I’m surprised no one has used this concept before. A psychopomp is a being that escorts the newly deceased to the afterlife. Director and writer Danny Villanueva has taken that idea and crafted I Dream Of A Psychopomp, an interesting and atmospheric anthology film whose reach occasionally exceeds its grasp while offering a competent and entertaining seventy five minutes of ghost stories.

In the wraparound narrative (which is indeed called “Wrap Around Segment” in the credits), heartbroken widower Kerry (Elohim Peña) begins to hear his dead wife Evelyn Reynosa’s (Kulani Kai) voice at her funeral. He then begins seeing her spirit. Apparently when you die you get suspended in purple CG mists. He visits her grave where he meets others in mourning. He also sees and hears a psychopomp (Steven Alonte) who offers to show him about death through stories of the supernatural.

What follows is three stories intermixed with Kerry’s journey to see his wife safely to the afterlife (in all its purply glory). “This town seems to have a consciousness of its own,” he is told by Julian Torres (played by writer/director Villanueva), “It does bad things and then buries its secrets.” The three tales that follow seem to bear that out. “Spellbound High Monster Hop,” the first and weakest segment explores loss and death in high school. Caroline (Fiona Rose) has been made crushing on BMOC Lonnie (Easton Michaels) for years. She wants to ask him to the Halloween dance. Something happens (the film never shows) and Caroline finds herself at the dance with a strange boy in a devil mask.

The second segment, “Answers,” is the strongest and most effective. The police bring in a psychic (Nakada Meridian), seemingly to speak with child-abducting suspect Carl Grimwood (Peter Knox), but it turns out to be more than that. This segment is the film at its creepiest. The third segment, “Until Forever,” a mediation on fears of living and fears of dying, features a vampire tired of living (Ben Shaul) who encounters a young girl dying of cancer (Jillian Lebling) seeking any cure.

I Dream of a Psychopomp calls itself “An Anthology of Death,” and that it is, yet it does not really teach us or tell us about death in any real way. The segments themselves skip a rock across the surface of their ideas, but ultimately do not quite satisfy either the horror itch or the thoughts of death. This is not a gore film or a jump scare film. It is a film aimed at filling the viewer with a quiet dread about death.  It doesn’t always succeed in this goal, but the director has a clear idea of what he is trying to do, and Peña anchors the film in his display of going through all the stages of coping with loss and death. Kerry seems to reach a good place by film’s end, but the film itself never quite coalesces, and we are left hanging in the purple mists.

6.5 out of 10