Stuff I like – a new blog series

Since going on a romance writing hiatus, I find myself turning towards reviews as my creative outlet. During the pandemic I had a short stint reviewing Netflix series for a local paper and I really miss it. But even without that gig you’ll typically find me live-tweeting whatever I’m watching or reading. I also tried posting on FB but that platform has long moved past the “here are my thoughts” content for engagement, so I thought – well, I have a blog that I pay hosting for, don’t I? So here we go!

Stuff I watched lately that I liked plus a digression on horror

The Autopsy of Jane Doe (2016)

I’ve been hearing a lot about this movie since it came out eight years ago — all about how it was a good horror film. To be honest, though, that poster and title put me off. At best there’d be a naked lady throughout the movie, probably played for titillation, plus gore because autopsy. (The Final Girls podcast says the same thing so yes, I wasn’t alone in thinking this.) But I should’ve known better. Brian Cox probably wouldn’t have agreed to star in this one if it was some sort of Eli Roth exploitation flick.

So digression: I’m actually a fan of horror movies – but I CANNOT stand jump scares or exploitation or violence against women. This means I can’t watch 90% of the genre. What I do enjoy is psychological horror. The kind that stays with you and makes you think. Often these are explorations of grief — like El Orfanato, which captures the feeling of longing for someone you lost that you welcome their ghost, or The Babadook, which looks at the grief, guilt and rage of a woman who loses her husband yet must care for their child. Midsomar is my absolute favorite — it’s almost a comfort watch for me — although this video explores where that sense of comfort comes from and why it’s so deceptive.

Back to The Autopsy of Jane Doe (TAOJD because that’s a pain to type out all the time). It came out on Netflix so I thought to put it as my writing hack of the day (tl:dr – when I’m working on something boring or dense, a horror movie playing the background helps me concentrate.) Except TAOJD was so good I found myself watching more than working.

The movie starts Brian Cox and Emile Hirsch as father-son coroners doing an autopsy that presumably perished in a fire. The father tells his son to look deeper, and sure enough the body yields clues that contradicts the son’s initial thoughts. Soon they’re asked to look at a strange body – that of a young woman, with no visible injuries, but whose ankles and wrists are shattered and tongue is cut out. As they proceed to do the autopsy, more strange clues appear: markings *inside* the woman’s skin, and in her stomach, a piece of cloth, intact, with a verse about suffering a witch to live.

There are a lot of themes at play here. I appreciate the clinical way we are asked to consider dead bodies: the hollow shells that contains the spark that makes us, “us.” Gone, we become a vital collection of clues that tell a story. There’s a part where Emile’s girlfriend wants to see one of the dead bodies in the morgue, and we the viewers enter an uncomfortable position of a character considering the titillation of death…while we are consuming entertainment all about death. Here, too, is where the movie’s most effective scare is introduced: bells tied around the bodies’ toes, a coroners’ tradition, Cox’s character explains, from the days when it was difficult to tell a comatose person from a deceased one.

Of course this fact comes back to haunt the characters as the autopsy progresses and the very dead bodies in the morgue become animated. This movie is such a good example of terror vs. horror: the gruesome bodies are never fully seen, just hinted at: a shadow here, a blurry reflection there — showing how something we don’t see is much more effective than when the whole monster is revealed.

Then there’s Jane. The Final Girls episode on this goes so well into how, in the movie’s third act, it becomes a movie about witchcraft, and how Jane, though mute, dead and naked on a slab, is the most powerful character. Cox delivers a monologue about how the witch hunts were all about hurting kids, and how, in the process of ridding a place of evil, an evil is created instead. If you’re interested in horror, definitely give this movie a try.

Streaming on: Netflix

Sidenote: I’m a big fan of Succession and though I’ve seen Brian Cox in other things pre-Succession, his Logan Roy is so indelible I kept expecting him to betray his son and all the corpses in the morgue, LOL. He does get some choice F-bombs into this movie and they are excellent.