I still feel like I haven’t seen one that’s really knocked my socks off, except for maybe the first couple of seasons of Black Mirror. But yes, there are so many more stories that I would kill to have the opportunity to explore.

There is a gap in the market – I grew up on Eerie, Indiana, Are You Afraid of the Dark.

I was just watching an expose on spooky shows/series for kids that were in the early nineties, and how in the 2000’s they just stopped making them cold. There was almost zero content being made in that arena because, for one reason or another, people had decided that they weren’t good for kids. They just went off of the air altogether. It was just diving into whether that’s a negative thing. Horror, in whatever format, helps kids…I’m trying to remember what the quote was in the video. It was something like “everyone knows evil is there from the time we’re born. It’s just burned into us. But horror, especially children’s horror, shows us that evil can be defeated.” That’s why it’s important for kids, and in the 2000’s it just went away. I didn’t notice it because I was in my twenties around then so I stopped paying attention to what was being made for kids. But you’re right… where are these shows now?!

Catch The Morturay Collection at Arrow Video Frightfest on Friday 6th March at 10:50PM.