I will die on the hill that Jerimiah Kipp is one of the best directors working today. I know he specializes in horror, but the truth is his skill goes way beyond horror since he always creates perfect worlds that are 100% believable. It is a trick that many of the best directors can’t do even in a non-fantastical setting.
I have been a huge fan of his going way back to when he made the short THE DAYS GOD SLEPT and a remake of the infamous drive-in staple THE SADIST with Tom Savini. Way back then I was lucky enough to interview him via email about those films. Over time I got to watch as he made more truly scary features and shorts including the recent neo classic SLAPFACE. I looked forward to each new cinematic treat. (I also have been reading his occasional pieces, interviews and reviews, that have appeared in Shock! Magazine)
Not long ago I was offered a chance to see the film THE MORTUARY ASSISTANT and as part of that I was asked if I wanted to speak with its director Jerimiah Kipp. Yes, I said. Absolutely. Without even seeing a frame of the current film. (My review is here)
Life bounced us around, but we managed to speak right before the film was released to theaters last month. We spoke together for half an hour and some how managed to stay on point and only talk about the current film. Some how I managed to hold it together as I spoke with one of my cinematic heroes.(And that is not hyperbole, I have been openly gushing about Kipp’s output for the last decade)
What follows is pretty much everything that was said. The only thing removed was a couple of incidental remarks.
This is one of the best interviews I’ve been part of. Granted Mr. Kipp did all the talking, but it was great to have a ringside seat as a favorite director tells you about his work.
I want to thank Stacey Cusack for setting this up and Mr Kipp for taking time out to speak to one of his fans about one of his best films.
STEVE: It's so nice to finally speak to you in person.
JEREMIAH: Likewise.
STEVE: I I don't know if you remember, years ago I did an interview.
JEREMIAH Oh, I do.
STEVE: It was right around the time you did THE SADIST, and THE DAYS GOD SLEPT. I've been following your career for ages, and I'm on record all saying you being one of my favorite directors.
JEREMIAH: Thank you. I appreciate that.
STEVE: I love MORTUARY, the review went up today, I just think it's absolutely magnificent.
JEREMIAH: I’m really grateful.
STEVE: It's wonderful, it's actually one of the best horror films I've seen in a long time
One of the things I was curious about is that your films tend to look realistic. However, MORTUARY ASSISTANT feels like a movie. I don't mean this in a bad way, because I know you. I've been following you for so long, and I know you know horror, but here you almost subvert what you've done before, because the mortuary doesn't feel real. It feels like a horror movie place. It isn’t realistic, but as a result of it, you've created a place that's really scary.
JEREMIAH: That's really good to hear. Yeah, as you said, most of the movies that I've made are very grounded and naturalistic and realistic, no matter how supernatural they got. And this one, because of being based on a video game, the mortuary felt like a liminal space. The film was far more influenced by German expressionism than what I normally do, which is to go into a location and look for what's grounded about it and real.
In SLAPFACE, the entire point was to put supernatural stuff inside of a setting that was everyday. The Mortuary Assistant, as a video game, I thought the thing that was really great about it was that the location was kind of an interesting character in and of itself, and in that sense it needed to feel a little less naturalistic, because it's a strange and haunted space. So if it feels a little bit unreal, that was satisfying to me. It's supposed to feel like, when you walk into that space, it's supposed to feel a little strange.
It was a set that we built. Production designer, Chelsea Turner, and the director of photography, Kevin Duggan and I, were talking about it for weeks before the build. We were talking about the layout of the space, and the colors, and how we wanted to represent the mortuary from the game, but also things that we might need to change a little bit, so that we could do all of our camera tricks inside of the space.
But I think that what you picked up on is accurate and correct, you know, it's meant to feel a little bit reality plus, instead of just reality.
STEVE: When Rebecca goes home, or is in her apartment, there's this reality, but she's always going back to this unreal place, and it just creeps you out, because the unreality, the level of other worldliness bleeds out of the mortuary. And even when she has the assault of her friend you know, you can feel the mortuary almost bleeding into the real world, which is nice.
JERIMIAH Yeah, it's like an infection, absolutely.
STEVE: I'm curious, because I know you know horror films so one of the things I absolutely loved about it is you have this wonderful level of school horror running through the film. You know, the dark and stormy night, The lightning is always going. But at the same time, you have the more modern horror, you have the graphic embalming, blood and stuff.
So, I want to know how did you walk that line? How did you manage to balance that? Because there's this perfect balance of old and new horror in the film. Most filmmakers fall all over the line. They try to do the same thing, and it comes off as not well. Here, it sets the mood. Here, everything plays perfectly together.
JERIMIAH: Yeah, I think that the thing that we were aiming at was, when we were doing the mortuary science and the embalming, and Norman Cabrera's brilliant designs on the dead bodies, who were played by very wonderful actors, we were aiming for accuracy. We were studying medical journals, and I was interviewing morticians to talk about the science of it.
And in scene one, when she's doing the first embalming session that gets her the job on the night shift, we just wanted it to feel, we wanted the bodies to feel based in a certain level of accuracy. The strategy behind that is that when we start introducing elements of the fantastic, these specters and these demons that are popping up from the shadows, you know, like we've already established for the viewer very realistic looking gore effects, where she's slicing people open and sticking tubes in them. We even went so far as to put a medical lens on the camera, it's called the probe lens, so we could get very, very close to the wounds and almost treat them like landscapes.
It was as you noticed, a strategy to try to bring the viewer into a certain feeling of horror. As the movie progresses and gets increasingly strange and increasingly supernatural we wanted them to gradually feel the shift from let's call it medical horror to supernatural horror. We even tried to do very subtle effects, like the lighting by Kevin Duggan, we, as the storm progresses and as the insanity of the story progresses, we would make the lighting scheme increasingly darker and more shadowy, like kind of like the walls are closing in on Rebecca. That was all very exciting for us.
I must say that Norman Cabrera, our special effects artist, was the key to our success because he's been doing special effects almost his entire life. He studied under the master Rick Baker of AMERICAAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON fame and so many other great projects.
Norman has worked with great artists like Guillermo del Toro, so we were very, very lucky to have him on our movie. I know Norman was very happy. He's an absolute genius and the effects that he did were so strong, but he was very happy that the effects were lit with precision and care so they were made to look real, and not like rubber and paint. There was a level of high respect between Norman and Kevin, the special effects artist and the director of photography. We were all really inspired by movies like John Carpenter's THE THING, where the camera is prowling around an interesting location and creates an atmosphere of paranoia, so by the time we get to the supernatural effects, the audience is primed for them.
STEVE: I have to say something, I'm a fan of John Carpenter's THE THING, I love the way it looks and stuff, but the effects you achieve in this film are so much better. They look so much better. Don't get me wrong, I love Carpenter's film, and I think it's brilliant, but even allowing that THE THING is more fantastic, everything in MORTUARY ASSISTANT is much more real.
JERIMIAH: Well, that's good to hear. That's certainly what we're aiming for, to keep the horror restrained. It was just a conscious effort on our part to maximize our cinematic control over the images.
STEVE: I can't wait to sit down and really just watch it, where I can really see it for itself, and I'm not, because I’m doing this interview and the review. I want to go back and see what I missed.
JERIMIAH: It's my sincere hope that they do a physical media release. A lot of the Shudder films have been going to Vinegar Syndrome for a physical media release after the film was played on Shudder for a while, so I hope that happens again on this one.
Vinegar Syndrome just did a really beautiful version of SLAPFACE that we were all very happy with.
STEVE: I'm going to ask you this, because I know when you did THE SADIST that was , a work for hire, was this this something you put together or was this a work for hire?
JERIMIAH: I guess technically it was a work for hire, but it didn't feel that way.
You know, because SLAPFACE came out, and then Epic Pictures Group, who were the sales agent on SLAPFACE, teamed up with Shudder, where SLAPFACE was shown, and they decided they wanted to make a film of The Mortuary Assistant. This was a couple of years ago. And then I signed on, and I worked with the game developer Brian Clark, and then there were many drafts of the script, and a rather long development process until we got it right. I think that the key to getting it right was hiring screenwriter Tracy Beebe from Austin, Texas, who really understood the Rebecca Owens character, and created a very strong through line for her, while at the same time understanding the dynamic of creating scary sequences every 7-10 minutes or so.
I worked on the movie for several years, and it didn't feel like a work for hire assignment. It felt like a personal project. It felt like a passion project.
I liked to think about SLAPFACE as being about my childhood, and MORTUARY ASSISTANT as being about my life in my mid-20s, because even though I wasn't a mortician, much like Rebecca Owens, I was living very much in my work, and not in my life. And when you do that, your life comes crashing in. And in our film, it's the form of supernatural demons.
So I felt like it was a very personal film for me, and personal filmmaking. It never felt like a job. And Brian Clark, the game creator, who, it was his personal thing, he's a solo developer, and he made this entire thing from scratch.
He said some very lovely things, like, he said that this game was mine, and when we turned it into a film, it became ours. So that's really the level of personal investment I had in this movie and personal filmmaking. I just absolutely loved it.
It's one of my favorite films that I've made, and it never felt like a job. It felt like something that I really, a story that I just really, really wanted to tell. And I was very grateful to do it with the collaborators that I had, because they were really remarkable department heads.
STEVE: It definitely is one of your best films.
How did you balance the sense of reality? Because you manage to keep what's real, what's not real, what's happening, what's not happening balanced. With a lot of horror films, they lose that. They shift things once or twice, and then you end up losing the audience because they don't buy what's going on.
And with this film, you stay with Rebecca and the fact that everything is shifting. Things are not real, but they might be real, but you don't know, and you don't understand what's going on until the end. But you stay with it. You never lose the audience. How did you manage to work out what was too much, or what wasn't too much, or how to keep everybody?
JERIMIAH: I really appreciate the question, because it's something that we thought about a lot. It was something that the game creator Brian Clark and I talked about a lot.
Because we wanted to make sure it worked. There's nothing I hate more than that pulled-back-to-reality-was-all-a-dream thing, which can feel like an awful cheat. I think the thing that helped us navigate that was the fact that Rebecca Owens, as a character, is in a very addled state. She's in recovery from her addictions, she suffers from depression, she has suicidal ideation, so she has a lot of problems.
And she had a very difficult childhood. And I thought that all of those things informed the work that we were doing. It never felt like we were doing frivolous bullshit, frankly.
It felt like it was all coming from the character, and when the character was being addled, and her point of view was being wrecked by the mortuary, and the forces in the mortuary, it created an altered state for her. And we always knew, when you're doing stuff like that, you have to know what's real. Because that's true north. When a character's into madness, you have to know when it's the elements of the fantastic. The thing is, when you're in an addictive state, those two realities can blur and you don't know what's real.
And when the character's in that state, we had to know about it. We had to know that Rebecca's in a place where she doesn't know what the hell is going on. And there are many good films in movie history that you can look at as a reference for that.
CARNIVAL OF SOULS is a movie from the 60s, where reality slips. And I thought that they did it very successfully. More recently, I really loved the Rose Glass film SAINT MAUD, where it's more religious ideation, but that character slips into religious frenzy and madness. It's almost as if you're seeing a movie about Carrie's mother in her early 20s, or something like that. It's a really great film, if you haven't seen it. So those were our reference points for when a character slips into madness.
Another really good one is Prano Bailey Bond's movie CENSOR, which is another person-going-crazy movie, where the reality shifts under the feet of the main character. I think if done well, it can be very powerful. And if done poorly, it can feel like a cheat.
And we really were aware that we're walking on very slippery territory when you're making those kinds of choices in your storytelling. All I can say is that it was very conscious when we did it.
STEVE: The other thing I like is you don't use jump scares too much. Everybody relies on jump scares. And I know that there's probably one or two in the film, but I couldn't for the life of me tell you where they were. But it doesn't feel like it's all... It's so much like mood. Everything is mood, and anything that's even remotely like a jump scare is so earned.
JERIMIAH: I have the same feeling about jump scares that you do. My feeling is more that I like creating an atmosphere of unease and anticipation. There are people who do jump scares really well, it's just not my cup of tea.
We only conceived of one jump scare, and it was well into the movie. Maybe an hour and ten, hour and fifteen minutes into the movie. And even then, it's done as part of a shot that is about waiting for something terrible to happen, more than the jump scare.
That was one where in the edit, we constructed it, and the editor, Don Money, said, Well, there's our jump scare. And I said, yep. Not a moment too soon either.
We're well into act three of our story, and barreling towards the conclusion before we do any sort of jump scare. It's not that I don't think those things are worthwhile, it's just not the kind of horror that I do. I'm more interested in creating a heavy atmosphere where you're just anticipating the worst the entire time.
STEVE: And that's just more the filmmaking that I prefer. I prefer the less jump scares, because I know a film is good, or a horror film is good, when it stays with me. A lot of times, the jump scare just dissipates all the feeling. And even though they're here, you immediately pick it up again, and the film ends, and you're still disturbed at the end. The end credits are rolling, and you're still bothered, and I love that. It's wonderful.
JERIMIAH: Yeah, we were very conscious. I won't spoil the ending, but it was thematically relevant for us to not tie things up with an easy ribbon and a bow, and say everything is going to be great from now on. Because I don't think that the world of our characters is like that.
Very early in the movie, Raymond says, again, and again, and again. And that is something that we were trying to convey in our movie, is that in recovery, it's like you just make it through the next day, but you still have tomorrow to face.
STEVE: You talk about the ending and I would like to keep it going, and I'd love a sequel, but it ends in such a way that it's not one of these films where you've made a film that stands on its own, it's its own thing, and it doesn't need a sequel. It ends there, and it ends, but it's not over. It's like, I never need to go on from here, but you can go on if you wanted to. I don't know if I'm explaining that right.
JERIMIAH: No, you are, and it is something that I care about, too. I like it when stories come to a natural conclusion. If we do make another movie in the world of THE MORTUARY ASISTANT, obviously it depends on the audience and if they want one, but if we did, Brian and I have talked about wanting to do another stand-alone adventure that doesn't have to be beholden to anything that we did in this first one.
I love the Mad Max series because MAD MAX 1, and then THE ROAD WARRIOR, and then BEYOND THUNDERDOME and FURY ROAD are each unique stand-alone adventures involving Mad Max, and I think that's the attitude that we have about the world of THE MORTUARY ASSISTANT. If we are given the opportunity to go again, and I would in one second, I loved playing in this sandbox so much, and I loved the world and the characters so much. If we did do it again, I wouldn't want to repeat what we've already done and I would be curious what other stories we can tell within this world.
STEVE: Sign me up, I'm there.
Just one more quick question This is just a curious thing because I was looking at the pictures and promotional stuff. I've seen a couple of different posters and there's the poster that I was given which was with the demon there, but to me that's so inconsequential, it was like who decided what to pick that, because I saw another one with Rebecca and a face coming out of a body bag (see above) and to me that was a much better...
JERIMIAH: I think that's the international one, the face coming out of the body bag. I know that was a temporary poster they were using when they were selling the film abroad and I think just some foreign territories picked up on that one. But you know, it's marketing and they wanted the iconic monster to be on the proverbial cover of the box. You know, and I understand it because people who love the game, love that monster. But what you're picking up on that I agree with is that the thing I liked about that monster is that it doesn't do obvious monstrous things like scream at you and charge at you, it's always kind of skulking in the sidelines and observing and you're always wondering what it's thinking and what it's going to do. And that was the thing I liked about this monster.
I felt like Brian Clark had created a creature that is unpredictable in its stillness and it reminded me of some of the monsters that I've seen in J-horror movies where the thing that makes them scary is what makes them unknowable. It's almost like they're just standing there and looking at you and what are they going to do? And that's what I liked about the monster in our movie. But I know that's why they put it on the posters because fans of the game love that creature.
I'm well versed in the monster being on the cover of the video box. That just seems like something they've been doing since the 1980s.
STEVE: To me, I like the other one better, but it's just also, I think for me, I came away as much as I like the monster, don't get me wrong.
I remember Rebecca is who I carry from the film. It's not...
JERIMIAH: Likewise. Rebecca's the character I pinned the whole movie on.
She's the character that I love and the character that we're following. To me, Clarice Starling is the star of SILENCE OF THE LAMBS and Dr. Lecter is a wonderful character brilliantly played by Anthony Hopkins. But it's not Dr. Lecter's story, it's three Starling's story and I felt the same way about Rebecca Owens in the Mortuary System.
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