There was a time when I didn’t enjoy short stories or anthologies. I wanted the big epic stories with multiple plot threads, deep characters, and a variety of themes to explore. Short stories and anthology series didn’t have that because they were trying for something completely different. In the past few years though, I’ve come around on them quite a bit. I now enjoy that short form storytelling can narrowly focus on a certain theme in a way that big epic stories can’t.
The Mortuary Collection, Shudder’s latest “original”, is an anthology of short films that all end in death. The frame story takes place inside Raven’s End Mortuary with mortician Montgomery Dark (Clancy Brown) giving a tour of the mortuary to his new hire Sam (Caitlin Fisher). Sam wants to hear the dark stories of death that Dark has in his wealth of knowledge. He starts off small, with a simple tale of a pickpocket that gets eaten by a tentacle monster but after being told his story is too simple, he presents a more elaborate tale.
The second story takes place in the 60s where a frat boy convinces a young woman to come to his party and then proceeds to have sex with her there. She asks him to use protection but he secretly slips it off only for his subterfuge to have dire consequences. It is a fun story with a gross and twisted ending. Dark’s tales of the macabre don’t stop there though as he then tells the story of a man who has spiraled into a deep depression while caring for his comatose wife. He makes the decision to kill her, and end both their miseries, but she reacts and in an attempt to save her from his poisoning, he accidently kills her, leading to a dark twisted game of how to remove a body from your nosy apartment while you are possibly going crazy.
The final story is told by Sam, taking place in the 80s and dealing with an escaped psych patient that mutilates children and their babysitters. On the surface, this one seems like a pretty standard 80s slasher tale but there is a bit more going on in it with some fun subterfuge that all leads back to the frame story for a fun ending. And that’s the big takeaway for me from The Mortuary Collection, it’s a fun antholgy. The stories are all dark and disturbing but there is a sense of levity in them as well that makes this a fun 110 minutes and an easy recommendation.
4*
About Author
