Netflix’s Post Mortem Looks Ghoulishly Great

Netflix’s Post Mortem Looks Ghoulishly Great

A woman who’s been declared dead suddenly awakens — and the weirdness only amplifies from there in Post Mortem: No One Dies in Skarnes, a new Norwegian horror series that’s arriving soon on Netflix.

Things become even more complicated by the fact that the not-so-dead woman’s brother runs the local funeral home — and business isn’t exactly booming, for what appear to be some very supernatural reasons. (See: the movie’s subtitle.)

Netflix recently shared a trailer for Post Mortem, which looks like a delightful blend of pitch-black comedy, monstrous mystery, and ample rivers of blood.

“You’re not what you think you are,” someone tells Live Hallangen (Kathrine Thorborg Johansen) in this trailer. And we can’t really tell exactly what she is — a vampire, with all those heightened senses and a thirst for the red stuff? A zombie, considering she was extremely dead but is suddenly alive again?

Did she inherit something from her mother, or is it the town itself that’s somehow caused her resurrection? How did she “die” in the first place — and will her new, ah, state of being somehow end up helping her brother keep the family business afloat?

Here’s the official description from Netflix: “Live Hallangen is declared dead. Hours later she suddenly wakes up on the forensic table. A dark, insatiable hunger has awoken in her.

Meanwhile, her brother Odd tries to keep the family driven funeral home afloat, but the stagnant death rate in the small Norwegian town of Skarnes makes it impossible. Live has to learn to control her new dangerous nature and decide if she is willing to sacrifice people’s lives for her own survival, which ironically goes hand in hand with the survival of the family business.”

It has some parallels to iZombie but Post Mortem looks like it’ll tell a fun story bolstered by some supremely deadpan humour. We don’t get a ton of Norwegian horror in the states — feature films Dead Snow, Trollhunter, and Lake of Death being three recent exceptions — so it’s exciting that Netflix is bringing more Scandinavian genre projects to the forefront.

Post Mortem is directed by Harald Zwart and Petter Holmsen (Holmsen also wrote the series), and in addition to Thorborg Johansen, it stars Elias Holmen Sørensen, Andrée Sørum, Kim Fairchild, and more.

Post Mortem: No One Dies in Skarnes, which runs six episodes, arrives August 25 on Netflix.


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