At the beginning of Jeremiah Kipp’s The Mortuary Assistant, we find protagonist Rebecca Owens (Willa Holland) passing several landmarks, but not really celebrating – like someone hesitant about their own worth. For in the opening scene, she is, as an intern, carrying out her final supervised embalmment of a corpse before the watchful eye of her mentor Raymond Delver (Paul Sparks). Rebecca performs and passes this final test on her path to becoming Raymond’s assistant at the River Fields Mortuary, which he owns – but she declines his offer of a congratulatory drink. Raymond is Rebecca’s boss and an older man – indeed old enough to be her father – but it is not a question of workplace propriety that stops Rebecca drinking with him. Rather it is both because, and in spite, of the fact that today is her ‘birthday’ – and not a birthday in the conventional sense, but the anniversary of her going clean. For the first time since her early teens, Rebecca is one year sober – and as her sponsor Kelly (Keena Ferguson) reminds the group which Rebecca attends that evening to receive her badge, recovery is a process that is never really over, but must be continued “one day at a time”.
Indeed, the events of Kipp’s film, adapted by Tracee Beebe and Brian Clarke from Clarke’s 2022 horror VG of the same name for DreadXP, span only a single brief day – and the long dark night (of the soul) that follows. For called in by Raymond to do the late shift all by herself, Rebecca will find that she is not in fact alone, and will be put through an infernal ordeal in the mortuary. Yet before any otherworldly incursions even take place, it is clear that Rebecca already comes with her own demons and ghosts. In the opening sequence, as Rebecca slices open and resutures the cadaver on the slab, we certainly observe that she is also concealing the deep scars on her own wrists, even if Raymond, distracted by the slight movement of the corpse’s toes, may not himself notice. Those scars, signifiers not just of self-harm but even of a suicide attempt, suggest that Rebecca’s proximity to death is no less personal than professional.
Similarly, before she even begins this fateful night shift, Rebecca sees, or imagines that she sees, her late father (played by ‘family’ man John Adams, mimicked by Mark Steger) seated among the members at the AA meeting. Rebecca is haunted – scarred, even – by the guilt and trauma of her past. One might even say that her harrowing, hallucinatory experiences at the mortuary are as much psychological as supernatural. “None of this is real”, Rebecca recites to herself while under constant demonic attack – and the possibility remains that these nightmarish intrusions are all in the head of a young, damaged woman working, and occasionally sleeping, through her troubled past and the monsters of her mind. That said, Rebecca is not the only one with a skeleton in the closet – or a devil in the basement (Emily Bennett). Perhaps people like Rebecca and Raymond are made for this kind of work, closer to the dead than the living.
“Again and again and again,” says Raymond, surveying his nocturnal duties. The Mortuary Assistant is indeed a story predicated in iterations. There is the repetitive routine of the embalming process, enacted upon body after body after body. There is the mortician’s lore passed along from teacher to student, father(-figure) to daughter, in a long tradition. There is the film’s close imitation of the original videogame, or its more distant echoes of any number of horror films set in mortuaries or morgues (Dead & Buried, 1981; The Beyond, 1981; Re-Animator, 1985; Night Watch, 1994; The Corpse of Anna Fritz, 2015; The Autopsy of Jane Doe, 2016; I Am Not A Serial Killer, 2016; The Dead Center, 2018; The Mortuary Collection, 2019; The Funeral Home, 2020; Broken Bird, 2024). Most of all, though, it is the ever-resurfacing traumas of Rebecca and Raymond, as their sad, solitary struggles do not so much find resolution as recur, over and over, in endlessly repeating cycles.
For as this odd couple, bonded in suffering, try to address their problems and to keep their demons down in the hole, what emerges is a cinematic portrait – in a funeral home whose interiors are amply decorated with portraits – of emotional repression as a living hell where even death offers no real end. With her physical scars and her damaged psyche, Rebecca drifts about on a transgressive threshold between this place and the next, and will always have one foot in the grave. Yet for her to go on – for her, in her distressed, self-loathing, zombified state, to enjoy even a half-life without (more) chemical anaesthetisation or a(nother) suicide attempt – all those numbing, repetitive steps must still be taken, indeed undertaken, again and again and again, one day at a time.
strap: Infernal undertaking: Jeremiah Kipp’s horror VG adaptation has a recovering addict facing her demons during a night shift at a funeral home
© Anton Bitel
