An accomplished filmmaker with acclaimed work in a variety of genres, Jeremiah Kipp has built a successful name for himself in the industry working in a variety of fields and formats, creating a big name for himself in the industry. Now, in honor of his latest film, "The Mortuary Assistant," premiering on Shudder, I talk with him about his early start in the industry, the concept of the film, and bringing it to life.
Me: Hello and thank you for taking the time to do this. First off, were you always into genre films growing up? What films specifically got you into watching horror movies?
Jeremiah Kipp: Growing up in rural Rhode Island, deep in the woods, horror movies were a source of great entertainment and comfort. My family was extremely lenient about what I was allowed to watch, so my cousin and I would always be checking out movies like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Dawn of the Dead, The Thing- and I made very little distinction between the scares in those films and the witch from Grimm’s fairy tales. It was fun and wildly imaginative. The movies that really terrified me were about more human concerns, like nuclear war in the BBC film Threads, which I saw when I was far too young, or movies like Dressed To Kill, where the sexualization of violence was upsetting and confusing. The real world always seemed more terrifying to me than any creature feature.
Me: When did you first discover a passion for filmmaking? Were you always interested in the creative arts growing up?
JK: Art was always a part of my life, where I’d draw my own comic books or write stories or play music to entertain myself. I was a child actor at the local theater. When my grandparents bought a video camera to record family gatherings and weddings, I immediately gathered my friends together and would say, “Bring your army jackets, we’re making a war movie!” Or more often, “Wear clothes you’re not afraid to ruin because you’ll be zombies attacking the house.” We lived in a very creative household where everyone would roll up their sleeves and help make the movie.
Me: Having worked on various aspects of film production, do you have any particular preference for working on any one in particular?
JK: I’m interested in all the constitutive elements of filmmaking, from script development to pre-production to filming to post, even in promoting the film, which is what we’re doing right now. All of the elements feel like part of the process to me. That said, I enjoy being on set with like-minded people trying to achieve a singular point of view. I was an assistant director for several years, and I liked supporting the vision of a director I believed in. I’ve found that the more sensitive and vulnerable you allow yourself to be as a director, the stronger the work. And paradoxically you have to have enormously thick skin in the face of obstacles, or winning over a crew’s support, or taking in the audience response if they have mixed feelings about what you’ve done.
One of my favorite parts of working on The Mortuary Assistant was the collaboration with special effects artist Norman Cabrera, who has worked with luminary directors such as Joe Dante and Guillermo Del Toro. He was a protege of the genius Rick Baker, and still has that childlike enthusiasm when creating a striking gore gag, which is really just a wonderful magic trick done with rubber and paint and lighting. He’s a beautiful person, and even though he’s ten years older than me, he still has the child’s enthusiasm for the work that we do.
Me: With plenty of short films early in your career, what tools and skills do you acquire working on those that transferred to feature-film projects?
JK: You learn so much by doing, and short films don’t require the budgetary considerations of a feature. Grab a camera and some friends and you can go make a short, and nowadays you can put it on YouTube or TikTok and build a career. One of the great lessons on short films is you see how everything builds to one peak moment, then it ends.
A feature film feels like you’re doing that nine times, building to a moment where the audience has to
know what happens next, then build to the next peak, until you reach an inevitable conclusion. All of the narrative tools of feature-length storytelling can find their genesis in the short film. What short films don’t teach you is the endurance of a several week shoot, and learning how to pace yourself. You grow to understand the enormous value of pre-production and pre-planning for a feature, where you are holding a 90 to 100-page screenplay in your head. I’ve seen directors get broken by that crucible and experienced actors and crew eating a director alive if they perceive that person as being unprepared or not knowing their business. You have to be so prepared walking onto a feature film that when things change, as they inevitably do on an indie, you’re able to make a smart pivot because you know exactly what that scene is about, what shots you need to tell the story, and how to get everyone on your team making the same movie. Short films are an amazing training ground, and I wish our culture allowed us to make a living doing short works the way Edgar Allan Poe and H.P. Lovecraft could eke out an existence writing short horror stories - they did very few novels, but they were masters of the short form. Kind of like Chuck Jones, who did the brilliant Bugs Bunny cartoons.
Me: When writing a new project, what's the one fallback tactic that you're always able to draw inspiration from?
JK: There was a wonderful interview with actor Willem Dafoe who said, “If you’re feeling uninspired or don’t know what to do, make a bad painting, write a bad scene, perform a scene badly - something interesting and different might come out of it!” There’s a remarkable lack of preciousness in that idea, which allows you to get on with the work. Writing for me often comes in short fragments of ideas that, when put together, can form into an engine that makes the story go. When I wrote the monster movie Slapface, I was initially thinking of the middle sequence from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein where the monster is lurking outside a farmhouse imagining the lives of the people inside. I thought about stories my grandfather had told me about how his father would play a “game” with him where they would slap each other’s faces as a punishment exercise, and found this even more disturbing than the monster outside the window looking in. Suddenly, there was a spark and the story ignited - the humans being scarier than the monster, and I switched the gender of the creature from boy to girl and made her a witch, only still ten feet tall like Frankenstein’s monster. I hope this illustrates how one idea inspires another, and then another, and a script is a series of such realizations from writer and/or character until it builds to, as I said earlier, the inevitable conclusion.
Me: So, that brings us to your new film, “The Mortuary Assistant.” What can you tell us about the film?
JK: The Mortuary Assistant is based on a video game of the same name created by Brian Clarke. It’s the story of a young mortician named Rebecca Owens who has completed her interview process and is starting on the night shift at River Fields Mortuary. What starts out as an ordinary night of being alone with the dead and the process of embalming and cremation takes a supernatural turn when aggressive entities bind themselves to her, possessing her, using everything from her troubled past to assault her. The question soon becomes: will she survive the night? Anyone who has played the game knows this is not a foregone conclusion.
Since Epic Pictures Group was the sales agent for Slapface and Shudder was the distributor, when they were seeking a director for the film adaptation they approached me to hear my pitch. Brian Clarke was part of that decision making process, and I think he appreciated my personal take on the material. I found that Rebecca Owens loved living in her work and not in her life, much like me being on film sets in my mid-20s, and the demons of the game were metaphors for addiction, suicidal ideation, self-harm, depression. I proposed making the movie using techniques from Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs where the whole thing was told from the perspective of the Jodie Foster character, sometimes literally her POV, which replicated the experience of playing a video game. The player projects themselves onto the character in a game, and in horror movies there’s a long tradition of people empathizing with the plight of the “final girl” - sometimes literally shouting at the screen, “Don’t go in there!” That felt like a connection between the gaming experience and the cinematic one: empathy.
Me: Where did the inspiration for the film come from? Were there any unique stories about its conception?
JK: Brian Clarke has become a great friend to me, As a solo game developer, he built everything in that game from the ground up. Every tile on the floor, every bit of lore, every character, every spirit, this was something Brian had thought up in his head and created. He began the game by imagining walking into a room and seeing a dead body, which is unnerving. Then he asked himself why you would be there, and it could be embalming or autopsy. He found embalming to be a more creative, less clinical activity. And thus The Mortuary Assistant was born. For me, it was all about the characters: who is Rebecca, what does she want, what’s driving her, why is she refusing to look at the danger out of the corner of her eye, why do human beings never want to look at their problems directly?
Me: With a cast of experienced and talented indie actors, how'd you settle on the cast getting involved in the film? What characteristics did you look for with each performer that they brought to the table that helped bring the production to light?
JK: Our casting director Allison Estrin had proposed Willa Holland and Paul Sparks for the roles of Rebecca Owens and the mysterious funeral director Raymond Delver. I knew Willa’s work most recently from The Dirty South, a crime movie produced by my Slapface partner Mike Manning. I appreciated how Willa seemed to hold so much in reserve, which made me as an audience member lean forward and want to know more. Willa was unlike many other actors I’ve worked with in that she was interested in seeing the mood boards and the shot list as much as she was in reading the script, she always wanted to understand how we were covering a scene so she could deliver the parts of the story we needed for that shot. In that sense, a very technical actor - but when the camera was rolling she was remarkably un-self-conscious and very present in the role, giving herself completely over to the performance. She has enormous contempt for ideas about acting as being something mystical, so I enlisted her as a filmmaking partner and include her in how director of photography Kevin Duggin and I had planned out the scenes. This built trust between us, and I appreciated Willa bringing her many years of experience to the table. She’s been acting since she was six years old and in some ways feels like she was denied a childhood and teenager-hood, which fed directly into her interpretation of Rebecca Owens, who in many ways was the same as Willa. Her performance is undeniable.
And I was a huge fan of Paul Sparks from not only his TV work on House of Cards and Boardwalk Empire but also his impressive theater resume in plays by Sam Shepard, Edward Albee, Samuel Beckett, he was just finishing up a Samuel D. Hunter play right before doing our movie. He’s a brilliant and chameleonic actor, and I thought for sure he was going to say no to our movie. “Yes, make him an offer so he can hurry up and pass and we can get someone who will actually do our movie,” I told Allison. To my surprise, it turns out Paul wanted to be in a horror movie and was intrigued by the possibilities of the role. He played the game and explored all the different endings when considering doing the part, he watched Slapface, he wrote a long comprehensive biography of the character with multiple interpretations depending on what direction we wanted to go - Paul commits wholeheartedly to the work that he does. I absolutely loved making this movie with him, and hope we get to work together again in the future. A great actor and a warm, generous person.
Me: With a large following based on the game already, what did you plan to achieve to help it appeal to fans while also making it stand out from other films?
JK: The devotion of the video game community is powerful, and adapting material that they love is a huge responsibility. Just look at how hated movies like Doom were in the gaming community, where they felt betrayed and angered by a filmmakers lack of respect for a game that meant something to them. It reminded me of fans of an IP like Star Wars who crucified filmmaker Rian Johnson for his interpretation of the Luke Skywalker character in The Last Jedi. I absolutely loved the game, and was a fan of the game, and wanted to create a movie that would honor the world that Brian Clarke created, so the intuitive choice was to include Brian every step of the way, through every iteration of the script, interviewing some of the department heads, being there almost every day on set (we even cast him as the second corpse you see in the film, Mr. Liebowitz.) We showed him every cut of the movie, I dragged him into the interview process with sound designers since the audio was such a memorable feature of the game and we both decided to hire Jeffery Alan Jones to do sound and score. And our friendship grew out of that experience together, indeed we’re still working on the film. We attended and introduced the premiere together, we’re both giving a Q&A at a screening at an actual funeral home a week before the Shudder release, we’re doing a podcast interview together later today. Honestly, I thought Brian made a remarkable game with a strong story, tremendous atmosphere, fascinating backstory and opened up my imagination. That’s no guarantee that fans of the game will enjoy our film - the “video game curse” is very strong and some people may hate our interpretation, but we made the movie we wanted to make and stand behind it. I think indie horror games are where original storytelling is taking place right now, and movies being made like Iron Lung and Exit 8 are a testament to the originality and artistry of the game creators and the filmmakers. The Mortuary Assistant was made in that spirit.
Me: What was the set like while shooting the film? How did the cast and crew react to the type of film being made?
JK: For someone who loves making dark and weird movies, I don’t like being on dark and weird sets. The Mortuary Assistant was a very friendly work environment made by a crew who was excited about the material and happy to be there. Director of Photography Kevin Duggin and Production Designer Chelsea Turner set the tone - they were enormously experienced department heads (Kevin has camera operated for The Thing cinematographer Dean Cundey; Chelsea had just finished a film directed by John Travolta). They inspired a can-do spirit and positive work ethic from their teams, who were constantly off in the parking lot of our studio sets banging together pieces of equipment that looked like amusement park rides that Willa Holland would get strapped into and moved through a room on, or fall through the air on, much like an amusement park ride. Some folks might think that’s CGI but almost all of the effects in our movie, including Rebecca Owens being possessed and whisked from one reality into another, were done practically. Paul Sparks would always show up to set very early, and he’d see me there early too and he liked that. The notion that everybody on this movie cared about what we were doing. “It’s a terrible feeling acting in a scene and being told yeah that’s good enough, let’s move on - you get the feeling on this movie that we will keep going until you have the shot and THEN you move on.” This movie, across the board, was made by people who cared.
Me: Do you recall having any odd or funny on-set stories about yourself or any of the other cast/crew members?
JK: The editor Don Money brought his kids to the set one day - they were huge fans of the game - and they were walking around pointing at all the easter eggs. I cannot confirm or deny that Willa Holland slipped them a few of the letting strips that feature so prominently in the game and the film. To them, it was like Rebecca Owens had come to life and given them a secret.
Me: What are you most looking forward to with its upcoming release?
JK: It’s truly an honor to be a part of the filmmaking community with projects available on Shudder. I love their programming, and their curators have such a knack for diversity in storytelling. Recently I’ve been a big fan of the Adams Family work - their most recent and deeply unnerving Mother of Flies dropped on January 23 this year (and fans of their movies will recognize wonderful actor John Adams in the role of Rebecca’s dad). Last year they had Black Cab starring Nick Frost, Elric Kane’s The Dead Thing, Emilie Blichfeldt’s The Ugly Stepsister - these are films I deeply admire. I was deeply moved by the level of care they took with my previous movie Slapface, programming it the same month as fellow witch movie and dare I say modern classic Hellbender. The way they have been rolling out The Mortuary Assistant has been smart, imaginative and understanding of the film. Since I have enormous respect for the Shudder audience and fan base, the film belongs to them now.
Me: Lastly, what are you working on that you'd like to share with our readers? Thank you again for your time!
JK: As the old saying goes, serve no wine before its time. I can’t say, or am not allowed to say, too much about the projects currently in development. If there is a call for more films to be set within the world of The Mortuary Assistant, I would absolutely love to work with Brian Clarke again. And I mentioned Slapface producer Mike Manning, who’s one of those great artists that I’d leap at the chance to collaborate again, any time and any place. But most interesting at the moment is a scary children’s movie set in a puppet world similar to Labyrinth or The Neverending Story or Nicolas Roeg’s The Witches. There’s a beautiful script by acclaimed multi-media artist and fellow filmmaker Lindsay Katt, who would co-direct, and we’ve been discussing going out and making a proof-of-concept. It has been a while since we had a film in that vein, and Lindsay’s idea is so fresh, so daring, so original - so singularly itself - it’s one of those movies that is just calling out to be made. Slapface felt that way, and so did The Mortuary Assistant - and that’s usually when you know that this is a story you’re burning to share with others. Let the future come.
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