American Horror Stories – Necro

By: Kelly Kearney

In the seventh episode of the horror anthology series, a young female mortician named Sam quickly learns it is the living who she should fear the most. After a tragic incident in her past is triggered by her appealing and mysterious new co-worker, Sam is forced to admit a truth she long kept buried. 

The Journey to the Otherside 

We begin in 1998, in a blood-covered house in Maine. A woman is lying dead on the floor surrounded by marshmallow cereal and the murder weapon. Next to her is her young and confused daughter who we see lean over her mother’s body to breastfeed. Cut to the present and a young female mortician named Sam (Madison Iseman) is zipping through the preparations of a body for a funeral. Her boss Henderson (Jeff Doucette) is impressed with her skills and compliments her on completing a tough job. Apparently, the client was in rough shape and she made it possible for the family to have an open casket. The care she shows for her work earns her a raise but it doesn’t earn her the praise of her lawyer boyfriend, Jesse (Spencer Neville). He avoids all of her romantic attempts to get him into bed by claiming her formaldehyde scent is a turnoff. The two showers she took before coming home didn’t do much to wash off the reminder of the dead and he’s practically grimacing as he pushes her aside and heads out the door. We can tell there are troubles brewing for the couple and Sam knows it. She does what most people do when they’re faced with relationship issues and goes to her friends to complain – admitting that she questions “if he even gets me at all.” Her friends are Team Jesse all the way; they’re like a little coven of Karens who took an oath to defend the handsome lawyer’s honor. They agree her work is a turnoff and also question what she’s done to try to make things easier for him. Would she give up her job if he asked her to? Probably not, and why should she? She loves her work;  giving grieving families one more moment with their loved ones is important and she’s proud to be a part of that. Her friends point out that Sam talks more lovingly about the dead than she ever has about her boyfriend and thatt’s something to think about. 

The next day at work Sam is doing her usual: talking to her decedents and respectfully explaining her procedures to them. It’s not like the dead can hear her…or can they? When she is interrupted by the new grave digger and body transporter, Charlie (Cameron Cowperthwaite), wheeling in another body, Sam can’t help but notice the man lean down and whisper something to the person inside the body bag. What was that all about? She asks him later when she spots him outside by his hearse. Charlie says he thanked the dead woman for allowing him to transport her to Sam. Being a part of someone’s death (even if it’s just delivering their body to the funeral home_ is an honor and he doesn’t take it lightly. This impresses Sam because it’s exactly what her boyfriend and friends do not understand about her work. Death is a journey, according to the Ancient Egyptians, and getting an invite to go along for the ride should be cherished, not ridiculed or shunned. 

After her interactions with Charlie we watch as Sam heads home and falls into bed with Jesse but the entire time she’s thinking about the new guy at work. The following day the two coworkers are bantering back and forth about the history of death and practices around the world. Charlie is an interesting guy, if you’re into the morbid side of life and after, and Sam really enjoys having someone to talk shop with. She finally met someone with shared interests and the fact Charlie’s handsome doesn’t hurt his appeal. Over time the two really get to know each other and, eventually, Sam finds out Charlie’s family is all gone as he is the sole survivor of a drunk driving accident. He saw his entire family die and it left him with the need to care for others on their journey to the other side. This prompts Sam to admit she had her own brush with death and just as she’s about to explain how and also maybe kiss him, her phone rings and interrupts the moment. It’s Jesse, the guy she just said she can’t talk to about her traumatic past, and he’s wondering why she’s late for dinner with his parents. 

THE PROPOSAL 

She hurries home only to find an empty house lit up by a candle and surrounded by marshmallow cereal littering the floor. It triggers a flashback to the night her her mother was murdered by an intruder and she was left to care for and feed from the woman. When the lights flicker on she’s on the floor sobbing and Jesse and her friends are standing near her in shock. On the floor in what he thought was her favorite cereal Jesse has spelled out “Will you marry me?” She walked into a surprise engagement party and now she has to explain to her maybe fiance why she had a meltdown at the first sight of generic Lucky Charms! It’s all too much for her and Sam flees the house saying Jesse deserves someone who isn’t a mess. Unfortunately, the someone she thinks she deserves winds up in her funeral home dead from an OD. Sam is devastated. Charlie was the only person she ever met who understood her and now he’s gone. She kisses him on the lips and it leads to the unthinkable, as she climbs on top of his body in a necrophilic frenzy. She mentioned earlier how certain body parts will move or harden and, yeah, the hardening part is what interests her most. In the middle of having sex with dead Charlie the man’s hand reaches up to grab her thigh and it somehow wakes her up from her deadly deviance as she goes running from the embalming room in both fear and shame. She has a bit of a breakdown in the casket room and then returns to the basement to find Charlie is missing! Did he get up and walk away? Apparently he did because when Sam shows up at his house he’s standing on the front lawn apologizing for “trying to help you.” The whole thing was a set up. He took pills to lower his heart rate and his buddy helped him fake his autopsy report and Y-incision. Sam is livid and calls him deranged, but so is she since she engaged in sex with a dead body. He points out the dead part is what really turned her on and, while she doesn’t deny it, she isn’t ready to admit he is the right. He says people like them are different and she should embrace it, but she runs from him instead. 

A NEW LIFE

Two months later we see Sam has left her career in mortician sciences and took her makeup skills to a cosmetics store. Now she spends her days fresening up the looks of the living by selling mascara and doing makeovers. She’s also engaged to Jesse. From the outside everything is looking up in her life, so why isn’t she happy? It might be because she’s constantly reminded of Charlie – the man who shared her death obsession. Ever since the night he tricked her into having sex with his supposedly dead body Sam has been on autopilot – just going through the motions. She is lacking that joy she got from her life as a mortician and even her best friend (Sara Silva) says it’s caused a noticeable personality change. Something is up and the fact she’s about to get married and looks the saddest her friends have ever seen her means that night with Charlie is haunting every second of her life. Is this “boring, regular life” (as she refers to it) what she wants? She’s determined to force herself to want it. She smiles through her wedding vows (referring to Jesse as the only family she has), but when her husband-to-be surprises her with a video of their happiest moments things go from romantic to horrific in one little added edit. Inbetween the photos of ice cream dates and vacations a video of her indecent moment with Charlie plays for all their church guests to see. That’s when Charlie shows up at the back of the church claiming this hack was to force her to see who she really is and what she wants. He professes his love for her and she responds by telling him he is what’s ruining her day, not these lies he thinks she tells herself. Sam flees the church and runs after Jesse, leaving Charlie with her shocked guests. 

The fall out from the wedding video was career and life changing. She’s now a sex offender who lost her fiance and her job in cosmetics. The necrophiliac mortician went viral and now the video and memes of her moment with Charlie follow Sam everywhere she goes. She can’t even score a gig with Zappy Maids cleaning toilets because nobody wants to work alongside the woman who had sex with a corpse. It’s a tough sell, even if you know all the hacks to clean a blood out of carpet. She’s not even able to get a cup of coffee without someone in line calling her a “zombie f**ker.” With nothing left to lose, Sam buys a gun and tracks down Charlie at the graveyard. She holds him at gunpoint and says he ruined her life, but all he thinks he did was wake her up to the real her When he cheated death, covered in his family’s blood, he never felt more alive. He knows she spent three days drinking from her dead mother’s breast before the police found her. He pleads with her to tell him how it felt. After struggling to admit it, she said it tasted like love. 

We flashback to those three days and see young Sam caring for her dead mother. She brushed her hair, fed her cereal, and snuggled her body as she fed. “It was the last time I ever felt safe, ” she says, and that’s why Charlie says she is a disgusting and beautiful woman who he can’t help but love. She thought she would never feel like that again until that night with him. These two twisted death fetishists deserve each other because not only does Charlie understand her needs, he will never judge her for having them. She wishes he never woke her up from her self-induced haze of normality after spending two decades conditioning herself to block out the part of her that crave that line between life and death. She’s broken, or so she thinks, and raises the gun to her own head ready to end her suffering. Charlie pleads with her to stop saying, “I would die a million times to be with you for a minute…” and his declarations convince her to lower the weapon just enough for her to shoot him in the stomach! He barely flinches when she pushes him into a dug grave and hits the release button on the soil truck to bury them both alive! She climbs on top of him and the two make love as the hole around them fills with dirt. It’s a love they promise will last forever…ashes to ashes, dust to dust…necro to necro and beyond.