I’LL TAKE YOUR DEAD – directed by Chad Archibald – SPOILERS ⁓

William Derrow (Aidan Devine) lives on a farm with his daughter Gloria (Ava Preston), and circumstances have made him an urban legend. His butchering skills are regularly employed by crimminals from a nearby city to dispose of inconvenient corpses. (He chops them up and dissolves them in a chemical bath.) They call him “The Candy Butcher. Some believe him a cannibal; others think he sews bits of bodies together like a would-be Dr. Frankenstein; and everyone is afraid of him. The family’s last name is never mentioned, but an old sign outside the farmhouse reads “Derrow Family Butcher”.

Our first view is of Gloria looking sadly through a car’s rear window. “Sometimes it’s hard to tell who’s alive and who’s dead,” she thinks to herself. “I think most people are scared of the dead. Not me. I see dead people all the time. This story doesn’t have a picture perfect ending. Not everyone lives. And again, after what I’ve seen, I’m not sure death is what we think it is.” The events that unfold are shown to us the way Gloria remembers them.

One snowy February morning, three new corpses arrive. William is reluctant to accept the job, but his daughter answered the door though she had been instructed not to, and threats are made against her. The corpses, two male and one female, are left in the driveway. William and his daughter drag them into the garage.

In a flashback, we see the the female victim (Jess Salgueiro) being shot, and according to her cellphone it happened at 12:20am on Tuesday February 9th. (The 9th was a Tuesday in 2016.) As William is about to carve her into disposable bits, the woman wakes up on the slab, dazed and confused. William sedates her immediately. He has a syringe handy with a sedative in it, and one wonders if such a thing might have happened to him before. The next day, the woman re-awakens tied to a bed, her wounds patched, dressed in the clothes of William’s deceased wife.

Her name is Jackie, and she struggles against the ropes, tears out her stitches, and almost dies, but William intervenes again and transfuses her with his own O negative blood, and the woman again recovers. (Her pointless wrestling with the restraints might have been caused by nicotine withdrawal. Shortly before she is shot, we see Jackie smoking a cigarette, but in her entire time at the farm, she never asks for a smoke.)

Gloria believes the house is haunted by the spirits of those whose bodies have been dissolved there, and she could be correct. She regularly sees such spirits, one of whom repeatedly plays a single note on the piano, and it is the wrong note for the key he is pressing (the same note at the other end of the scale). While her father is busy cutting corpses, Gloria mirrors his activity by cuttng up a stuffed rabbit.

William has an exit plan. He is paid well for his disposals, and keeps the money in cash in a jar in a kitchen cupboard, along with an ad for a house in El Paso, and this latest job gives them enough money for that house. On the day she and her father are planning to leave for Texas, Gloria insists that Jackie have breakfast with them. Unknown to them, Jackie has contrived to telephone her boyfriend Carter (Brandon McKnight) and tell him where she is.

It was Carter who arranged Jackie’s death in the first place, and he arrives with armed accomplices Reggie (Ari Millen) and Demarco (Moe Jeudy-Lamour) to finish what they started. Before they arrive, the conversation at the breakfast table includes this exchange:

JACKIE: “So, Gloria, what do you want to be when you grow up?”
GLORIA: “I’m not sure yet. At first I thought I wanted to be a doctor, to help people, you know. Then I was thinking I could maybe do what my dad does.” [awkwardly pauses when no one knows how to react to that] “Oh, not that part. Just the raising farm animals part. But it would just be a milk farm. No more death.”

One doesn’t quite believe her, because she had just poured milk on her cereal, and “milk farm” seems like an improvised save. Gloria says that she operates on her stuffed animals because she hoped to be a doctor one day, but maybe she does want to do exactly what her father does.

Confronted with dissatisfied customers, William chooses to side with Jackie, possibly because it’s the right thing, and possibly because he now has enough money for the house in El Paso. An impressive fight scene follows in which Jackie is confronted with her would-be killer and manages to overcome and destroy him.

The spirits of those whose bodies William has made disappear fight alongside Jackie and Gloria against the home invaders.

William’s wife Abby died of leukemia some years previously. Because William dressed Jackie in his deceased wife’s favourite dress after treating her wounds, it is possible that the ghost of his late wife Abby was inadvertently summoned to inhabit Jackie’s body. That would account for the disappearance of her smoking habit, and her ability to quickly bond with Gloria. It would also imply that the ghosts Gloria sees are real. The subsequent actions of Jackie/Abby appear to be directed toward getting Gloria away from both that house full of ghosts and away from William.

Before Gloria and Jackie leave, the camera focuses on the damaged stuffed rabbit, Abby’s wheelchair, and the upright piano in the upstairs hallway. The piano and wheelchair are things likely attached to Abby, rather than Jackie.

As Gloria forewarned, not everybody survives. She and Jackie (Abby?) drive away with a jar full of money as Gloria waves goodbye to the ghosts trapped in the farmhouse. They wave back, and Gloria completes her opening internal monologue. “I think people do bad things for good reasons,” she thinks to herself. “My dad was a good man. He did bad things, but he did them for me.”

---

Miscellaneous Info

Original music for I’ll Take Your Dead was composed by Stephanie Copeland, who has won two Canadian Screen Awards. (In 2024 she was nominated for her work on the film CASCADE.) Songs by Ginger St James. (“Honeymoon Stage“) and South River Slim (“Buckle Up Baby“) are also heard during the film.

According to her cellphone, Jackie was shot at about 12:20am. Twelve Twenty is also a short film (by Pen-Ek Ratanaruang) based on “Sleeping Beauty and the Airplane“, a story which, like I’ll Take Your Dead, is an excellent example of magical realism.

---

I’LL TAKE YOUR DEAD can be streamed on TUBI, and on PLEX.
and is available on Blu-ray and DVD.