The Biggest Challenge In Making The Mortuary Collection Isn't What You'd Expect - Exclusive

The Mortuary Collection, currently on Shudder and coming to VOD and all forms of physical media, is something of a throwback anthology horror movie. Writing five stories, including the frame story, comes with plenty of challenges — different sets, scripts, actors, the works. It's an impressive feat, given the variety of stories and set pieces. But The Mortuary Collection had a unique challenge, one Looper learned about exclusively.

There are many possible challenges with horror films, especially cartoonishly gruesome ones like The Mortuary Collection; makeup tests, creepy crawlies, distressing lighting, but all of these all standard problem. They're also easy, because the production crew has complete control over them — if they don't like how something works, they can always change it. According to star Clancy Brown, the hardest part of making The Mortuary Collection was dealing with something they couldn't change: the house they used as a set.

"We had to be very careful because the Flavel House is a museum and it's a historic place in the story," star Clancy Brown told Looper, "and we couldn't wreck anything, we couldn't put any holes in the walls or anything like that." The Flavel House is a historic house museum in Astoria, Oregon. It dates back to 1884-85 and is on the National Register of Historic Places.

This isn't the Flavel House's first appearance in a motion picture — it was featured in The Goonies, as the place where Mikey's dad worked — but it's certainly the best look we've gotten on screen at the inside of the building. Brown gives a lot of credit to production designer Lauren Fitzsimmons for keeping the house's character while upping the spook factor: "Lauren's genius was to sort of lay over top of what was already there, something complimentary, and creepy." 

The Mortuary Collection releases on VOD, Digital HD, DVD and Blu-ray on April 20.