Death Boom had its world première at Tribeca, 9 June 2026
“If you get queasy, if you don’t think you can handle it,” says John Astle near the beginning of Death Boom, “there’s a chair you can sit in, ’cos it gets pretty graphic.” One of very many morticians interviewed here, Astle is not only ushering the film crew into the embalming room at his Oklahoma Mortuary Service, but also introducing the viewer into Jessica Chandler’s documentary, as he invites us to cross the threshold into a closed world from which most people wilfully exclude themselves. The death industry – and it is an industry – deals with the living at their most vulnerable, and with the dead at their most commodified, while concealing beneath a sanitised, cosmetic surface aspects of our mortality and our materiality that many would prefer not to see, and that might even repel or sicken them. So the film comes, from the outset, with a caveat emptor.
Of course the one constituency of viewers that is naturally drawn to watching embalming trocars plunged into abdomens, or cadavers in varying states of decay, is horror fans, who have already chosen to see these things fictionalised in films like Stuart Gordon’s Re-Animator (1985), Hèctor Hernández Vicens’ The Corpse of Anna Fritz (2015), André Øvredal’s The Autopsy of Jane Doe(2016) and Jeremy Kipp’s The Mortuary Assistant (2026). Chandler is herself a horror fan, and her friend the horror director/producer Eli Roth serves as both narrator and a producer here, and states explicitly that his interest in the reality of death and what happens to our bodies after we die is a natural corollary of his love of these themes in genre cinema. This may be a documentary, but the traditional methods of disposition for a cadaver – interment or cremation – are introduced with rapid montages of scenes taken from horror films which depict burial or burning. The actual processes, shown in more detail, are of course altogether less sensational and more banal – but the point is that these rites of ultimate passage are readily mythologised in the human imagination.
Death Boom is so called because the 76 million people born in the US during the post-war baby boom of 1946-63 are now reaching that age where they are expected, statistically speaking, to die in equally large numbers. This is a business opportunity for the death industry, but also a problem, given how that same industry truly struggled to cope with the one million who died during Covid – a mere ripple compared with the “tsunami of bodies” inevitably to come. Those numbers in turn will stretch the amount of urban graveyard space available, while killing faster those still alive with the vast pollution caused by embalming (peculiarly popular in the US since the Civil War and the nationwide tour of Abraham Lincoln’s corpse) and incineration. As Michah Truman, CEO of Returning Home, puts it: “Your final act on earth at the moment is one of pollution, whether you like it or not.”
Death Boom offers a show-and-tell of other methods of disposition, some old, some new. There is natural (i.e. embalmment-free) decomposition, whether below or even above ground, provided that the space is available; there is natural organic reduction (aka ‘human composting’), a two-month encasement that yields a bag of usable soil rather than an urn of ash; and there is alkaline hydrolysis (aka ‘resomation’, ‘water cremation’, or ‘aquamation’), a chemical process which liquefies the body in four hours leaving a sterile, treatable effluent and pure, pulverisable bone. Ranged against these more environmentally friendly methods are pressures from the more corporate ends of the funeral business (including the Catholic Church) who do not wish to see their considerable profits undermined in any way. There is also of course what Nicki Mikolai, funeral director and sales manager at Resomation Natural Water Cremation, calls the ‘ick factor’: that general sense of revulsion at the thought of a body breaking down, set against the more palatable fantasy that a cadaver, and the life once associated with it, might somehow be preserved for eternity. Yet by tackling head on this most transgressive of topics in a manner that is both frank and often funny, Chandler’s documentary lifts the veil, takes us behind the scenes of the death industry, and encourages us to think – and perhaps even talk – about the best options for our bodies post mortem, in preparation for what is coming whether we like it or not.
strap: Memento mori: Jessica Chandler’s documentary offers a thorough autopsy on the mechanics and economics of different mortuary practices
© Anton Bitel
