Production has started on the film adaptation of horror work sim The Mortuary Assistant, with Willa Holland in the lead role.
Holland – who has previously starred in Arrow and Gossip Girl, although I knew her first as Marissa Cooper’s little sister Kaitlin in The OC – will play Rebecca, a young woman who works as, you guessed it, a mortuary assistant.
Holland is joined by House of Cards and Boardwalk Empire Paul Sparks, who plays Rebecca’s boss Raymond Delver in the upcoming film. As reported by Deadline, Rebecca’s boss “appears to be a mentor, but also a potential threat”.
Indie horror The Mortuary Assistant initially released on PC in 2022, before becoming available on consoles. As you may have surmised, it casts players as a newly hired assistant at a mortuary who embalms corpses. However, there is a catch – the mortuary is haunted.
Film director Jeremiah Kipp told Deadline he and the game’s creator Brian Clarke “respond to character-driven storytelling within a disturbing horror space”. Kipp said as Clarke’s “influences have been largely cinematic, the whole process has organically felt like an expansion of his unique gameplay”.
“We’ve captured the atmosphere of singular dread that players responded to so powerfully – this movie will be scary as hell,” Kipp said.
Clarke added that “seeing the mortuary assistant evolve over the years from a small prototype to a full feature film is beyond anything I could have imagined as a solo developer”, calling Kipp an “insanely skilled director”.
“It has been one of the highlights of my life working with him,” Clarke said. “The entire team at Epic Pictures have done an amazing job capturing the spirit of the game while adding their own unique cinematic flair. It is an honor to see Willa and Paul bring these characters to life along with the rest of the film crew.
“I feel extremely fortunate and can’t wait for fans to see The Mortuary Assistant expand into new territory.”
The Mortuary Assistant adaptation was first heard of back in 2022, when Kipp said the film will be a “companion piece” to the game. According to Deadline’s report, the film will expand the game’s world further by “delving deeper into the lore of the demonic entities plaguing River Fields”.