By Aaron Moore   

Warning! Spoilers ahead.

I have watched horror movies since I was roughly four years old. However, at that age, I was not allowed to watch any of the scarier horror movies, because they were all rated PG-13. However, I did not let that stop me from watching shows like A Haunting and My Haunted House. At first, the shows scared me, and I would hide under my blanket just peeking over the edge to watch. But as I grew up, I learned to love them. However, when I reached the age of 10, my real love for horror movies began. 

My family started to let me watch movies like The Conjuring because they felt I was old enough to handle them. My mom Stephanie Moore said, “He was already watching scary shows all the time; there isn’t much difference between that and the movies.” I have now watched so many movies in the “horror” genre that they rarely scare me. When watching these movies with friends, I have been called “insane,” “built different,” and “crazy.” The most common reaction I get from friends, however, is: “Is something wrong with you?” Although it is quite hard to scare me, 2016’s The Autopsy of Jane Doe is a recent movie that, to me, was truly terrifying.

Image credit: Olwen Catherine Kelley.

The movie begins when Sheriff Burke (played by Michael McElhatton) enters a grisly crime scene, where all four people inside a house are dead. There is no sign of a robbery and no real motive or suspect for the murder. However, when the police enter the basement of the house, they find the half-buried body of a pale woman. Without any way to identify her, she becomes known as Jane Doe.

To get some idea of what happened to Jane Doe and insight into the mass murder, Burke brings her to the Tilden Morgue and Crematorium, to the father-son mortician duo of father Tommy (played by Brian Cox) and Austin (played by Emile Hirsch) Tilden. It is late at night when Burke arrives, and Austin is about to leave to go on a date with his girlfriend. Burke explains how the autopsy of Jane Doe is urgent, and that he needs the cause of death by morning because of the severity of the case. To help his father, Austin decides to stay. 

Tommy explains that the autopsy would take place in three different parts: external examination, internal examination of the organs, and the final examination of the brain. At first, the external examination of the body reveals nothing. There are no obvious external signs of damage. There is no bruising, no burns, no cuts; just pale white skin. However, they eventually notice that her ankles and wrists are shattered, and under her fingernails, they find a type of peat that comes from the New England area of the United States. Finally, when they look in her mouth, she is missing her tongue.

As they continue the autopsy, odd things begin to happen around the morgue. Their radio changes channel and starts playing the song “Open Up Your Heart and Let the Sun Shine In” by the McGuire Sisters. However, when they open up the body and begin the internal examination, the strangest occurrences begin. They find their family cat dead inside of a vent after seeing it alive only a few hours earlier. The inside of Doe reveals more clues. There is a piece of paper in her digestive system with Roman numerals and a cryptic code on it, and a flower from the northeastern U.S. that is used as a paralyzing agent. They also find extensive damage to her lungs so severe that it suggests she was burned alive. Finally, her organs and heart are covered with scar tissue that looks like the result of stab marks, all while she had perfect skin. 

As they dig deeper into their investigation, they find that the perfect skin is not her own. It peels off and reveals cryptic messages on the inside. At this moment, everything in their morgue erupts. The power goes out, and the corpses mysteriously disappear from inside their chambers. After watching the film, Cameron Jacobson, a senior at Manchester High School, said, “ The movie was already scary before this, but afterward it was terrifying.” Along with the disappearances of the corpses, the incinerator mysteriously turns on and begins to fill the morgue with smoke. Austin and his dad decide that they must find Doe’s cause of death to get the occurrences to stop.

As they hold back mysterious beings from trying to break down the walls of their medical room, they do the final part of the autopsy, the examination of the brain. They open her head and take a chunk of her brain to analyze it, but from the examination, they find out there is no cause of death. The cells in her brain are still alive. The father and son begin to put facts together. The Roman numerals and code on the paper found in her intestines revealed a Bible verse that says, “Any man or woman who consults the spirits of the dead shall be put to death, for they are a witch, and their blood shall be on their own hands.” Then they realize that the peat and the flower they found are from around the area of Salem, Massachusetts. While there were no witches during the Salem Witch Trials, the torture of the accused created the witches that they were trying to destroy. 

What Doe wanted to do with the father and son was to get revenge for what happened to her. In the end, she did.

The Autopsy of Jane Doe is described on Rotten Tomatoes as, “a smart, suggestively creepy thriller,” and received a score of 87%. I believe that this quote does not do the movie justice. Each discovery took the movie down a completely different road from what I was expecting, and if you had asked me what was going to occur with 15 minutes left in the movie, I would not have predicted it. This movie is one of my favorite movies of all time, and if you like horror movies, I think you should watch it too.