We are no strangers to Bad Movies. This is especially true in our current streaming-dominated era. Filler Movies. Generic, bland fare that are primarily ways to pad out the options on the various selection screens and ensure there is always something “new” when users log on. Slop, even if no LLMs were utilized. The number of forgettable movies has always outnumbered good ones, but as ever more content is created to justify increasing subscription prices the gap in that ratio becomes all consuming, and we grow numb to it.

All that is to say there are loads of bad movies that get made. But it has been a long time since I have seen a movie as bad as The Mortuary Assistant.

The Mortuary Assistant is a Shudder produced film based on the video game of the same name. It released directly to their streaming service on March 27th, and I can’t stop thinking about it.

It’s bad, but in a way that I find truly fascinating. The premise of the game and movie, a mortuary assistant is stuck processing bodies overnight while spooky paranormal things begin to happen, seems a fine set up for the kind of serviceable horror flick to put on during a rainy evening. While the game does have a lore, it’s primarily a delivery mechanism for various jump scares. And that’s fine. If that was all the movie set out to do it would have been unremarkable but fun enough. Let they who has never enjoyed a jump scare throw the first stone. But that is not what The Mortuary Assistant set out to do. Instead it made a series of baffling decisions that led to it being not just a generic movie, not just a poorly made movie, but a bad movie of a type that felt unusual and specific to me. A sort of Lovecratian creation, that while not terrifying still induces a sort of madness in the inability to properly describe what is that you have gazed upon.

And I need to talk about it. It has lodged itself in my brain, not because of the bad writing and acting, not simply because it is incompetent in most metrics, but because The Mortuary Assistant does not feel real. So I am going to tackle the biggest reasons this movie felt like the result of a dream you had while half asleep, because it is the only way I can try to make sense of it.

A Double Cheeseburger, Hold The Cheese

Jump scares are often looked down on as being cheap, an easy way to elicit a gasp from the audience. I take the view that jump scares are like puns; they exist on a spectrum, with one end being lazy and trite and the other end being masterful. But even that is somewhat beside the point because, at the end of the day, jump scares are fun! Lots of people like the funhouse feeling of things jumping out and saying “Boo!” and having that ensuing release of endorphins.

It’s big part of why The Mortuary Assistant game (and many a game like it) became popular. Not only is often fun to be got by a jump scare but it can be especially fun to watch someone else react to getting got by a jump scare. So you would think, if nothing else, the movie would be an excuse to throw a bunch of these at the audience. It seems so obvious that even now, as I am drawing out the reveal, you are thinking “there is no way the movie did not include jump scares.” And yet.

Not only are there no jump scares in the movie based off a game where that is the main selling point, there are times where the movie seems to go out of its way to avoid providing them. The editing seems allergic to the concept, cutting around where a jump scare would normally go

The most glaring example is a scene where our protagonist Rebecca hears the voice of her grandma coming from the other room. We know from the many establishing shots of the morgue that there is a large window in that room. This is something taken from the game, where the figure of an old women often appears in the window when you are nearby (jump scare!). It would follow that we are being led to a scene where our protagonist will investigate and upon getting close to the window BAM, an apparition of her grandmother will suddenly appear. Cliche? Absolutely. But the simple setup/payoff of even something routine like this is the lifeblood of these kinds of horror films.

Instead, what happens is while Rebecca is still in the lobby, the camera cuts to the window where the apparition of a woman is already standing on the other side. There is no sudden movement or action, there really isn’t even a music cue to sell a scare. It’s just A Cut. Functionally indistinguishable from a standard transition.

Actually, let me take a moment to talk about the wasted potential of the set. Most of the movie takes place in the mortuary, and it is explicitly pointed out that the doors separating the lobby from the other rooms have been removed. The film does not dwell on the reasons for this, but that decision does create lots of large, open spaces. It is perfect for building suspense, and having things move or shift in the background that our protagonist is not aware of. The movie in fact has plenty of shots where Rebecca is positioned in the foreground while we can see into the next room behind her. And just about every time we get a shot like this, nothing happens. There is only one shot where we see a corpse sit up on the table behind her. That’s it. All that fantastic negative space, all the opportunities to quietly and gradually build tension, and we get one shot that we have seen in countless other movies.

(There is another use of something happening in the background, but it it does not happen within the mortuary set designed for such things, and has a whole mess of other issues I will get into later.)

The film is littered with the absence of these kinds of moments, made all the more apparent by the fact that it doesn’t do anything else to fill those gaps. I cannot adequately explain how surreal it is to watch a horror movie that you can tell based on the surrounding context should have things jumping out and creepily moving in the background, but steadfastly denies providing it. In other hands I could see a cleverness to the intentional withholding of those expected moments. A subversion of tropes and cliches. But it does not feel like an intentional choice in The Mortuary Assistant, instead it feels like they just forgot, and by the time they realized what was missing it was too late. The result is similar to watching someone order a cheeseburger and then ask for it to be served without cheese; a feeling of confusion and a sense that the person doing the ordering doesn’t understand what they are doing not because of incompetence but because the concept of burgers is itself alien to them.

Some Kind of Metaphor

The movie desperately wants to use its paranormal spooky scaries as a metaphor for addiction. This is in part taken from the game, where the main character being a recovering heroin addict and how it led to the death of her father is part of her backstory. But in the film it becomes The Point, only the the movie can’t seem to make up its mind on what to say about it. Talk to Me it is not.

When we first meet Rebecca we see her hastily cover scars on her wrist, implying a history of self harm. Then we see her at a recovery meeting where she announces she has been sober for a year. It is not explicitly stated from what. And then towards the end of the movie we get a flashback showing how her drug use led to her dad’s death, with her passed out in the woods and used needles nearby. Again, her father’s death is taken from the game, but the movie is laying it on thick that Rebecca is a Troubled Individual, to the point it is her only real characteristic. This can be somewhat forgiven in a game where the protagonist is the avatar of the player, and as an active participant the player is invited to fill in some of those gaps themselves. But we need more for a film protagonist. We need a sense of who she is, why she turned to drugs in the first place, why she got interested in being a mortuary. Instead we get an empty shell.

This lack of characterization means the symbolism the movie attempts to employ has to do all the heavy lifting, and it is not up to the task. The most obvious manifestation of the addiction theme is the Mimic, a genuinely well done piece of practical creature design who stalks Rebecca throughout. In the game’s lore the Mimic is a lesser spirit connected to the demonic entity at the center of the story. The movie chooses to separate him in a way, instead having him appear in flashbacks to her drug use (where somehow her father sees him? This is apparently what causes him to stumbled and crack his head on a rock while Rebeccas is passed out) as well as outside the mortuary at the end of the movie. Both of these scenes imply he is a stand in for Rebecca’s addiction, the scene at the end specifically tapping into the notion that recovering addicts are never really done fighting their addictions and must always be vigilant.

That’s all well and good, but it opens up a whole bunch of questions. So it isn’t tied to the mortuary? Then why does Rebecca only start seeing him when the other hauntings at the mortuary start? Also when Rebecca sees him at the end, in the sunlight juxtaposed with children playing, it causes her to turn back and accept the head mortuary’s offer (*deep breath*) to continue working with him to contain demons even though Rebecca now knows that includes siphoning off blood from another woman who, while possessed, had been locked away in the basement for years (*exhales*). Rebeccas initially takes moral objection to this, but then changes her mind because she sees the Mimic. If the Mimic is the manifestation of her addiction, does that mean she is willing to harm other people for her sobriety?

It feels incredibly superficial. The more interesting angle would have been to flesh out and explore the relationship between Rebecca and Raymond, the owner of the mortuary. As it is, the movie handles Raymond more poorly than Rebecca. From the very beginning Raymond has “Suspicious” stamped across his forehead, and it couldn’t be more obvious there is something he is hiding. Eventually Rebecca learns he has been withholding information, but there is no real tension built over whether or not she can trust him. When he does eventually dump exposition before abandoning her for the central chunk of the movie, Rebecca takes his pseudo-coherent babbling about demonic passions at face value. And when he makes the proposition to Rebecca at the end, the movie does very little to actually question his motives and reasoning.

If instead the movie made Raymond a bit more methodical and competent, and spent time showing us the ways he interacts with her, you could tell a story about how recovering addicts, in their search for stability as they rebuild their lives, can be particularly susceptible to predators. To be fair, the movie kind of attempts this with the demon trying to bond itself to Rebecca. But like with everything else it takes such a half-assed approach that nothing actually feels intentional.

For example, there is a scene towards the midpoint of the film where Rebecca inexplicably wakes up in her apartment, with no recollection of why or how she got home. Her sponsor is knocking on her door demanding to be let in, saying Rebecca had just called her. The parallel being made to going on a bender are clear. But then the scene escalates in comedic fashion; the sponsor confronts Rebecca, Rebeccas apparently becomes possessed by the demon, the sponsor tries to run but Rebeccas stops her, Rebecca kills the sponsor in an over the top manner which provides the film its one moment of almost inspired action, while Rebecca talks to Raymond on the phone the corpse of the sponsor gets back up and moves toward Rebecca (that other example of something moving in the background), and Rebecca rushes out the front door only to run into the sponsor (the real sponsor?) again.

The scene is a confusing mess. It’s seemingly designed first and foremost to give the audience a “whoa what the fuck” moment. But the initial parallel of a black out gets lost as we are faced with new questions about the nature of the demon and its powers. So ok, it transported Rebecca back to her apartment. Why? Maybe to torment her, to throw her off and make her more susceptible. Ok. So was the sponsor always a trick of the demon? What about the second sponsor as Rebecca runs back to the mortuary? If she was real, did the demon call her? And if the demon is able to make Rebecca see things that aren’t there, why have her physically go back to her apartment? Wouldn’t it be easier to keep her in the mortuary and just make her think she is in her apartment?

It’s weird, and feels incidental to what passes as a story for the film. Maybe if the movie had invested in the relationship between Rebecca and her sponsor there is a way you can make it a bit more thematically resonant, but like everything else with The Mortuary Assistant it feels slapdash.

Why Is This

I can’t stop thinking about this stupid movie.

It is not memorable in any sense. It is not “so bad it’s good.” There is nothing about it to recommend, no justifiable reason to commit 2500+ words of any kind of analysis to it. But still I feel compelled.

I think the reason it fascinates me is there is a contradiction within it. The Mortuary Assistant is and should be a cash grab, banking on a semi-recognizable IP to pump out a safe-but-servicable flick within a relatively forgiving genre. But the movie also really really really wants to be “about” something, as if the filmmakers watched a couple video essays about elevated horror and decided they needed to add some depth to the proceedings. That they failed at the latter is not surprising, but the degree to which they whiffed on the former is.

I keep going back to the lack of jump scares. The fact that even the cheapest executions of them were missing indicates a bizarre laziness. But then the film goes out of its way to make an attempt at crafting a metaphor, and while it certainly fails in that attempt it would have been easier to not even bother. The easiest and most obvious version of this movie is one that focuses on the jump scares and barley bothers with plot, and that is the version the film goes out of its way to avoid being. Why? Why forgo that layup in service of a half-assed metaphor that the film also has no interest in exploring?

The worst part might be that I have no grand takeaway here. This is compulsion. I have watched plenty of bad movies, but watching The Mortuary Assistant made me question what I was actually watching. I kept feeling as if I was the problem, that there was no way the movie was missing so many key components. I kept questioning its very existence. And in its wake, I had to document it. I would not wish viewing it upon anyone, but I need to ensure people understand that it was real. I need to provide evidence for 5 or 10 years from now, when I question whether or not I hallucinated the whole thing. The Mortuary Assistant was here, but for what purpose I do not know.