A dark cloud falls over Venice as one girl after another disappears off the streets. Police are convinced they are only missing, not abducted, but the local suave reporter feels there are more diabolical forces at play. Could it all be just a coincidence or could it be the guy in scuba gear?
The Embalmer is a 1965 Italian horror film about a shrouded lunatic who lives in the tunnels under Venice, Italy. He is kept company by a harem of standing, embalmed women who he has kidnapped, killed and embalmed! When he feels the need to add to his collection of dead darlings he takes to the streets in a very conspicuous, not very scary, scuba diving outfit and drags his helpless victims into the Grand Canal back to his secret lair.
I enjoyed The Embalmer as a straightforward horror movie. The villain looked spooky and had a classic villain vernacular, the underground tunnels he lurked in looked great and I loved the secret chamber containing the skeletons from a secret society of other embalmers, but there was lack of mortuary chachkies for me to nerd out on.
One of two things I can discuss regarding the legitimate mortuary aspects in The Embalmer is The villain used a gravity feed embalming set up in his underground lair to embalm his victims. This is a glass tank (usually made to hold a gallon as opposed to the standard three gallons of an electric embalming machine) suspended above the deceased to slowly embalm at a very low pressure controlled only by the height of the tank. This system isn’t used too often anymore in American funeral homes, but it is still used in medical universities to embalm cadavers for long term preservation. The thought process is if your flow is slow the embalming solution has time to penetrate tissue better and not circulate out and down the drain into your and my water system. Also, at a lower pressure there is a lower risk in damaging the vascular system by creating a blowout in an artery leaving some portion of the body unpreserved.
From my desensitized point of view I figure if you’re looking at a line of tables with folks needing to be ‘juiced’ and you don’t want to spend the night on the fart couch in the mortuary’s lobby – the terms ‘slow flow’ and ‘low pressure’ aren’t even crossing your mind.
The second interesting thing Your Favorite Mortician noticed in The Embalmer is the display of beautiful, young, but dead Italian women in the villain’s lair. No that didn’t catch my attention because of the obvious Freudian slip, but because they were all embalmed to stand up. Although The Embalmer was shot in 1965, the idea of positional embalming has been brought to my attention only in the last few years when pictures of posed embalmed corpses from the Marin Funeral Home in Puerto Rico started to circulate the internet.
I know nothing about how embalming people into standing or posed positions is achieved but what’s a little blind speculation gonna hurt? Looking at these embalmed bodies I’m noticing none of their clothing appears to be cut so I’m wondering if these bodies are in some way pieced together with a mannequin body or body parts. Embalm the hell out of the head and hands, chemically dry then wrap the stumps and skewer them onto a mannequin body with a plastic dowel. This would be to only worry about a couple things potentially going wrong instead of a whole body to potentially ruin a funeral.
If these people are intact they would have been completely exsanguinated of any blood and probably eviscerated to avoid anything from leaking out. Sure you could pack their asses like they were taking a trip to mars, but viscera, shit, and piss are tenacious and if there is a way to leak, your body is gonna leak. I would also be chemically cauterizing the hell out of anything and everything on that body; any injection site, any abrasion, any pimple that might weep, anything.
Now I’ve had some crazy requests working in the funeral biz: cutting out someone’s heart and slicing it into quarters to cremate separately, doing a shot of tequila with a family with their dead relative’s cremated remains in it, and being instructed to pull thong straps out of a young women’s jeans for the public viewing to name a few. But I’ve never been asked to embalm someone into a position other than lying flat-but hey if anyone out there has the money and wants me to give it the ol’ college try, drop me a line.
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