If Tales from the Crypt, Creepshow, and a very classy funeral home had a baby, it would be The Mortuary Collection—and that baby would grow up to enthusiastically murder you while delivering a moral lesson in an impeccable baritone.
Ryan Spindell’s 2019 anthology is one of those rare horror films that actually remembers two crucial things: 1) horror should be fun, and 2) if you’re going to morally punish your characters, you might as well do it with style, slime, and Clancy Brown in corpse-white makeup.
Welcome to Raven’s End, Please Check Your Soul at the Door
We start in Raven’s End, a fog-soaked island town in the 1980s that exists somewhere between a Stephen King paperback and a haunted postcard. The local mortuary is run by Montgomery Dark (Clancy Brown), who looks like a cross between an undertaker, a Victorian scarecrow, and your favorite Gothic English teacher.
One day, Sam—a brash, snarky young woman with big “I’d survive a slasher… or start one” energy—turns up responding to a Help Wanted sign. Instead of just handing her a W-4 and a mop, Montgomery decides the appropriate interview process is: “Let me show you cool corpses and tell you about all the people who died badly.”
Honestly? Strong management style.
Clancy Brown chews the scenery like it’s embalming cotton—he doesn’t just play an old-school horror host, he resurrects the entire tradition. His Montgomery is theatrical, creepy, weirdly gentle, and absolutely the guy you want telling you bedtime stories if your goal is never to sleep again.
Story #1: The Medicine Cabinet of Shame
We open in the 1950s with Emma, a pretty, greedy party girl who sneaks into a bathroom at a fancy house to rummage through wallets like she’s doing God’s work for Visa and Mastercard. She then notices that classic red-flag object: the bathroom medicine cabinet.
Rule of horror: if a cabinet refuses to open easily, that’s not “sturdy construction,” that’s the universe saying “don’t.”
Emma pries it open anyway and finds… a tentacled monster. No explanation. No setup. Just pure, Lovecraftian “you should’ve minded your business” energy. She’s promptly grabbed, killed, and dragged into the cabinet. A lonely tentacle reaches out to flip off the light like it’s clocking out for the night.
It’s a tiny, nasty little shock—basically a horror short about curiosity killing the thief—and a perfect appetizer for what’s to come: simple set-up, swift punishment, zero mercy.
Story #2: Unprotected, or The One Where Karma Has Teeth
Next up: the 1960s, where Jake is a frat boy and walking Greek-lettered red flag who’s turned “sexual liberation” into a full-time manipulation strategy. He hands out condoms on campus like a woke king, then stealthily takes his off during sex with Sandra, because he’s human garbage in a letterman jacket.
The universe responds by giving him the most horrifying consequence imaginable: a supernatural pregnancy.
Jake wakes up with a rash and a belly situation. The campus doctor, Dr. Kubler, gives him that “you’re screwed, but scientifically” look. His water breaks in front of his bros, who just finished celebrating his conquest totals. He flees to Sandra’s house, where her parents calmly strap him to a table and prepare for the world’s worst gender reveal party.
Sandra is not sympathetic. She’s furious he removed the condom, informs him this is his problem, and very casually reveals that she’s already lining up a date with someone else. Her mom, in one of the best deadpan lines in the anthology, tells Jake the baby has to come out “the same way it got in.”
You don’t need a medical degree to know this ends badly. His penis, quite literally, explodes; his abdomen tears open; the monstrous baby is extracted and carried upstairs to join a crib full of other eldritch rugrats.
It’s grotesque, hilarious, and—for a story about a guy who thinks consent is optional—pretty satisfying. Call it cosmic reproductive justice, with slime.
Story #3: Till Death (and Then Some)
We slide into the 1970s next, and the mood shifts from comedy to miserable domestic horror. Wendell is a sad, exhausted man who’s become full-time caregiver to his catatonic wife Carol. His life is a loop of pure duty: feeding, cleaning, tending, breathing in the stale air of their apartment and their dying marriage.
His doctor (hey again, Dr. Kubler) gently suggests, in very euphemistic terms, that Wendell could… “accidentally” overdose Carol and end her suffering. It’s the kind of advice you hope your doctor never gives through a smile.
Wendell tries to slip her painkillers; she chokes, spits them up, then immediately impales her head on a figurine in a moment of bleak slapstick that plays like the darkest Looney Tunes short ever made.
Panicked, Wendell dismembers her body to conceal the death. The movie leans into a kind of delirious Grand Guignol here: bits of Carol, blood, hallucinations, guilt dripping off every frame. He stuffs her in a chest and takes the elevator down, only for it to stall. Blood seems to drip from the chest. Carol’s ghastly form rises, rotting and feral, and forces him into a grotesque kiss.
When the doors finally open, the police find Wendell babbling his wedding vows, Carol still neatly boxed up. Whatever happened in that elevator, it broke what little was left of him.
It’s a great little gut-punch: a story about how far love can decay, and how sometimes the horror isn’t that you don’t love someone anymore—it’s that you still do, and you’re stuck inside that obligation forever.
Frame Story Flip: Sam Has Notes
Back in the mortuary, Sam is unimpressed. She complains that all these tales are predictable morality plays where people do bad things and get what’s coming to them. She’s clearly more of a “bad people win all the time, actually” kind of girl.
That’s when she reveals why she’s really here: the tiny coffin Montgomery is about to cremate? That’s the child she killed. She’s not a job applicant. She’s a wolf that walked into the lion’s den, fully confident she can bite first.
Time for her story.
Story #4: The Babysitter Murders – But Make It Meta
One night, Sam is babysitting for Logan, son of Dr. Kubler and his wife Debra. She half-watches a slasher movie on TV, half-burns dinner, and completely misses the news report about an escaped asylum patient: a child-killing cannibal known as the Boggy Bay Tooth Fairy.
She finds a wounded man in the house, unsure if he’s victim or threat, right until the answering machine message plays and outs him as the escaped killer. Massive fight ensues: tense, fast, and nicely choreographed. The man rushes upstairs to find Logan; Sam battles him, convinces him he’s “not a killer” (he sobs, he’s clearly not okay), and then promptly throws him down the stairs and drops a TV on his head.
Final Girl 101: therapy is for later, blunt force trauma is for now.
Logan’s parents come home, see the dead man, and immediately recognize him as their actual babysitter, Sam. The girl we thought was the plucky heroine? She’s Charlotte Gibbons, the Tooth Fairy herself. The TV, now cracked, reflects her true face.
They find Logan’s charred remains in the oven. Happy ending: denied.
It’s a clever little inversion of the babysitter trope and a neat preview of what Charlotte is capable of. And she’s not done.
Final Act: The Mortician, the Monster, and the Moral
Back in the mortuary, Charlotte/Sam pulls out her signature buck knife, pockets one of Logan’s teeth, and stabs Montgomery. She declares that his stories are wrong; bad people do win, and she’s walking proof.
Montgomery doesn’t bleed red—he leaks embalming fluid and laughs, because of course he does. He calmly tells her the job is now hers. She tries to flee but literally cannot escape the house; some unseen force drops her right back at the entrance like she hit a cosmic “nope” wall.
In the library, Montgomery explains that he’s been bound to this place, stuck as its mortician and storyteller. The house—and its stories—exist to remind people that actions have consequences, even if those consequences take their sweet, horrifying time.
Charlotte insists she decides how her story ends. The universe responds by dropping books off the shelves. Out of them crawl the charred spirits of the children she killed. They tear her apart and reclaim their stolen teeth in a cathartic little spree of ghostly dental work.
Montgomery then, like the diligent professional he is, stitches her back together and pumps her full of embalming fluid. Suddenly freed from his curse, he steps outside into the sunlight, ages rapidly, and explodes into dust. Retirement, horror-style.
Charlotte reanimates in the mortuary, now the new keeper of Raven’s End. In the final moment, she greets a familiar newspaper boy, Bill, with a sweetly ominous smile and says she’s about to start “making dinner.”
You just know that kid is not getting a sandwich.
Why It Works: Fun, Fangs, and a Beating Gothic Heart
The Mortuary Collection succeeds where a lot of anthologies fall flat because it actually cares about:
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Tone: It’s playful, gory, and weirdly cozy. You feel like you’re being told campfire stories by Death’s chattier cousin.
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Craft: Period detail in each segment is spot-on; from 50s party to 60s campus to 70s apartment to 80s slasher night, everything feels textured and deliberate.
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Morals: Yes, it’s old-fashioned, but in a fun way. Bad behavior gets punished, but the film never feels preachy—more like a mischievous grandma saying, “See what happens?” then handing you a cookie.
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Characters: Even in shorts, we get clear, sharp sketches—Jake the smug user, Wendell the broken caregiver, Sandra the furious avenger, Charlotte the unapologetic monster, Montgomery the weary raconteur.
And Clancy Brown? He’s the glue, the host, the soul. Without him, it’d still be solid. With him, it feels like an instant Halloween staple.
If you like your horror with:
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Practical effects and goo
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Twisty morality plays
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Anthology structure that actually pays off
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And a sense of humor blacker than embalming fluid
…The Mortuary Collection is absolutely worth your time. Just don’t open strange medicine cabinets. Or take off the condom. Or ignore your vows. Or babysit for Dr. Kubler. Or apply for a job in an old mortuary on a foggy island.
Actually, you know what? Just stay home and stream it. It’s safer that way.
