Name: The Mortuary Assistant
Director: Jeremiah Kipp
Genre: Horror, Mystery
Released: 2026-02-13T00:00:00+00:00
Duration: 91 min
Cast: Willa Holland, Paul Sparks, John Adams, Mark Steger, Shelly Gibson

The room is all stainless steel and low fluorescent hum, the kind of light that flattens skin and turns everything the colour of a held breath. This is where Rebecca Owens spends her nights: alone with the recently dead, a drain in the floor and a checklist of tasks that horror has always found unbearably intimate. Wash, embalm, close the eyes, sign the form. The Mortuary Assistant draws its dread straight from that procedure, from the tactile patience of preparing a body while something in the dark begins to breathe along.

Rebecca is not a screaming ingénue but a certified mortician with a wrecked history, a recovering addict who took the job because it was the one that would have her. What starts as routine, all paperwork and cold storage and the mentor two doors down, curdles when the corpses begin to speak in borrowed voices and a demon starts trying on the faces of the dead. The central task is the one that made the source material a fixation: identify the thing correctly, or be taken by it.

Casting Willa Holland as Rebecca is the film’s clearest argument about what it wants to be. Holland plays her not as a final girl but as someone already worn down before the haunting starts, which keeps the fear psychological rather than merely reactive; the woman is fighting her own history before any demon shows up to itemise it. Opposite her, Paul Sparks brings his particular register of soft-spoken unease to Raymond Delver, the funeral-home mentor whose kindness never quite settles into something you can trust. The two-hander shape, a younger woman and the older man who knows the building’s secrets, gives the supernatural material a human circuit to run along.

Director Jeremiah Kipp arrives here from a long stretch of short-form and genre work, and he is adapting one of the more admired recent examples of indie video-game horror, a game whose power lived almost entirely in first-person ritual and player culpability. That lineage matters. The film lands inside the current wave of small horror games making the jump to screens, the same current that carried Five Nights at Freddy’s and Iron Lung out of the console and into the multiplex. Screenwriters Tracee Beebe and Brian Clarke share the adaptation credit, and because Clarke built the original game, the translation at least stays close to the source that gave it a following.

Underneath the possession mechanics, the game and now the film are about guilt as an unpayable debt. The demon does not simply attack; it accuses, digging into what Rebecca has done and what she has left undone, wearing the dead like masks to get at the living woman. Horror set in a mortuary trades on proximity, and here the dead are not monsters so much as evidence. The work of tending them becomes a nightly confession, and Kipp keeps the camera returning to hands, to instruments, to the small clinical gestures that patience makes unbearable.

Kipp and his team treat the funeral home as a character in its own right. River Fields is all worn linoleum and sodium-lit corridors, a place where the palette runs to bruised greens and the brown of old wood, where every clean surface reads as something waiting to be stained. The scares live less in what leaps out than in the composition itself, in the long held frames that let a shape resolve at the edge of the light before Rebecca, or the audience, is ready to name it. It is a film that understands a mortuary is frightening first as a room, and only then as a haunting.

What the film cannot inherit is the exact thing that made the game frightening. On a console, the terror was participatory. You were the one who had to choose, and a wrong identification was your failure, logged in your own hesitation. A film removes that agency and asks a fixed camera to reproduce a dread that once depended on the player’s nerve. Adaptations of atmosphere-driven, loop-based games routinely lose that friction, and it is not yet settled that a River Fields shot in ordinary coverage can make a passive viewer feel implicated the way the controller did. The jump scares will land; the culpability is the harder import.

Willa Holland as Rebecca Owens in The Mortuary Assistant, 2026 — Willa Holland in *The Mortuary Assistant* (2026)

The cast around Holland and Sparks includes John Adams, Mark Steger as a figure billed only as The Mimic, Emily Bennett, Shelly Gibson and Keena Ferguson. The film runs ninety-one minutes and was produced through Epic Pictures’ Dread label alongside Traverse Terror, an American and British co-production. It reaches audiences by way of Shudder, the horror-streaming home that has quietly become the default destination for exactly this size and temperature of genre picture.

The Mortuary Assistant opened in limited United States theatres on February 13 before moving to Shudder and AMC+ in late March, with a United Kingdom Shudder date following soon after. In Korea the film is dated for August 28. Whether it earns its scares through more than volume, it keeps its central dare intact: sooner or later, you have to say the name of the thing in the dark, and be sure you have it right.