Welcome to Hell—Now Featuring Discount Latex
Every so often, a horror film comes along that promises to peel back the layers of the human soul, gaze into the abyss, and confront the true nature of evil. Necromentia is not that film.
Instead, Necromentia is what happens when a film student binge-watches Hellraiser, Saw, and a Tool music video on three tabs of expired ketamine, then decides to make their thesis project about it. Directed by Pearry Reginald Teo, this 2009 direct-to-video fever dream attempts to mix body horror, philosophy, and bargain-bin satanic lore—and ends up with a movie that feels like an Ed Hardy tattoo came to life and started monologuing about pain.
It’s a grimy, confusing, and unintentionally hilarious descent into the “underworld” that looks suspiciously like a disused meat locker in Bulgaria.
Plot: Three Men Walk into Hell, Nobody Comes Out Smarter
The story—if we can call it that—centers around three miserable souls connected by a demonic Ouija board tattooed onto someone’s back, because apparently Hasbro ran out of ideas.
First, we have Hagen, a grieving man who keeps his dead girlfriend’s decomposing corpse in his house, because romance isn’t dead—it’s just rotting on the couch. Hagen’s coping mechanism involves candles, whispers, and the kind of smell that probably voids renter’s insurance.
Then there’s Travis, a heroin-addicted torturer-for-hire who also takes care of his mentally challenged brother. Picture a combination of Sid from Toy Story and every guy who’s ever asked if you “party.” Travis accidentally discovers that ketamine—yes, the horse tranquilizer—can open portals to Hell. So now we’ve gone from “drugs are bad” to “drugs are dimensional doorways,” which, honestly, might make a better D.A.R.E. campaign.
Finally, we meet Morbius (Layton Matthews), a mute bartender turned demon who looks like the lovechild of Pinhead and a Hot Topic manager. He’s the one pulling the strings—or rather, carving the flesh. Morbius is fueled by betrayal and a thirst for revenge, which he expresses mostly through grunts, flashbacks, and interpretive gurgling.
The three men’s fates intertwine when Travis is instructed by Morbius to use Hagen as a “gateway to Hell.” He does this by carving the titular Ouija board into Hagen’s back—because apparently Sharpies weren’t metal enough—and sending him straight to the underworld.
Down there, Hagen is immediately torn apart by a faceless meat monster that looks like someone tried to build a Cenobite out of spam and Play-Doh. Travis soon follows and meets a similar fate, proving that if you’re dumb enough to carve Hell into your skin, you deserve what you get.
We later learn through a series of baffling flashbacks that Morbius became a demon after being poisoned by his girlfriend Elizabeth and her lover Hagen. When that plan goes sideways, Morbius chokes out Elizabeth, dies, and ends up face-to-face with a gas-masked entity claiming to be her unborn son. Because yes, the fetus wants revenge too. Freud would be having a field day.
This entity offers Morbius eternal vengeance in exchange for his soul—a classic Hell bargain, except somehow less believable than a used car warranty. Morbius accepts, transforming into the eyeless, black-eyed monster from earlier. Full circle. Full nonsense.
Welcome to Hell: Population, Poor Lighting
If you’re expecting a terrifying descent into the underworld, prepare to be disappointed. Hell in Necromentia looks like a haunted house run by broke theater kids who bought all their props from a thrift store that specializes in chains and viscera.
The set design is 50% rusty pipes, 40% black goo, and 10% smoke machine. Everything is sticky. Everything glows red. Everyone is covered in at least two layers of corn syrup and regret.
The monsters—if we can call them that—range from “mildly gross” to “did someone’s cousin design this?” Mr. Skinny, for example, is a diaper-wearing butcher in a pig mask who encourages a child to commit murder. He’s less scary and more “unemployed mascot for a BBQ restaurant.”
The gas-mask demon looks like a Silent Hill character that got rejected for not being scary enough. And Morbius himself—our supposed big bad—resembles a Cirque du Soleil performer who took “method acting” way too far.
It’s all deeply unpleasant, which, to be fair, might have been the point—but when every frame looks like a Nine Inch Nails album cover circa 1995, the shock wears off and boredom sets in.
The Characters: Depressed, Depraved, and Dim-Witted
There’s not a single likable character in Necromentia, and not in the cool, anti-hero way. These people are all so miserable you start rooting for Hell to unionize just to stop dealing with them.
Hagen, the necrophiliac lover, spends the film whining to his girlfriend’s corpse like a lonely goth Romeo. Travis, our druggie torturer, is so unlikeable he makes the Cenobites look like life coaches. And Morbius, the central figure, doesn’t speak—a bold choice in a film where no one has anything meaningful to say anyway.
Their motivations are murky at best and laughable at worst. They make Faustian bargains without reading the fine print, perform unholy rituals without washing their hands, and take advice from demons that clearly have a Yelp rating of one star.
If there’s a moral here, it’s “Don’t do drugs, don’t date occultists, and don’t get tattoos in languages you don’t understand.”
The Horror: Body Parts, But No Soul
There’s plenty of blood in Necromentia. Buckets of it. But it’s all so numbing that by the fifth disembowelment, you might find yourself checking your phone to see what’s on Tubi.
The film tries desperately to be shocking—intestines, mutilations, people stapling things to themselves—but it’s too derivative to actually disturb. Every sequence feels borrowed from Hellraiser, but without Clive Barker’s twisted poetry or philosophical undercurrent. It’s just blood for blood’s sake, like a metal album cover brought to life by a director who thinks “edgy” means “turn off half the lights.”
Even the score is aggressively industrial, pounding away like someone dropped a blender full of chainsaws. The editing doesn’t help—half the scenes end abruptly, as though the movie itself got bored and decided to skip ahead.
Symbolism and Other Lies
The movie clearly wants to be deep. It flirts with ideas of guilt, addiction, revenge, and eternal punishment, but it handles them with all the subtlety of a tattoo gun powered by caffeine and self-loathing.
Morbius’s transformation into a demon is supposed to represent his fall from grace, but mostly it represents an excuse to glue more prosthetics to his face. Travis’s addiction is treated as both a literal and metaphorical gateway to Hell, which is very clever until you realize it’s also really, really dumb.
And the recurring image of the Ouija board carved into skin? It’s meant to be symbolic of human suffering or something. But it mostly looks like a bad tattoo you’d get on spring break and instantly regret.
Performances: Somewhere Between Pain and Numbness
Layton Matthews as Morbius does his best silent-anguish face, which is basically “mild constipation” with eyeliner. Chad Grimes as Travis delivers his lines like he’s trying to remember whether this scene was before or after his character died.
Santiago Craig as Hagen goes full melodrama, giving us the kind of performance that should come with a goth poetry open mic. Everyone else seems confused, possibly because they read the script and realized no one was getting out alive—metaphorically or otherwise.
Final Thoughts: Necromentia? More Like Necro-Mental Breakdown
Necromentia wants to be profound. It wants to be nightmarish, philosophical, and raw. Instead, it’s a muddy, self-serious slog through Hell’s least interesting waiting room. It mistakes gloom for depth and gore for meaning.
To its credit, it’s ambitious—it tries to build its own mythos, its own version of the afterlife. But it does so with the finesse of a drunk guy carving runes into drywall.
If you’re into surreal, grimy horror and don’t mind a movie that feels like it was filmed inside Marilyn Manson’s laundry hamper, maybe you’ll find some perverse charm here. But for most of us, Necromentia is just proof that sometimes the scariest thing about Hell… is the runtime.
Rating: 1.5 out of 5 Tattooed Ouija Boards
A gore-soaked, grimdark trip to nowhere. Imagine Hellraiser directed by a philosophy major who just discovered hot glue, and you’re halfway there.
