Plot
The film opens with Sandra Larson staring at a human corpse while she reminisces about at her childhood fascinations with death. As a young teen Sandra was enthralled by the feelings invoked by the stillness and smell of death. At night, a near nude Sandra would dance with the corpse of an animal rubbing it on her body, before giving the animal a funeral. Sandra only had one childhood friend, a girl named Carol (Jessie Winter Mudie) who also had a death fascination. Their friendship ended after Carol found Sandra's ceremonial dance too extreme.
Fast-forward to the adult Sandra at school fascinated in biology, carefully dissecting the bodies of small animal, trying to avoid disfiguring them. Sandra was working for a flower shop when she learned of an opening for a chauffer at a funeral home. She asks Mr. Wallis (Jay Brazeau), the mortician, for the job and he hires her. The funeral home's janitor Jan (James Timmons) believes, like Sandra, that dead bodies still have a soul in them. While driving the hearse with a body in a coffin in the back through a carwash, Sandra looks at the body and finds a shining light, believing that body's soul is alive somewhere.
Mr. Wallis apprentices Sandra in embalming. She starts studying mortuary science in college, where she meets a med student named Matt (Peter Outerbridge) who also must study corpses for his major. Matt and Sandra begin to date, while Matt is intrigued by Sandra’s death fascination. Occasionally they would spend night's together in Matt's basement apartment, but Sandra would leave for late night visits to the mortuary to celebrate the dead bodies of young men with dance ceremonies which escalate into necrophilia as her death fascination increases to an extreme obsession. Matt becomes distraught when he discovers that he is competing with dead bodies. He unsuccessfully tries to get Sandra to talk about her necrophilia, so he starts visiting Sandra at the funeral home which upset her. Matt has to go to an extreme to win Sandra’s heart, as she struggles with choosing between the living or the dead, with tragic results.
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Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)
“There comes a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
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And providently Pimps for ill desires:
The Good Old Cause, reviv’d, a Plot requires,
Plots, true or false, are necessary things,
To raise up Common-wealths and ruine Kings.”
—John Dryden (1631–1700)