THE STORY – Eighty years ago, the “Baby Boom” led to a massive uptick in births. Now, we’re seeing the inevitable end of that surge as those tens of millions of people pass away. This fascinating doc explores the dilemma now facing the funeral industry and the many inventive solutions being pioneered.
THE CAST – N/A
THE TEAM – Jessica Chandler (Director)
THE RUNNING TIME – 85 Minutes
If you’ve ever heard or used the phrase “Okay, boomer,” then you probably know where
it comes from: baby boomers, the generation named after the post World War II baby
boom that saw the population grow by nearly a billion people, almost 100%, in just a
fifteen year span. We’ve all been inundated with the ways this group is different from the
Generations X, Y, and Z that came after it, from their old-fashioned interests to their
outdated views, but there’s one thing that connects all of them, and thus, all of us. We’re
all going to die and we all need to reckon with that fact. Well, luckily for later
generations, the boomers need to think about it with a bit more haste, but there
underlies a seemingly obvious problem that most of us have probably never
considered: if we had a baby boom, there will naturally come a death boom, in which
this entire generation will go as quickly as they came. As horror filmmakers Jessica
Chandler and Eli Roth’s new documentary, aptly titled “Death Boom,” warns, the world
is not prepared for a loss of life this large, and the effects it can and already have had
on both the funeral industry and the planet have the potential to be devastating.
In this respect, it was an unexpectedly inspired choice for the Tribeca Film Festival team to
program this cheekily macabre documentary as part of their Escape From Tribeca
lineup. The midnight crowd isn’t just unafraid of death, they crave it, gleefully
embracing films and filmmakers who love to to tear bodies apart and feast on the bones.
They find comfort in the darkness, which makes them the prime audience to watch a
documentary about demise. Chandler and Roth’s film casually features rotting corpses,
morbid animations, mass graves, and even upbeat montages of the kind of clips you’d
find on the wrong half of a Reddit 50/50, all of which seasoned midnighters will likely get
a kick out of. However, Chandler’s filmmaking is far from grotesque and, eventually, a lot of the shock wears off, leaving viewers bound to be caught off-guard by something
even a great midnight film rarely evokes: real-world implications. The true horror of
“Death Boom” is not that we die, or even how we die, but that the ways we are laid to
rest are actively harming the world we leave behind, all for the benefit of – you guessed
it – billionaires and – maybe you didn’t guess it – organized religion.
“Death Boom” begins with a crash course on the traditions of memorializing the dead
and makes a damn good argument for how antiquated much of the process has
become. Embalming uses excessive amounts of formaldehyde, which causes greater
cancer risk for morticians, not to mention taints our water supply with bodily fluids. Cremation sends our body’s smoggy leftovers into the air and almost always leaves
people’s ashes intermingled with previously burned bodies. Even traditional burial
caskets can leave toxins in the ground, if the land shortage wasn’t enough of a concern.
Worst of all, all of these methods come with a considerable price tag, one that continues
to inflate as a largely monopolized funeral industry puts profit ahead of people. Chandler
and Roth spend a considerable amount of time speaking to experts and breaking down
how these harmful effects have gotten worse over time, which can feel a bit like going
through a checklist. However, it’s all in service of making it evidently clear that the
traditions we all grew up respecting are slowly killing us, a sentiment that makes for an
incredibly engaging and even rousing narrative throughline. Combined with the already
universal existentialism that comes with death (even for the sickos out there), it’s hard
not to be truly horrified by how much horror has gone down under all of our noses.
Thankfully, we eventually get to the potential solutions to this overwhelming problem, of
which there are surprisingly many. Chandler and Roth leave no stone unturned:
different types of natural burials, soil- and even water-based alternatives to cremation,
donating your body to scientific research, and even simply letting your body rot in
sanctioned mulch. Every method is approached with inquiry and dignity, making for a
deeply informative documentary that’s also surprisingly moving. Roth and Chandler
get particularly involved in a visit to Return Home, a company specializing in human
composting, or, as they call it, terra-mation. As Roth lies in one of the company’s soil
vessels, which uses heat and microbes from the body to transform remains into soil,
suddenly dying doesn’t feel so scary. It even feels beautiful, especially as we witness a traditional “laying in” service, complete with a decorated vessel of family photos and
drawings. By the end of the film, even Roth himself has decided that human composting
would be his preferred way to go. Even aqua-mation, water-based cremation, feels
more natural and less environmentally-straining than more traditional methods. Which
naturally begs the question: why aren’t these methods used more?
This is when Chandler and Roth’s film turns another corner – this time into borderline
conspiracy thriller – as they expose how the Catholic Church and Service Corporation
International, the world’s largest funeral home company, have actively worked to block
legislation from moving forward in Congress to legalize these more humane, less
austere funeral practices. Ultimately, the fight goes on, in part thanks to the charming,
thoughtful, and even funny subjects featured in the documentary’s talking head
interviews, all of whom are helping to normalize these practices all over the world.
Though there is no clean “happy ending” to what the future holds for unconventional
burial, neither is there in death. The most we can do is accept our fate and find the
cleanest way to leave this mortal plane, and “Death Boom” brings comfort to this
inevitability. Though it feels like Chandler and Roth could’ve pushed the film’s stylistic
tenets further, even at the expense of our stomachs, it’s admirable that these horror
filmmakers chose to lend their talents to documentary in the first place, let alone with
a subject that so playfully speaks to their filmmaking sensibilities. After all, it only makes
sense for folks who have already confronted their own death to lead us all in doing it
ourselves, like Charon down the river Styx.
