It may come as no surprise that ever since I was a wee ghoul, I’ve loved horror films. My knowledge is nowhere near encyclopedic, but back in the ancient days of the video store, I spent hours and hours haunting the horror section looking for new monsters to fall in love with. In the past several years I’ve dropped farther and farther behind on new releases, but I still want to fall in love.
An unfortunate side effect of writing fiction professionally was that I’ve become incredibly fussy about prose. An unfortunate side effect of being elbow-deep in dead bodies is that I’ve become unbearable to watch movies with. I’ve turned into one of those people with specialized knowledge who can’t keep their opinions to themselves. (For some people it’s horses, or guns, or historical clothing: for me, it’s corpses.)
Usually the question I get when people find out my profession is, did I watch Six Feet Under? (Only a few episodes.) More recently, however, people have been asking if I’ve seen The Autopsy of Jane Doe. So many people, in fact, that I finally sat down with my long-suffering partner and turned it on. And now you, beloved readers, can suffer as well.
Obviously this will contain spoilers for the film. Proceed with caution.
We open with police investigating a murder scene in Grantham, Virginia. While searching the house, the police discover the unaccounted for—and by all appearances, very fresh—dead body of a young woman half-buried in the basement.
Body in the basement, I know, I know, it’s serious…
The mystery corpse bothers the sheriff far more than the violent murders of people he knew, so they bundle our titular Jane Doe up and deliver her to the…
Morgue and Crematorium? A family-owned morgue and crematorium? Is this a Virginia thing? Funeral homes with crematories are perfectly normal, but I have never seen a family-owned morgue, or a morgue that advertised as such. At the basic definition, a morgue is a place where bodies are stored. Hospital morgues hold bodies until a funeral home picks them up for the family. (Usually no longer than 72 hours, and they don’t want to hold them that long.) If a coroner or medical examiner requests an autopsy, the body will go to a municipal or county morgue.
What’s the difference between a coroner and a medical examiner? I’m so glad you asked! A medical examiner has a medical degree, usually with specialized training in pathology. A coroner is an elected or appointed position. You can be a judge, a farmer, a mystery writer, or just about anything and be elected coroner. Many coroners do have some medical training, especially in larger cities, but in some areas no experience whatsoever is required for the office. Depending on the location and circumstances, if a nonmedical coroner needed an autopsy performed, they might be able to send the body to a medical examiner.
All of this is to say that when it’s revealed that Tommy Tilden (played by Brian Cox) is a coroner, that helped me accept that he and his assistant, Austin (also his son, for purposes of narrative tension; played by Emile Hirsch), don’t wear masks or hair nets, and are presumably shedding DNA into crime scene evidence on a regular basis. (Masks on actors is an issue, I get it; I can still gripe about the hair.)
As far as the crematorium…I don’t know. I guess a funeral director could just as easily be elected coroner as any other person. At least they’re familiar with death, decomp, and basic anatomy. I might feel a little weird about the person in charge of forensic inquests being able to incinerate evidence, though. And to clarify, while I’ve known many morticians who are true-crime enthusiasts, morticians working in funeral homes do not perform autopsies.
The title of coroner here is a load-bearing structure when it comes to my suspension of disbelief, and even that is strained to capacity. When Austin’s girlfriend shows up and wants to see a dead body, Dad gives his blessing. Professional ethics? What are those? This allows the audience to catch a glimpse of a couple of corpses in the racks. One of them, a woman who apparently died of cancer, has her mouth sewn shut. Like visibly, sutures on the outside of the lips. This is a mutilation lawsuit waiting to happen. Another body was the victim of a gunshot wound to the face. I have to give the special effects designers a pass on this one, but I have repaired those types of injuries, and this one was not remotely realistic. I’m more hung up on the absolute lack of confidentiality for the deceased, and the bizarre mutilation.
The girlfriend is still on the premises when the sheriff arrives with the mystery corpse, asking Tommy to ascertain the cause of death by the next day. Because of the aforementioned family tensions, Austin chooses to stay and help his dad with this pressing autopsy instead of going out with his girlfriend. I would have done the same thing, of course, but we-the-viewer realize he’s making a terrible mistake.
I don’t mean to be an utter killjoy. The movie does many things well, and the next section is rather engaging. An old funeral home basement with a creaky elevator is a great setting. There’s some effective use of diegetic music and radio news, and the overall atmosphere is spooky. I enjoy Brian Cox as an actor in general, and he and Emile Hirsch sell the father/son tension and affection. The slow revelation of just how weird this mysterious woman’s corpse is probably works really well for viewers whose hearts aren’t wizened coals.
Bits of random trivia: rib shears do come in a range of sizes, but usually you just need the smaller versions—clavicles are harder to cut through; the bone saw made me happy, as did the angle of the cranial incision and the way they pulled the scalp forward; tissue doesn’t just peel off the bone like that, though, you have to separate it carefully with instruments. There’s a particular foley opportunity they missed for the sound that…husking…the meninges makes when you remove a calvarium. That’s a little niche, though, so I give them a pass.
But, speaking of lawsuits… At one point during the mounting tension, the family cat is discovered dying of a gruesome wound. Tommy ends his suffering and…disposes of the body in the retort. The retort used for human remains. No, my friends, no. If this movie had been set in Colorado (a state where the funeral service industry is notoriously unregulated), I would be much happier.
Everything goes downhill from there. For the characters, I mean. Tommy solves the mystery of Jane Doe (which unfortunately lost me all over again plotwise), but too late to save our heroes. The sheriff arrives to once again find people he knew inexplicably and brutally killed, and the once-again unblemished Jane Doe on a table. His response is to ship the body off to Virginia Commonwealth University and their forensic department, which made me cackle. (We got to embalm some cadavers for them recently, and it was awesome!)
A lot of people really like this movie, and I see why. The premise is fun and creepy. I love the idea of the corpse itself being the source of the supernatural shenanigans, since I’ve never understood why any ghost would haunt a funeral home. The explanation for the haunted corpse, however, leaves me cold. (Sorry.) And as much as I love Brian Cox, someone should have shut that “Morgue and Crematorium” down for ethical violations years ago.
If you have questions—or movie suggestions—for the necromancer, submit them through our portal. In the meantime, I’ll be brainstorming what kinds of spooky happenings I can set in a college embalming lab.
Amanda Downum is the author of The Necromancer Chronicles, Dreams of Shreds & Tatters, and the World Fantasy Award-nominated collection Still So Strange. Not content with armchair necromancy, she is also a licensed mortician. She lives in Austin, TX with an invisible cat. You can summon her at a crossroads at midnight on the night of a new moon, or find her on Twitter as @stillsostrange.