There is a particular feeling that comes over you when a film reminds you of something you have always loved — not a specific memory exactly, but a whole atmosphere, a whole way of being inside a story. That is what Funeral Home did to me on a late night when I stumbled onto it without expectations and found myself completely unwilling to look away.
The film is technically a slasher. It is set in 1980 and it has the bones of that era. But what it actually is — what it feels like in your body while you are watching it — is a vintage gothic romance novel. The kind with the painted cover, a woman running toward or away from something in a nightgown, a house looming dark and full of secrets behind her. Victoria Holt. Phyllis Whitney. That specific atmosphere of dread and beauty and a mystery that lives in the walls.
One of my quiet pleasures in watching old films is the clothing. There is something deeply satisfying about seeing an era wear itself — the specific cut of a collar, the way a hem falls, the particular shade of a polyester blouse that could only exist in exactly that decade. Funeral Home is a small treasure in this regard. The late seventies and early eighties are all over it — Heather in her casual summer separates, Florie in her brassy going-out outfit, Maude in her stiff, buttoned-up dresses that say everything about who she is without a single line of dialogue. Clothing in old films is a kind of time capsule. It reminds you that these were real people living in a real moment, wearing what the world told them was fashionable, completely unaware they were being preserved forever in it.
The story is simple on its surface. Young Heather arrives in a small rural town to spend the summer with her grandmother, Maude Chalmers, helping convert the old family funeral home into a bed and breakfast. Maude is deeply religious, stern and particular, a woman who makes artificial flower arrangements to make ends meet and quotes scripture at guests she finds morally wanting. When a couple — the obnoxious Harry Browning and his mistress Florie — refuse to leave despite Maude's clear disapproval, they take a late night drive out to the local quarry and never come back. Their car is found at the bottom of the water. Other guests follow them into silence. Meanwhile Heather keeps hearing voices from the basement at night — Maude speaking, and then a man's voice answering. When she asks, Maude denies it entirely.
The slow burn is not a flaw. It is the whole point.
The characters are wonderfully, believably quirky in the way real people in small places actually are. Billy Hibbs, the sweet and simple-minded handyman who tends the grounds and the cemetery, is easy to love. Rick Yates, the local boy who gives Heather a ride into town and becomes her summer romance, begins quietly unsettling everything she thought she knew about her family — telling her that her grandfather James was not the upstanding man Maude described, but an abusive alcoholic who had an affair with a woman named Helena Davis while Maude was locked away in an institution. And then Mr. Davis himself arrives at the inn, Helena's husband, looking for answers about his missing wife — and ends up dead before morning.
But Maude herself is the great pleasure of this film. Kay Hawtrey plays her with extraordinary restraint — formidable and maternal and quietly terrifying, a woman riddled with contradictions, fiercely loving and deeply broken at the same time. You believe her entirely. You almost understand her. Which is its own kind of unsettling.
And then the ending comes, and it is extraordinary.
When Heather and Rick finally descend into the forbidden basement, they find Billy's body. And then Maude finds them — and she is no longer quite Maude. She has been speaking in her dead husband James's voice all along, carrying on full conversations with a man who has been gone for years, and now she turns that voice on Heather, scolding her for trespassing, swinging an axe. Heather flees deeper into the basement and stumbles into a hidden room — and there is James Chalmers, preserved and seated in a chair, surrounded by Maude's artificial flower arrangements, tended and kept like something sacred.
The truth comes out after, in the way all gothic truths eventually do. When Maude was released from the institution, she came home to find James with Helena Davis. She killed them both. She buried Helena. She kept James. And for years she has been talking to him in the basement, being him in the basement, carrying the whole unbearable weight of that secret in a locked room beneath the house she opened to strangers.
When the police finally arrive, Maude comes back to herself with no memory of what she has done. She asks, very politely, if she might make a cup of tea first.
That detail undoes me a little every time I think about it.
I loved this film the way I love a paperback gothic romance found at a thrift store, spine cracked, cover slightly worn — something made for a specific kind of reader in a specific era that somehow found me anyway across all these years. It is atmospheric and patient and deeply strange in the way only a story about grief pushed past its breaking point can be.
Some things are made for late nights and lamplight. Funeral Home is one of them.
***All images were obtained through a google image search, I do not claim any copyrights to any images shared in this blog, they are used for informative purposes only