Bobby Fowler is not the only figure of projection in the film of MORTUARY (2006), Hooper's penultimate feature and something of a New Testament eschatology primer before DJINN's return to the Old Testament lands where newly raised are parables of Sodom and Gomorrah and the city and the tower of Babel. An angel statue takes a geographic centrality in the film, serving as a beacon point: as characters carelessly wander into the film's front yard cemetery, they each come to interact with the statue in their slightly varied way. The ones whose fates are most perilous regard it with varying degrees of alarm, while the film's emo protagonist plucks at its collected nest of twigs like the forgotten receptacle it is (much like he himself?). Not much further off from a Tim Burton pièce de résistance, the angel is more than slightly younger than the "eons" spoken of in the Lovecraft couplet, but it represents something of a symbol of mortality for the characters stuck in their own cycle of time dictated by relativeness to the death of a proclaimed messiah. If lifetimes are so relative, what is it that makes us act out so? More than being a "droplet," why do our ripples feel so magnified to us? If MORTUARY is Hooper's most zen movie, it is because he's evaluated religion and our notions of sinfulness and come out the other end "a lamb." The film's figure of innocence, a six-year-old girl, who hands the angel a piece of licorice along with the slabs of stone that represent ghosts or undead effigies, asks her brother and his friends, "Am I a lamb?" and the teenagers have no choice but to acquiesce. They have aged out of that notion, but Hooper has read the Bible and read his career and he's doing an exposé of both here with the eyes of a child if the end were nigh.
