Mortuary Assaistant (2026)

Jerimiah Kipp's films are so good that I am continuously shocked that he hasn't risen to the level of horror icons like Wes Craven, George Romero, Dario Argento, John Carpenter, Lucio Fulci and others. Perhaps it's because he hasn't had a break out hit. His films tend to dance around being major releases, but with the access to a wider variety of films via streaming I would love to hope he gets discovered by the audience he desperves.

I am hoping this will happen with his latest film MORTUARY ASSISTANT which is getting released int theaters and then on to Shudder, because this film is deeply disturbing.

The film is the story of a woman named Rebecca who has just gotten a job as mortuary assistant in a funeral home. Her boss is a bit odd, but she is happy to have a job. She is a recovering addict who has guilt over the death of her father.  However she isn't long into her job when she realizes that things are not quite what they seem.

Based on a video game, the film has a very intentional unreal feel. It feels like it's set in a self contained world that you only get in games and horror movies.  The funeral home feels like a place that exists only in horror films. This is no doubt intentional because Kipp's direction leans heavily into horror tropes we have come to expect. There is blood and gore, and there is a dark and stormy night. Kipp is messing with his audience both giving us what we expect but subverting our expectations and using things against us. Kipp creates a world that messes with our sense of reality, and for a film that plays with Rebecca's notion of what is and isn't real, almost to the breaking point, he manages to keep things together to the point that we are deeply disturbed.

I'm not going to lie and say this film makes a lot of sense at times, it doesn't. The film layers on a few too many games what is or isn't real, but the central narrative actually holds it all together, more so when you get to the end and it's revealed what is going on. (Not to give too much away but it has to do with demonic possession but with a different set of rules than we are used to. This is a horror film that ultimately works because the world it creates is revealed to make sense in it's own universe.

As always Kipp's direction is masterful. There is a reason that I reached out to him over a decade ago to speak with him about what he was doing in his short films. Kipp hits us from all sides, first from the visual side by showing us graphic embalming and then slipping us into Rebecca's mind set. She doesn't have a grasp of what is real at times and neither do we. The result is that we don't know what is happening or why- but we knoiw its wrong on a cosmic level and we don't want to be there. (I want to add that when you see the film just go with it- it's all sorted at the end).

This film rocked me. There is something so visceral about it that it over rode my sense of logic. I went into pure fear for much of it because I didn't know what was going to happen because anything was possible.

This is one of the best American horror films in years