The Mortuary Assistant (2026) A Horror Game’s Logic Trapped in a Linear Film

2026 has seen one of those significant changes in horror taste that comes around every few years, but it’s not simply thematic as we’re being asked to reconsider what we know about horror narratives. The impetus for this change are the IPs that have recently been adapted from other media, with a raft of online content (especially videogames), being turned into films this year. The most popular example of this new wave is Backrooms – Kane Parsons’ adaptation of a termite-art creepypasta that’s become the second highest-grossing horror of the year (so far). We also have Return to Silent Hill, Exit 8, the finale of The Amazing Digital Circus and YouTube celebrity Mark “Markiplier” Fischbach’s adaptation of indie horror game Iron Lung all hitting the big screen. With their defiantly un-cinematic approaches to narrative, these sources have raised questions about how horror might feel like if we broke free from the traditional three-act structure and embraced the mechanics of gameplay, and now an adaptation of The Mortuary Assistant has come to Blu-Ray in the UK to challenge us even further.

Adapting horror videogames to the big screen has been a profitable enterprise ever since Resident Evil started doing it back in 2000, but Paul W.S. Anderson famously reworked the game’s plot to such an extent, fans protested the film before it was even released. In hindsight it was a smart move because it sidestepped the main problem with translating games to cinema – how to account for the time difference. Games are all about user interaction, with the players controlling events and their progression actively motivating changes in the story, which also means you could sit for hours in the same place and the game’s story would never move an inch – even if the game was running. A film however, is linear, so you turn it on, a narrative plays out for a couple of hours, then it ends – the watcher’s presence never changing the content of the film as we are passive in the T.V. glow. 

The crop of releases I’ve described attempt to reconcile sometimes open-ended inspirations with the demands of the cinema, with varying levels of success, the best being Iron Lung and Exit 8, both of which lean into the idea of slowly progressing through a problem to find their narrative momentum. Most flounder in the struggle to bridge the gap between game storytelling and film narrative, and sadly that issue plagues The Mortuary Assistant. The main problem is the source material itself as the The Mortuary Assistant is a horror game in which the player takes on the titular role, and must solve various puzzles while trying to avoid possession by a demon, the party piece being its procedurally generated story. In other words, the game will algorithmically randomise the possible puzzles you can encounter, and the novelty comes from the uncertainty. This then feeds into the anxieties and psychosis the demon inspires in the main character who struggles with a history of addiction and familial grief – we can’t trust ourselves, so how can we trust our ability to solve these problems?

THE MORTUARY ASSISTANT IS OUT NOW ON BLU-RAY, CLICK THE IMAGE TO BUY AND SUPPORT THE GEEK SHOW. ALSO, AVAILABLE ON SHUDDER.

Unfortunately, film can rarely be randomised in the same way so the screenwriters opted for a “single playthrough” approach, where our lead Rebecca (Willa Holland), encounters a series of demons in the guise of corpses, and she must either embalm or burn them while battling with her sanity. It would work if we saw Rebecca slowly learning how to spot the demons, making mistakes and gradually refining her skill until she’s able to defeat the final boss but the details of the process, especially the importance of the letting strip, are so fuzzy that the audience soon tires of seeing the same process repeated without variation. Character progression is also sparse, for example while we understand what caused Rebecca’s cycle of shame, regret, addiction and grief, this revelation arrives far too late and far too complete for us to develop any sympathy for her, even though the moments where Rebecca jumps in and out of her memories are appropriately disorientating and well signposted. She’s a blank slate for too long and the entire experience of the film is one of diminishing returns, making it fair to say that stripping away the game experience and the algorithmically mandated structure, the original game has nothing but cliché storytelling, and very little to bring to the table.

It doesn’t help that The Mortuary Assistant feels incredibly cheap as the cinematography suffers from the modern obsession with an exclusively grey, green or beige colour palette. At times you can barely see what’s going on in the frame, and there’s a strong desire for the colourful delirium of prime Dario Argento. Tracking shots add little more than a slightly detailed look at the mortuary set (if you can see it at given the heavy use of shallow focus), and most of the budget was evidently spent on that set because the other locations – especially Rebecca’s apartment – are dressed in an anonymous and slapdash manner. We’re treated to some very detailed demon makeup, especially in the final shots, but even then the sound mixing is so appalling that the abyssal hellspawn voice is frequently incomprehensible. If the true sign of a great low-budget horror film is the ways it hides the limitations of its budget, then director Jeremiah Kipp and his team have failed miserably, but it’s not universal as Holland does her best with very little and, despite the naysayers, Paul Sparks gives an appropriately unsettling performance in his deeply stilted way – at least for the first half an hour where he must be suspicious.

Die-hard fans of titles like The Mortuary Assistant, Exit 8 or Silent Hill 2 will make their adaptations at the very least profitable, especially if made cheaply, and while I can’t speak to the game’s fandom or their enjoyment of the film, my research of the game for this review involved watching Markiplier’s ebullient playthrough. Which raises some interesting questions, the first being even if an adaptation was produced with the budget of Backrooms (which itself wasn’t too expensive at ten million dollars), would its origins as a randomised experience fundamentally make The Mortuary Assistant a bad film? If so, on what basis do we mark the quality of this new wave of horror if they violate previously held tenets of cinematic storytelling? Is our beloved genre degenerating or evolving, and who now is the true market for horror?

Perhaps only time will tell, but I have a feeling that The Mortuary Assistant will only be a footnote in the wider movement when the dust settles.

ETHAN’S ARCHIVE – THE MORTUARY ASSISTANT