Mortuary of the Dead

The ghastly, nightmarish legends surrounding a notorious (and redundantly-titled) video known as “Mortuary of the Dead” has elevated its seedy legacy from the underground domain of VHS bootlegs and “true gore” sites, and into the realm of internet legends… Bearing a time-stamp of August 26, 1992, the extremely degraded VHS video — which has suffered further from multiple generations of duplication via underground tape-traders and low-resolution files shared online, is still a sight to behold. Set in a single location, and featuring a pair of young men; a camera operator who is faintly heard, but never seen, and second, a man seen on screen who may actually be a medical worker of some kind, as he appears to be wearing laboratory scrubs. The camera operator tracks his cohort as he playfully rummages around what appears to be part of a small morgue. Among the various grotesque subjects uncovered in the pair’s morbidly playful exploration of the room are partial human bodies in various states of dissection, a few fully-intact cadavers stored in deep-freeze units, multiple shelves lined with human fetuses preserved in glass jars, and a multitude of severed heads, arms and feet floating in what appear to be large plastic buckets. Some claim the two pranksters disappeared after the video was shot, and that the VHS footage was obtained from police evidence files during a missing-persons investigation. That’s creepy to think about, but highly unlikely; I’m betting we’re just watching a couple of stoned medical employees with a warped sense of off-duty fun. If we go with the most sensible consensus, then “Mortuary of the Dead” could actually be the real deal. If that’s the case, it’s a shocking (if amateurish) peek behind the veil of professional secrecy among the mortuary industry — a sight that most people would otherwise never get to see. Or want to, for that matter.