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Overview
This was a difficult movie. Not only is it uncertain what type of horror it is at the beginning, but the girl is naked the whole time. I’m sure that was more uncomfortable for her than us.
There is a bit of mystery as to the actual happenings in this movie. It takes place in one location with only a couple people for most of it. Slowly, like unwrapping that riddle wrapped in the enigma, we get clues to what is actually happening. You feel bad for the dead girl and what was done to her, right? Yeah, hold onto that thought.
The Autopsy of Jane Doe – Wikipedia
The Autopsy of Jane Doe (2016) – IMDb
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Transcript
Hello. Season three, we’re still doing culture clash and this time we’ve got the autopsy of Jane Doe, which from my understanding does really well at keeping your screen saver from activating.
Rhys: That’s true. It does. It keeps your machine running up and awake the
Stephen: whole time. That’s great. . You’re killing monsters yourself. .
Rhys: Yes. That’s because it’s a film from the UK in 2016. If it was a different movie or a different year, it wouldn’t work as well. Oh,
Stephen: it has to be that conjunction of just perfect alignment going on.
Yeah. It does have some magic in here. It’s a witch story
Rhys: kinda. It’s true. It’s also a very traditional horror film in that it runs an hour and 26 minutes, which is just about the perfect length for yeah. Horror movies without getting
Stephen: ridiculous. Yeah. Just the general feel from the movie.
I was like, wow how do you pitch this movie? Okay, we wanna do a movie that’s focused around watching these guys do an autopsy. What do you think ? It just, but that’s really the whole movie. It’s just one of those classic horrors, especially when you talk about like seventies horror, that just a little piece here and there that keeps building into this overall story.
There’s not tons of jump scares and the jump scares that are there are goofy. Really. Yeah. That’s thinking the same thing. It it, it just builds in the story till the very end when everything comes together and clicks. As the story. It’s not even a big, bad monster anywhere.
It’s the story of everything. And that’s the horrific part. And the culture clash is interesting in this one too. Oh yeah. Yeah.
Rhys: Like so many horror movies that we do, this one may strange bedfellows. This is a UK production. It’s set in the us but it was actually shot in Kent, England.
It was released in Canada and directed by a Norwegian. So yeah, it’s a hodgepodge again. Yeah. It premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 9th in 2016. But the public release in the US was,
Stephen: and we’re filming this on the 13th, it’s like anniversary . Oh yeah. I didn’t even think of that.
That’s crazy. Okay. Sorry. The US release was December
21st. Oh, perfect Christmas movie, .
Rhys: Yeah. It’s budget again, not really visible. It made teeny tiny drop of money in the United States, made $10,474 in the box office in the us Huh. But it grows 6.1 million worldwide. Nice. It was nominated for 18 awards.
It won 10 of them two of which they won at fantastic Fest. And Stephen King is a fan of this film. He compares it to early Cronenberg’s work, which I kinda see. But I kept thinking as I was watching the movie for the third time. It does feel like a Stephen King story, didn’t it?
Stephen: Absolutely. He does actually have one about an autopsy in the morgue at where the guy was bit by some snake that got and got paralyzed. And as they’re about to cut ’em open, they realize, okay, this maybe not appropriate for the, so any kids close your ears, but they realize as they’re about to cut him open, he’s got this really good looking female doctor and he starts to get an erection , and that’s how they know he is alive.
I’m like that’s good Stephen King right there. But yeah yeah it felt, yeah it’s that short story buildup and the movie felt like a big budget Hollywood without lots of crazy, over the top special effects, and we’re spending lots of money the, we talk about the shot, the way it looks, just all of that bit, that mold, but then it’s feels like a short story from the seventies yeah. Yeah.
Rhys: And I just, I love the whole how this movie came about. There’s a Norwegian director named Andre Overdo. And before this, the only way you knew of Andre Overdo was if you had seen Troll Hunter, which I have. And it was an amazing film. I really enjoyed it. I have, oh you say you have it or you haven’t seen it?
I have
Stephen: it. Have not watched it yet. Oh,
Rhys: I enjoyed it a lot. And it’s a found footage film and it’s a horror movie, monster movie. It’s even got some pseudo comedy kind of light spots in it. It’s a really nice blend of stuff. But he made that and it did really well. And then he went out and he saw the conj.
and he decided he wanted to make something that was the opposite of what he had done with Troll Hunter. He didn’t want it found footage, he didn’t want it a monster, but he wanted it to be scary. Now, Steve, have you ever heard of The Blacklist?
Stephen: Yes, I’ve heard of that. He
Rhys: told his agent, go find me a good script, and his agent found this script on the Blacklist.
Stephen: Wow. . Yeah, that’s, it was ri No wonder it didn’t have a big release and didn’t do well in the US and everywhere else it did. .
Rhys: Yep. It was written by two guys, Ian Goldberg and Richard Nang, and the idea they had was to do a contained movie that was all about a body and solving this mystery of what happened to it.
That’s and they liked it. Definitely
Stephen: ambitious. Yeah. They like idea, especially do it so
Rhys: well. Oh yeah. They like the idea that the deeper you cut into Jane, the deeper you got into her story, and the deeper you got into the relationship between Brian Cox and am Emil their characters Right as you go on Tommy and Austin.
Yeah. I thought that it was almost like a one of those games where you have to click to do the mystery on the computer where Yeah. Yeah. You have to do the room the, that whole puzzle almost is what it was. Very much yeah. It was the first movie they had written that was made into a f full length feature.
They outlined the story together with a really detailed outline, and then they wrote half of the film, each passing the script back and forth. Wow. Interesting. Hey your visuals are back
Stephen: up. Oh, that’s interesting cuz your mouth wasn’t matching what you were saying. You look Korean there for a moment, now it’s
Rhys: back.
Oh yeah. You’re not synced either, but you’re at least, you’re at least back up. Ian Goldberg and he’s more of a believer in the ultan, he was saying it really annoyed him because Richard would never send him anything until eight o’clock at night. So he’d read over Richard’s stuff and it would freak him out and he wouldn’t want to go to sleep.
Stephen: Wow. The story writers are freaking each other out. That’s good. .
Rhys: Yeah. They’ve worked together on a television show the Dead of Summer. They worked together on the movie. Eli, if you haven’t seen that’s a pretty good one. Yeah, that
Stephen: was a good one. I remember that one. The kid on Netflix.
Rhys: Yep. And Fear of the Walking Dead.
They worked together on a couple episodes of that. Oh good. Cool. Goldberg on his own has also worked on a few episodes of Krypton Criminal Minds and the Terminator of the Sarah Connor Chronicles. Oh.
I didn’t have to dial back in. It fixed itself. Oh
Stephen: wow. Okay. , I guess we’re cutting that chunk out. . Yeah.
Rhys: And you
Stephen: check that out. Okay. Then. All right. So where were we? I
Rhys: had just gone over the writers of the film. Yes. Andre Overdo is was the director. He is Norwegian. He’s really big on sharing credit with the entire team of the films he works on.
I saw a lot of interviews with him about this, and he was constantly just soaring the credit to everybody else except him. Nice.
Stephen: He’s probably one of those guys then that everybody says, oh, I loved working with him. .
Rhys: Yeah. He credits a lot of the success of this film to the quality of the writing and the script.
He went to visit several morgues to get ready for the film and interviewed Morticians,
Stephen: I hope. And he loved that you were gonna say he interviewed several bodies, .
Rhys: No. He loved the mystery of the whole tale where you wanna know what happened to her, but he gets more dangerous as you get closer to the truth.
He tries to keep other films out of his mind when he is directing. A lot of people were like what was your inspiration for this? And he is like, I try not to think about other movies while I’m directing. He claims that seven was one of the films he took inspiration from, which
Stephen: is interesting cuz one of the first things I say is Okay near the beginning is, what is this?
It’s like a police procedural. It’s a little bit like saw it was really hard to pin down at the beginning what this really was and what it felt like. Yeah. Yeah.
Rhys: He also is really pragmatic. He’s he, cuz he got asked a lot if there’s gonna be sequel and he’s he doesn’t think it made enough money to warrant being made into a sequel.
He knows
Stephen: she’s going to, she’s gonna what? Meet up with Michael Myers and go hunt them people down.
Rhys: She was at the end. She’s being transported somewhere else yeah. But in theory you could.
Stephen: Yeah. But what story are you gonna do that’s different plus any different right’s up and is good.
It’s, it’d be a crappy sequel, you know that.
Rhys: Yep. And I kind think he did too. Yeah, that’s good. The film was shot in sequence. They just started at the start of the script and worked all the way through it. Oh,
Stephen: Which is kinda cool. That’s interesting too, because I know they don’t do that a lot in movies.
But in this, I could see how it would keep the building in the filming, so the actors really know where their character’s coming from. And I’m not an actor, but you always see. We’re filming this today, but it was the end of the movie. And so it gets, actors will say all the time, I had no idea what this movie was gonna be like.
We can’t tell when we were filming it, but to be in one spot like this, not all over the place. And with the way the lack of, or the style of special effects in this film they could get away with that. They didn’t have to like book specific time to have special effects people in and Right.
Rhys: You know, Cluster.
Stephen: I am. Okay. Hopefully that’ll resolve our connectivity issues. All right. Where were we? We were just finished talking about how was shot in sequence.
Shot in sequence. All right. Moving on.
Rhys: Yes. This was his first English language film. Ah. He finds atmosphere more important than story or even character.
So he’s all about the atmosphere. Oh, I guess that comes from a filmmaker cuz lots of people would totally disagree. .
Yeah. Yeah. The stor, the script writer is
Stephen: probably very much considering they were freaking themselves out. And the story.
Rhys: Yeah. Yeah. He said he liked how you were sympathetic with Jane throughout the film until suddenly at the end you’re scared of her because as they’re going along it’s oh my gosh, what happened to this poor girl?
And then all of a sudden it’s oh my gosh. And then at the end you could even make the case that you hate her if you wanted to. Yes. He also said this was his all time favorite score. Oh. And again, I didn’t look up who did the music, which I should have, but yeah
Stephen: The music did not stick out.
And it added perfectly. It was. It I didn’t even really think about the music, which means it fit in and was in the right spots and all that. So yeah.
Rhys: Yeah. He has nine director oral credits on his cv. A couple shorts the found footage Film Troll Hunter, we mentioned it, and he did Scary Stories to Tell In the Dark.
Have you seen
Stephen: that? No. That actually is on my list for this year yeah. It’s pretty entertaining. He’s been tapped to do the sequel as well.
It’s based on a kid’s young adult book or something, isn’t it? Yep. With really good,
Rhys: like a series. Yeah. Yeah. One of my all-time favorite actors is in this Brian Cox place.
Tommy. Yes. And I just think he’s amazing. I’ve never seen a bad performance out of him. I’ve seen some bad movies. He’s been in. , but I’ve never seen a bad performance out of
Stephen: him. Yeah, he does really good. Both. They all do. It’s a small cast and those two are in it 90% and everybody else is 10 less.
Rhys: He’s Scottish. And it’s funny cuz he’s really squeamish when it comes to Gore. So there were parts of this film he had a hard time getting through. That’s funny. He’s also big on passing accolades onto his cast members. He was really complimentary of everyone else. You could find interviews with Andre Emil Hirsch and even the screenwriters pretty easily.
But I only found like one that Brian Cox was sitting in on, which kind of makes sense cuz you know, he’s a very busy guy, . And to show you how busy he is, he has 236 film credits. Holy geez. Yeah. Going back to 1965 on a television show called The Wednesday Play. There were a ton of titles on there that I didn’t re recognize and I bet it’s cuz they’re British shows from like the seventies and eighties.
But he was in RobRoy, I forgot he was in RobRoy. Oh yeah. He was in Bravehearts Red Dwarf he did Voice for Superman, the animated series. He was a Red Dorn Kiss.
Stephen: The Girls . Yeah. Oh, hey, I just watched that. Yeah. Okay. The boxer Rushmore Supert Troopers. Frazier. The Born Identity, the Born Supremacy the Ring.
Rhys: Yes. He was, I just
Stephen: watched Born also. That’s what my, oh yeah. He wasn’t
Rhys: he? Yep. X two Xmen United. Danny Phantom, Matchpoint Deadwood, the water horse trick or treat red and red too. And this one’s just for you. Steve Scooby-Doo in the Samurai sword.
Stephen: Oh yeah. All right. Listen, the Samurai sword.
Rhys: I don’t know. He was also in the fantastic Mr. Fox. He was the voice of the Elder Oud in Dr. Who? Oh, wow.
Stephen: Oh, he is British. I he’s gotta be on Dr. Who at some point.
Rhys: Yeah. Rise. The planet of the Apes forsaken penny. Dreadful Bob the builder. Mega machines. Wow. And from that to Churchill to Super Troopers two.
Good Omens, the Simpsons, blade Runner, black Lotus. So one
Stephen: of those actors that you’ve seen at some point doing something that’s good, but never that standout that if you passed him on the street, you might do a double takes. Like I, I know that guy type thing. Yeah. But like you said, if he’s in it, oh, I know him, and this is, you get that, it’s gonna be good feeling.
Yeah.
Rhys: Emil Hirsch is a California born actor. He’s got 70 titles on his I M D B page, which I thought was pretty impressive for as young as he looks.
Stephen: Yeah, absolutely. thought he was only like 20 here. 21.
Rhys: He spent a lot of time with the Los Angeles County morgue, which turns out to be the world’s largest morgue to prepare for this film.
I I, I’m not
Stephen: sure if that’s the distinction. I’d really, Hey, I work in the largest morgue in the world because we have so many killings in our city, yeah. He’s, he found himself in what he describes as a Costco with dead bodies on the racks. Wow. Yeah. Shocked and traumatized him and made him question if it was worth the trauma to prepare for the film.
Rhys: But he says it was.
Stephen: Wow. I’m always big on new experiences and living life. So is that living life through the dead ? That’s, yeah.
Rhys: Yeah. He said it for this film, he felt ridiculous if he was trying to get into the head of his character. He didn’t like the method version because he just felt it made it seem silly.
So he was purposely trying to be detached as he was going through it. Yeah. Okay. stuff you’ve seen him in. He was in Third Rock from the Sun. Sabrina the Teenage Witch. N y p d, blue er around here is where I realized he’s older than he looks. Yeah,
Stephen: absolutely. You said Third Rock from the Sun that’s been off for a while.
Rhys: Yeah. The Girl Next Door Lords of Dogtown The Air I breathe. Speed Racer milk. Then there, I didn’t know this. There are a couple Troll Hunter series that spin off spun off the movie. Andre doesn’t do them, but somebody does. And he’s been in a couple of those.
Stephen: You sure it’s not the cartoon? It might be there.
There’s a Troll Hunter’s cartoon that nothing to do with that. Troll Hunter movie.
Rhys: Just name the same. Okay. They actually had a British mental, ex medical examiner on set to try and keep things authentic. And it was funny, he was telling this story. He’s so I was talking to him and I’m like, so what do you do when you’re not doing autopsies?
He’s nothing. I never leave my house. And he’s like, why? And he’s see this man here? He’s dead. He was mowing his yard and something chipped a little piece off of the blade of his mower and it flew up through the air and cut his carotid artery and he killed him. I don’t go outside of my house.
You,
Stephen: you just need a machine gun. You shoot it and it’ll get hot and you can cauterize the wound. I’ve seen it.
Rhys: Okay. Yeah,
Stephen: it was in what was it? John Carpenter vampires
Rhys: Baldwin did. I was gonna say, you were just talking to me about that.
Stephen: Yeah. That’s how you save yourself. It
only
Rhys: works if you’re a Baldwin, Okay. Yeah. Ophelia Lava Bond played Emma. She’s a British actress who’s been in 59 films including Oliver Twist, inspector Lewis, Mr. Poppins Poppers Penguins. She was in Thor, dark World uncredited, but she got her credit as she played the same character in Guardians of the Galaxy. She was Karina the Collectors.
Stephen: Oh, okay. Yeah, servant. I see that. Yeah. She
Rhys: also did voiceover for Forza Horizon four. And Karina shows up in what if so she was in that too.
This is fun. Michael McKean is an Irish actor who played Sheriff Burke. He’s been in 92 films, including voiceover work in Assassin Creed four Black Flag, game of Thrones, final Fantasy for Storm Blood Justice League. The DOS boot series, the last dual, the wheel of time and the hall .
Stephen: There we go. We bring him back.
Yeah
Rhys: He was the creepy guy who like kept trying to talk to the guy whose daughter had been taken.
Stephen: Okay. Okay. Huh. Wow.
Rhys: And it was totally different. It was really funny cuz once I recognized that’s who it was, you could actually catch times where his Irish accent was creeping into his English.
Cuz it’s supposed to take place in Virginia. But I was like oh, I got a little bit of the in what he was saying.
Stephen: With the budget, most of our movies they can’t do endless retakes for a slight mis slight slip .
Rhys: That’s true. All right. And the last actor we’re gonna talk about is Owen, Katherine, Kelly Owen, Katherine, Kelly plays Jane.
I
Stephen: was wondering if it was a real person throughout this. Obviously not all parts of it were real . We’ll, just you’re really getting into the role. We’re gonna cut your chest open. .
Rhys: Andre was very insistent that they actually have someone who do it, and in fact, that’s always her. Wow. They just put prosthetics on top of her.
Wow. And everybody who was in this film was like, she was amazing. Do you think it took her long to get all her lines down?
She was she’s like a yoga master which is how she can sit there for a very long take and not blink her eyes or breathe.
Stephen: Wow.
Rhys: That’s crazy. She wassup. I know. She was super Cautious. She didn’t want to interrupt the other actors. That was her biggest concern. Wow. She was the first person that they that tried out for the role and Andre was like, it’s gonna be her.
And
Stephen: How do you try out for this role other than ? You have to, okay. Could you just lay on this table for 10 minutes? Let’s see how you do .
Rhys: Yeah. And they like tried a bunch of other people, but Andre knew as soon as he saw her that it was gonna be her. She lives right next door to the casting director,
So it was one of those weird things. Yeah. She said after she met him, she had complete trust in him during the whole process, and she did admit it’s a little awkward to just be lying on a cold slab buck naked for hours at a time, surrounded by a staff and casted crew that are almost all male. But yeah,
Stephen: I bet that was a little uncomfortable at times for everybody.
Rhys: Yeah. She became attached to the character and felt pretty sympathetic and defensive o over the process of the film about Jane. So in the end when you might be mad at Jane, she’s just yeah, go get ’em. That’s funny cause I did even when you find out, the more reveal of what’s going on and what has been going on, I still felt that sympathy for her.
Stephen: Cuz honestly, it let, you could have a discussion, what’s justice and what’s fair of course she took it out on people that didn’t cause that on her. Correct. So that’s revenge. That’s misplaced revenge.
Rhys: But yeah. Okay. Emil Hirsch was saying that there were lots of times where they were shooting and he’d have to do something with a tool or an implements, like a scalpel or something, and he would grab it and he would stop.
and just double check to make sure that she had the prosthetic on before he did anything . But the fact that she was, it was actually her the whole time, constantly made him like second guess before he did anything. Now, is this all ready to go or am I actually gonna hurt
Stephen: somebody here? Wow, that’s good.
Especially after some of the incidents we’ve had all the time. But see, if I was her would so be those very intense moments where her come down and be like, , which everybody I wouldn’t be able to resist .
Rhys: She’d been in two other films before this too. A film called Darkness on the Edge of Time and Why Life Sucks when you’re in your twenties.
Stephen: I like the
Rhys: title. She’s been in three other movies since hopefully she’s had more la More lines. More clothes. . Yeah. It’s gotta be chilly. Throughout the film, there’s a song that plays. That song is called Open Up Your Heart and Let The Sun Shine In. This version of it was performed by the McGuire Sisters.
Okay. It was re it was recorded on a 45 or PM record, but they played it at 33 and a third .
Stephen: Okay. I used to do that .
Rhys: Yeah. It was also recorded in 1954 in the UK by a band called The Cowboy Church Sunday School. But the McGuire Sisters were from the us It was covered by Anne Murray in 1977.
Stephen: I was gonna say, I recognize the song I had heard
Rhys: it.
Yeah. You can find versions of Anne Murray doing it in 77 on YouTube. It was also covered by Pebbles and bam. In an episode of the Flinstones.
Stephen: That’s probably where I know it from. More
Rhys: than likely, more than more likely that than Anne Murray probably. I. . Yeah. All right. So the film starts with credits and what looks like a night sky, a starring night sky.
But as time goes on and the credits are running, you’ve realize that it’s dirt or ground and it’s being moved, but not like by a shovel or anything. It’s just time lapse. And while the credit’s run, you get this unfocused scene of something outside that’s upside down. And as it comes into focus, you’re looking through a willow tree at cars parked in a driveway.
Stephen: Yeah. It was an interesting way to start, especially when you reflect back at the end of the movie. We get a lot of those. Yeah. There’s a the stuff that usually pick out for us to watch definitely pay attention to those openings because so often the openings are more integral than you would think.
Rhys: Yeah. I always refer to ’em as the don’t look away films because. As soon as you do, something’s gonna happen. And it’s gonna be slight, but it’s gonna be a big key and you’re gonna miss it. Yeah. A lot of slight, yeah. There’s a tag that comes, pops up on the screen telling you’re in Grantham, Virginia.
It’s a split level house. There’s nobody outside, but as soon as you get inside, there’s tons of activity. Medical examiners taking pictures. There’s lots of blood and evidence tags on the floor. There’s a body of an old woman with a gun. There’s blood everywhere. There’s a body of an dead older man. And this investigator heads upstairs and finds another body lying in the hall of a Hispanic gentleman, younger.
The officer looks out the window and sees a news crew pull up next to the sheriff’s car and someone in the basement calls him down in the basement. This is Sheriff Burke. He starts down the basement and there’s this dirt. There’s a pale, naked woman that looks like she’s partially buried in the floor
at this point. The sheriff declares her and Jane Doe cuz there’s no identification anywhere near her. There’s no marks on her body. A deputy says it didn’t look like anyone was breaking in. It looks more like they were trying to break out. And that was never a
Stephen: good sign. Yeah. That was the first thing. I’m like, oh, okay.
So that whole beginning thing you really get the feel that it’s going to be why they’re dead, why they’re shooting with all the blood but it’s not a locked door mystery. Yeah. It was all just for that line of, it looks like they were trying to get out and that should hang with you for the movie.
Rhys: Yep. It’s important to note here and it, you see it throughout the entire movie, how clean her body is. She’s buried in a dirt floor. But the camera really emphasizes the whiteness of her skin in the scene. That color denotes that she’s dead, but her body for being partially buried in a dirt floor is immaculately clean.
Stephen: Pr pristine. Yeah. There’s no marks. Nothing anywhere. Very obvious. That becomes important here in a bit. Yeah. Now we cut away to a new set, and this is all like atmosphere happening right here. There’s this spiral staircase heading down into what looks like a brick basement and lights are coming on, but the brick basement’s really just a hallway and opens into this wood paneled room.
Rhys: There’s an elevator, a desk with computers, a picture letting us know that it is the Tilden, morg and crematorium. It is this really nice little collection of shots. It sets the setting of where you’re at. And it looks used. Not it’s not like it’s abandoned, but also not like they just set the setup.
It
Stephen: doesn’t look like in a lot of the police shows, like I mentioned, like it’s some new building or downtown. It has an old field to it. Yeah, very much yep. And the me is a stereotype for shows. He’s eating, he’s singing, the radio’s going, nothing’s bothering him. That’s like the stereotype me cuz it’s the opposite of what you always think.
Except for the real me that was on set it sounds And this transition reminded me of midsummer where like it was dark and air and dreamy and there’s this loud thing and then there was this harsh phone ring. In this case, you had this nice kind of music and this tone setting thing of the actual mortuary itself.
Rhys: And then suddenly there’s this loud blast of music and bright lights as Austin is there working on what looks to be a burnt body. Brian Cox is doing the examination. Tommy, his son’s taking pictures of the Polaroid and they just get right into it. They’re weighing heart, they’re weighing the heart, taking tissue samples, cutting into him, pulling the brain out of the brain case and weighing it, bagging everything.
And there’s a recording on a camera the entire time, recording everything. Right about now is where you get this sense that they’re not gonna shy away from anything in this film, right? Yeah. And they really don’t. They’re It’s a pretty graphic film, right?
Stephen: All through. Yeah. Yeah. Not for the kids.
Rhys: No, not so much between the naked woman throughout the vast majority of it. And lots of anatomy being cut open,
Stephen: not the me Tommy’s doing scary stuff later yeah. Stay with stories. Tommy’s doing this in
Rhys: the dark . Yeah. Yes, for sure. Although that one was pretty creepy in places as well.
Yeah. Tommy’s doing this rundown about what the cause of death is, and he’s quizzing his son who automatically jumps to smoke inhalation, the body’s burnt up. Tommy’s pointing out that’s not what killed him, and it turns out the guy was killed by what looks like a blow to the head. And Tommy has this quote here that fits the movie just perfectly.
He says, everybody has a secret. Some just hide them better than others.
Stephen: That’s the theme right there. Yeah.
Rhys: Austin comes back with some cheesy line about some people are better at finding it, meaning that Tommy is the superior. medical examiner. Austin looks up to his father, but he also feels inferior to him.
And you’ll have that which is ridiculous cuz Tommy’s got years and years of background with him, but Right. Austin notes that the man died because he was alone. And Tommy ever, the pragmatist says no he died cuz he ate his head. didn’t matter whether he was alone or not, he hit his head.
That’s what killed him.
Stephen: Because being alone or with people doesn’t really seem to save people in this movie. Yes.
Rhys: Not at all. Lone or with someone else. Austin has a date later with his girl, Emma. And during their discussion we find out that Tommy doesn’t go out much. The Morg itself is in this lovely old isolated farmhouse.
And that’s actually the office building for this film set in Kent. Really? So they just use Yeah, they use the office building as scenes for the outside and then they built the set on the sound stage.
Stephen: Wow. And they mentioned the last movie that he went and saw was The Notebook. I That’s truly a scary movie
Rhys: there
It is. Austin puts the dead man back in a drawer and we hear these noises coming from event, and you’re like, oh, is this, is this the start? It turns out it’s Stanley the cat who is in the vent and he is caught himself A rat. Yes. Red button. Now Steve is going yet another animal. .
Stephen: It’s not a dog, but I’ve gotten close to some cats lately.
So you gotta feel I didn’t feel for the rat though. Oh, okay. Poor rat. Yeah. When you live in farm country and you have mice and rats eating through your house and your food and shit, you don’t get to Yeah. Screw those guys. Yeah.
Rhys: And the sequence are set, the sequences are set up to be tension filled.
Yeah. Even though there’s nothing going on just to creep the viewer out. And you can tell cuz there’s this jump scare as soon as Emma shows up, she scares Austen. It’s the first time she’s been down there. He’s really nervous, but she is super fascinated by the whole deal. Yeah.
Stephen: And I got the fa the feeling from the father in this scene that he was like, yeah, let her see it.
Partly the play with her, but partly because hey your mother had to get used to this, so if you’re serious, she’s gonna have to get used to this. Cuz he’s thinking Yeah, the son’s taking over the buil the business.
Rhys: And there’s this shot where the body drawers. . There’s two of them.
There’s two and then two underneath it, and then there’s like a sup wall support, and then there’s two on the other side of the wall support. And there’s this scene where she’s standing in between them, just like this visual foreshadow that she’s gonna end up in one of those drawers in the long run.
You know what I mean? Yeah. She never does actually, to the best of our knowledge, actually end up in this story in the immediate least. The drawers are there to symbolize people being dead. So austen’s against her seeing any bodies he’s there’s some things you can’t see.
Even Tommy shows up and he’s go ahead. And so she goes to pick. She picks one on the end and Austin opens a drawer and slides her out, and it’s a lady, she’s been all stitch shut. Her eyes and mouth are stitch shut. Emma’s no. She wanted to see the one next to
Stephen: it, but it’s important to see that lady
Yes. What she looked like.
Rhys: And it’s a good way to actually do it yeah. There’s not a lot of fluff in this movie. There’s not a lot of, every scene. It just moves along. Even it’s very lean. How can cutting a body apart and autopsy, that’s what you think.
Stephen: How can that be interesting? But it just keeps going and building. There’s no, yeah. Yeah.
Rhys: It pulls out the next one. There’s this hole where the face should have been, the sheet’s tucked into it. The guy shot in the face
Stephen: looks like a ass face from preacher. There’s a bell tied around his ankle and she’s wondering what it’s there for.
Rhys: And Tommy explains it was to make sure the victim’s dead because in the old days it was hard to tell the difference between a dead body and a comatose one. And he says he does it cuz he’s a traditionalist. And Emma wants to pull back the sheet to see his face and Austen’s no, don’t do it. And Tommy’s no, go ahead.
And just as she’s about to pull it back, Tommy rings the bell, so she jumps. Plenty games. There’s the type of stuff, bodies. Yeah. Austin walks her back to the elevator just as the sheriff shows up with Jane Doe and Tommy sends him off, says, yeah, I don’t need you. And Austin notes how the sheriff looked when he came in, and he doesn’t wanna leave his dad there alone.
We find out that Austin’s planning to leave in the future. He doesn’t wanna stay here. This isn’t his long-term goal, but he hasn’t discussed it with his father yet. One of those. Subdermal secrets that this movie’s got so many of Ah,
Stephen: it’s subdermal secrets. I see you
Rhys: did that . Thanks. He asks Emma to come back at 11 o’clock and they’ll go to the midnight showing of whatever movie they were gonna go.
And I’m betting about now he’s probably wishing that he had gone Yeah, right then a little
Stephen: quicker. The, though I thought that she’s, the thing that the cop says is, oh, but you gotta get it cause I need answers for the media, blah, blah blah. So you need to spend all night doing this. I like, okay, that’s a little weak contraption to get ’em this stay, but okay, we’ll just go with it.
Rhys: And you’re right. And I agree with you. There’s two points. That was one of ’em. That seems a bit weak to me. Yeah. Like story wise. The second one, I’ll get to the second one when we get to it. Got it. Cause it’s later on in the. The sheriff’s briefing Tommy on where they found her, but they’ve got nothing else.
The cat is growling at the thing. Always a
Stephen: fond in a movie when the animals
Rhys: react right? And the body, again, immaculately clean, almost Austin shows back words off dirt and everything.
It does, and I’m gonna put this at now, it happens very rarely, but on occasions there are shots where you can just for a half a second see the bottom of her feet and the bottom of her feet are dirty
Stephen: She’s walking around the set barefoot .
Rhys: It could be that, or you could look at it as she’s not really dead. She’s like walking around and doing stuff like. , but I thought it was an interesting little thing that they did cuz they could have had her lay down and then rip out her feet, but they left it on there.
Sure.
Stephen: Yeah. So I guess nice. Okay. Yeah that’s even deeper than I, I would’ve thought. Good.
Rhys: As you point out, the sheriff mentions that he needs this done tonight cuz she was the mystery here and they already have some cockamamie story about how the Hispanic guy who came in to do work on the house must have killed everybody or something like that.
So they just need to solve what this woman was. So they need this done now. Okay. So they start setting up and there’s little kind of spunky music going on. Tommy records an intro tag on the video camera as that they run during the autopsies and he goes through and explains how they’re gonna do a four step evaluation.
Tommy’s correcting Austin, who’s assuming the body’s about 20. And Tommy’s just saying we can’t make that assumption. Austin notes that there are no sign of damage on the outside and no distinctive external markings on the body, which is actually big if you think about it. If you just stopped down and looked at yourself.
I have like cherry blastomas all over the place. It’s just something that happens through life. But she’s got nothing. Yeah, I’ve had scratch scratches, not a mole. Yep. Nothing. And we get to the first mystery when it peels back her eyelids cuz her eyes are clouded and apparently the eyes don’t cloud over on a corpse unless the corpse has been dead for a while and there’s no sign of rigor mortis.
So the body hasn’t been dead for a while. So you have that kind of contradiction there right off the bat.
Stephen: And so of course I’m starting to go, okay, we got a zombie . You know what I mean? Ah, that, that was just it’s a horror movie, so it’s gotta be a zombie. I didn’t think it’d be a vampire, which it could be.
Because the toe the ringing bell thing, that was a big vampire thing back in the day that, that helped bring about the whole vampire thing in our culture. But I was like, it can’t be a vampire for two reasons. One, we’ve already done several vampires and Reese’s not gonna do that many vampire movies.
And number two, wow. She was gap toothed. I have never seen the gap Tooth vampire, so I thought zombie Wow.
Rhys: because zombies, the teeth don’t matter,
Stephen: right? Yeah. , as long as you’re there, that’s zombie. Yeah. It’s you that’s just the stereotype for a zo.
Rhys: Yeah. It turns out she’s colder than the ambient temperature, which is a little bit of a bizarre thing. It’s like the anti-life thing is if you’re alive, you’re gonna be warmer than the ambient temperature.
But if you’re colder, then you must be sucking the life out of the room.
Stephen: Oh, and they only show the breath one time that I caught throughout the
Rhys: movie. Yeah. Towards the end. Yeah. Her turns out her wrists and ankles are fractured, but there’s no sign of out outside no outward sign of damage.
So somehow her ankles and wrists were shattered, but there’s no sign that it’s done from the outside. It also comments that there’s Pete under her nails and then her hair, which is funny cuz they do such a good job making her so immaculate. But the fact they could find. And Pete is not something that occurs naturally in Virginia.
Apparently Tommy said this is the kind of thing you’d find up north.
Stephen: Yeah. And you’re right. I didn’t even think about that with the only spot you get the dirt is under the fingernail. Yeah. I didn’t
Rhys: over her feet. Yeah, that’s right. They open her mouth. Here’s the new surprise. Her tongue has been removed.
Crudely, not surgically. Like
Stephen: it, it looked pretty nasty. .
Rhys: Yeah. There’s also this kind of it goes by quickly. She’s missing a molar in the back on the bottom. And they don’t make a big deal about it cuz they’re focused on the tongue. But it turns out to be important later. Yeah. Tommy starts to theorize that she was bound and had her tongue removed.
Austin goes in for a photo when her nose starts to bleed and a fly comes out, which I suppose that’s probably not uncommon kind of thing for a medical examiner, but it’s still
Stephen: No, but if she was buried, usually if she was buried
Rhys: it would be partly buried, but yeah. Yeah. Tommy finds a string in her mouth and we hear thunder outside.
Then he notes she’s been vaginally traumatized and that covers the external exam. So they’re moving onto the internal exam now.
You hear more thunder and just as Tommy is ready to cut her open, the lights flicker and the radio kicks on. There’s some static and then a jumble of voices, and then the song starts. Open up your heart and let the sun shine in or whatever it is. Age qua Austin doesn’t like it. Yeah. So he changes the channel
As soon as Tommy cuts her open, she starts bleeding like she’s alive. Like it’s a fresh corpse.
Stephen: Austin takes a bloods. That was pretty freaky. We’ve, I’ve never been in an autopsy, but we’ve all seen enough of the movies. Once they’re dead, the blood coagulates and it dries up and you don’t get, but she bled like the heart was pumping.
Cause that’s the other thing people don’t realize is if the heart’s not pumping, the blood doesn’t gush everywhere, that was pretty it was a slight junk scare. Definitely unexpected. And it’s funny too, because if you’ve ever gone hunting or something and you’re skinning a rabbit, they don’t bleed like that, you.
Rhys: They’re dead. You know what I mean? You just skin the rabbit and it’s pretty bloodless really. But that was a lot of blood that just comes out.
Stephen: That’s why they, you hang ’em up to drain all the blood first before you’re cutting up the deers and
Rhys: stuff. So Austin takes a blood sample from this, puts it in the fridge, and Tommy’s asking for rib cutters, Austin heads back to give them, and then he notices blood is dripping from the fridge and he opens it to find the vial that he put in there is broken and there’s blood everywhere inside the fridge.
And the first thing I thought was, that’s way more blood than was in that little vial.
Stephen: Yeah. The, and it, you gotta he’s oh I messed something up, blah, blah, blah. But I’m going, oh yeah. Why the heck did that blood try to escape ? Yeah. Yeah. It’s like a gallon of it. Yeah. It was pouring
Rhys: Yep. Tommy notes that she has damage from long-term corset wearing. And then he gets, I guess those are rib cutters. We in landscaping, we just called ’em lockers , and he cuts out a big chunk of her rib tissue.
Stephen: Yeah. And it was very the sound was, what is the, that there you
Rhys: Yeah. Good. Fully work.
He notes
Stephen: that her, sorry, ,
Rhys: he notes that her lungs have been blackened not from smoking, like blackened, like house fire, but there’s no other damage to indicate that was the case. Tommy says it’s like finding a bullet in a brain with no gunshot wound, which was a Greg. Oh, the damage. Yeah, all the damaged, broken joints, burnt lungs, her organs have been scarred on the inside.
It’s all hidden on the inside. And that was, and neither of ’em have,
Stephen: that was the coolest thing to think about. It’s like, how would you do that? I’m thinking through it and of course we’ve seen a ton of horror movies, blah, blah, blah. And I hope I’m not giving things away cuz we give things away anyway.
But I’m starting to think, my gosh, it’s witchcraft. This isn’t zombies, this isn’t vampires, this is a witch. That’s how do you explain all this stuff? Cuz her organs having marks on ’em without her having any external marks that was like, wow, that’s not something I would’ve thought about for story at the beginning.
Yeah.
Rhys: How do you have something that’s so wounded and damaged, hidden away so well that there’s no sign of it on the outside and that’s the whole theme of the movie, right? Yeah. Tommy notes, you’d only do that if you’re trying to make someone suffer. And then there’s this big noise outside and Austin goes to investigate what it is.
And here we have a quick, they’re separated back and forth kinda shot thing while he’s away. Tommy’s looking at the crime scene photos. He notes how everyone else is just this big mangled, bloodied condition. But Jane is just meticulously clean and Austin’s out in the hall and they start to make use of this element.
They do such a good job with, there’s a convex mirror at the corner. Yeah. And we have those at work. Cause we have blind corners all over the place there. And so you can see somebody as you’re walking along, so you don’t run into him. He sees a figure standing around the corner, but he gets to the corner and there’s no one there.
And the noises outside continue. So he keeps going down the hall. Back in the morgue. Tommy just flat out asks Jane what happened to her. And then he notices there’s something odd going on with the skin. He’s gonna look at that. But Austin’s all the way down the hall and he starts to head up the stairs that lead out and then he notes that there’s a door, a jar, and he swings the door open and looks into this darkened room.
Cut back to Tommy. He’s doing something with the body and he, I think it was actually the ribs that he cut. Yeah. Caught his wrist and slightly cuts him on the wrist.
Stephen: So you got that blood sacrifice now, . Yep.
Rhys: Austin’s back in the office. He turns on the light to look around and both he and Tommy note these strange air movements and sounds coming from the vents.
Tommy’s washing off his damaged wrists and Austin’s looking into one of the air ducts here, moves the cover. And looking down the dark air vent, he puts his ear up to listen better and when he turns to look something quickly moves across the air duct and he startles him and he falls off his chair. He was standing on, he turns and sees this figure in the doorway, but it’s Tommy who came to see what caused the noise,
gets back up on his feet, gets back on the chair, brave kid. And he looks, and there’s the cat in the vent. Not quite dead, making these small viewing noises, but certainly nothing anyone can do anything about. Tommy seems pretty upset by the whole thing and Austen watches as Tommy snaps its neck, putting it out of its misery.
Yeah.
Stephen: Now here’s maybe what you were gonna mention. I’m like, okay, so this cat’s been running around catching mice and 30 minutes after it catches its last mouse, you find it in the air duct, it looks like it had been beat and just attacked by something. I guess it’s dead.
Let’s move on with our day. You’re not questioning this, you’re not wondering what is going on. Why is our cat in the vent? Bloody, that was a little there too.
Rhys: They take the cat down to the crematorium and Tommy puts him in and lights the fire and he asks Austin to give him a minute. So we get the feeling that the cat meant something to him.
As Austin’s leaving, he checks that mirror again. There’s nobody in the hallway, but Austin is now alone in the morgue. He goes to wash his hands and one of the empty body drawers swings open.
Stephen: So there are a couple, he walks some good horror movie tropes in here. We got, yeah, some fog. We get the, in the reflection in the mirror.
We get the doors opening but not overdone, not super jump skin yeah. , it’s hard to avoid those just in general. And the key is if you’re gonna use them to use them subtly and they do it very well here,
right? I, because again, with movies, you both basically have 2D images. That’s all you really got to work with to scare ’em.
If you use the music right, you’ve got some sounds and the sound effects and stuff. But it’s a 2d, so it’s, you gotta do some of those things to build that atmosphere. And that way also, we know it’s supposed to be scary . That’s sounds stupid, but that’s exactly why some of these have come up because it’s always spooky when a door opens and nobody’s there.
So it gets you. Sure.
Rhys: It’s like mid-summer in Sweden they think it’s funny, but the rest of us are like, this is really disturbing . Oh
Stephen: yeah, the comedy the cult. Yeah.
Rhys: He walks over to close that body. Drawer door and his dad comes in and Tommy mentions that the cat was his wife’s and it was a pain in the ass.
And Austin says, yeah, I miss her too. Which is just this really nice way of Austin picking up on what the actual problem here was. Yeah, he tells Tommy he can talk to him, but Tommy insists he’s fine. So now we are getting into the more in-depth parts of the autopsy. We’re cutting into Jane’s digestive tract.
This is the upper small intestine, and Tommy finds an intact jimson weed flower, it’s moon flower. They’re gorgeous flowers. They bloom at night, only they close up during the day. They’re hallucinogenic. But they’re also very poisonous. . And it’s not even it hasn’t even been digested it. The, so the entire thing is just sitting there
Stephen: again.
It’s like the puzzle box pieces. Yeah. The radio suddenly kicks in letting us know there’s a big storm coming in. Austin tries to talk Tommy into waiting until morning, but Tommy insists are gonna have to keep going. Once we start something, we finish it. He says, he goes back to her digestive tract and pulls out another foreign object, which might even be stranger than finding an entire Jensen flower, moon flower in there.
Rhys: There is a object wrapped in a muslin cloth.
Stephen: It’s a hex bag. . They have those, they roll .
Rhys: Yeah. They open it to reveal a tooth and Austin like instantly finds out that’s the lower molar that she was missing. They unwrap the cloth, the discover, it’s got ruins or a sigil on it. There’s Roman numerals running around the edge.
Austin notes it’s 27. Then he goes back and compares the thread that they found in her mouth to the material itself seems to be a match. And then he double checks and the tooth doesn’t fit in the place where she’s missing one on the lower jaw.
So at this point, they sum up everything they’ve seen, right? She was bound, had her tongue removed, had a tooth pulled out, wrapped in some ritualistic cloth, was force fed that. Then poisoned with a moon flower, which would paralyze her as well. She had internal organ damage as though she’d been stabbed.
And then she had burns on her lungs to show that she had inhaled super hot gases, like they tried to burn her even though the throat didn’t have any signs of that damage. , all of this is done without any mark on the outer body. So oxen comes.
Stephen: Here I mentioned witches, but I’m thinking at this point, it’s huh, this could be alien also.
She’s healing, but it’s only her outer body that’s healing or skin walker shape changer or something too. It’s, it was like all that damage internally and it’s it’s almost like a murder on the Orient Express. This person tried to poison her. This person tried to burn her.
This person tried to stab her they all had to do it to kill her. Rasputin, right? Yeah. Except she didn’t make it at the end. Obviously neither did she at this point.
Rhys: Austin, what do you think Austin’s I think she was a human. She was a sacrifice. This was a sacrificial thing.
And Tommy doesn’t disagree with him, but he is like, how do you do that without leaving no marks? And right around here is one of those scenes where you can see that the bottom of her feet are dirty and it’s the only part of her feet that is, except under her nails, which we can’t see. Then the radio has this kind of focus moment where it comes up and it’s like there’s a big storm, and trust me, this is not the kind of storm you want to get caught in the middle of.
And then at the end, he adds one thing’s for sure. You are not going anywhere, , and then the song starts
Stephen: back up. That’s a Freddie Krueger thing where he’s inhabited in the radio and he’s talking directly to the dream people or whoever. Yeah.
Rhys: At this point, Austin suggests that he and his dad just get outta here.
This is also where Tommy basically skins Jane. He discovers that there are tattoos on the inside of her skin.
Which is just, I was just blown away by that. I’m like, that is so crazy and so impossible. Yeah. It was a real, a really nice added touch to be like, yeah, this is off the rails
Stephen: now. I can see why the one guy had trouble sleeping after reading this. Yeah. First of all the skinning part was pretty well done for a movie and by well done.
Yeah. That creepy factor in making you very realistic. Yeah. Yeah. And then you gotta stop him. That’s like, how the hell do you tattoo the inside of somebody’s skin and put it back with no marks? That’s just crazy that really definitely was an over the top story moment there.
Rhys: Yep. and this whole scene is building tension. Building tension. And the doors slowly pull shut and both of them turn to watch the doors closing and they’re puzzled. And then every fluorescent light in the lab explodes leaving them in darkness.
Stephen: Yeah. Another trope. . Yeah.
Rhys: You hear every drawer, right? Every drawer pops open and you hear this thump of a body hitting the floor, and then someone’s struggling.
Turns out it’s Austin. He gets his phone out and turns his flashlight on showing that all of the doors are open and Tommy is just standing there. Slack jod saying, let’s get the fuck outta here. . Yeah, let’s go. Way to go, bud. We’re not gonna try and solve this mystery. We’re getting out. Of course. It’s not gonna be that easy.
Little
Stephen: late, you’re halfway through the movie. So too bad.
Rhys: Now this is one of the things that does drive me nuts, and they do this in every movie, right? Where all of the fluorescent tubes explode. They just blow up all over the place. But they never mentioned the fact that now the floor is gonna be just covered in super fine ground glass.
Yeah. They’re not barefoot, they’re standing up putting
Stephen: it, they’re not barefoot like diehard, so
Rhys: But for Austin to stand up, he’s gonna have to put his hand down, right? Yeah. To help push himself up off the floor. That’s nitpicking .
Stephen: We have bigger things to worry about. Yeah.
Rhys: They’re walking down the hall and the generator kicks on and all the lights come back on.
The ones that haven’t blown up and there’s this super loud funk from upstairs. Elevator’s not working, so they’re gonna take the stairs up, but the doors won’t open cuz they’re those bco kind of doors that lift up and both Austin and Tommy are pushing on it. And it turns out that big thump was a tree falling on the house.
So they can’t get out. Austin’s trying to get a signal. Yeah. Austin’s trying to get a signal on his cell phone. Can’t get one. And Thomas is like, we have a landline. . So they head into the office? . Yeah. They head down the hall and there’s this tapping sound coming from the morgue. It freaks him both out.
So they just run down the hall of the office, slip through the door, and Austin shuts it and locks it. He’s pointing back at the door and he is of mouthing what the hell was that? Tommy picks up the phone and has a signal, bucking the whole horror trope
Stephen: there. Yeah, but that’s why we have a storm,
Rhys: right?
He dials the phone number and the sheriff’s office answers the phone and the guy on the other end is I can’t hear you. And Tommy’s put Burke on the line. And the sheriff gets on and. Tommy says, you gotta come help. We’re in trouble. He really can’t hear him. And then the line goes dead and we hear that bell that was tied around the guy’s ankle.
So it’s someone
Stephen: that Austin ?
Rhys: Yes. Austin gets down and looks out of the crack under the door and you see a pair of feet step up to the door and you hear the bell on its ankle. Then there’s pounding on the door.
Austin and Tommy barricade the door with the filing cabinet and then the knocking stops.
Austin’s wondering what the hell’s going on. He says, it’s because of Jane. It’s cuz we decided to cut into her. Tommy’s trying to be rational about it at this stage. I don’t know how you could be. Yeah. . And then he notes that his wrist is bleeding again. So he goes in the bathroom to wash off his wrist.
Then he notes that the shower curtain’s wiggling. In the other room, Austin is saying he should have just left. He wanted to leave in the bathroom. Tommy’s gonna pull back the curtain and Austin sees him about to do it and can see a figure through the curtain. He tries to warn Tommy, but Tommy pulls the curtain back and there’s no one there.
They both look at each other with a sigh of relief, but then suddenly Tommy’s yanked off his feet and the door slams
Stephen: shut. One of those horror movie delayed jump scares.
Rhys: Yep. Austin runs the door, it won’t open. Tommy’s just being flat out and assaulted in there and to Austin. Finally gets the door open.
His dad’s on the floor and he hears the door swing open in the other room, the door they had barricaded is open. The filing cabinet’s not there. Tommy’s in bad shape, but Austin helps him up. Tommy says whoever assaulted him had her eyes. They were gray, they were her eyes. Austin just says that they’re way past possible.
This has to have something to do with her corpse.
I like how pragmatic these guys are. You know what I mean?
Stephen: Which they’re not. They the me, they set that up at the beginning. That’s what his father the whole time. Don’t jump to conclusions. Take what you got. Just evaluate what we have. So they
Rhys: step out in the hallway.
There’s a bloody rag on the floor. They look back towards the stairs and the lights flick her a bit. Then they turn and head back towards the morg itself. The room itself’s a disaster. Everything’s out everywhere. It’s lit by the emergency lighting. They cautiously enter the room. Jane’s still wears you.
They left her in the same condition she was in, but everything they took out of her is started to decompose, like rapid decom. . Tommy decides he’s gonna take the body to the crematorium. . We’re just gonna The door . Yeah. Then the door closes and they’re closing her. They’re closing her up and moving her onto a cart.
Then the door locks. Austin grabs an ax and starts to heck at the door. He looks through the hole, he cut in the door and there’s an empty hallway. And then you see the stitched face of that first corpse that Emma looked at, like in the hole. Looking back. and this whole section purposely was reminiscent of the Shining.
He does mention that he had done that to, as an homage to The Shining, which gets referenced a lot in these horrors. I was
Stephen: just gonna say that I, if anyone has an ax to adore, it’s the Shining . Yep.
Rhys: Tommy turns to look at the hole and sees the same body, so it’s not Austin Hallucination Hall hallucinating.
It tries to cry out and Austin says, fuck it, and just starts pouring alcohol all over the body. Tommy takes a whole book of matches, lights it, and tosses it on the alcohol, and everything goes up in flame. Then the flames rocket to the ceiling and the morgues on fire. . Oops. .
Stephen: So Austin grabs a fire, extinct.
We were talking earlier about it, the body like rejecting the dirt here, it rejects the flame that the flame just leaps off. Oh yeah. The I kinda saw that and I’m like oh, nothing’s gonna work to, and we established earlier with the blood, something is still alive Austin grabs the fire extinguisher, but they’re like, the whole room is on fire.
Rhys: It’s not gonna help. But then the flames just suddenly die down and disappear, and Jane’s body is in the exact same, perfect condition it was before it caught on fire. Yeah. Then Tommy hears the elevator. Austin grabs the ax, they find the mor doors aren’t, are unlocked. Austin starts to walk down the hall and Tommy’s behind them.
As they go down the hall, the lights start to flicker, leaving them periodically in the darkness. The elevators are, doors are closing just as they get. Here’s where they use that convex mirror again. The camera focuses on it, and we see the corpse with a bell walking down the hall reflected the mirror coming towards them.
In the hall they’re in. You don’t see the body, you just hear it approaching. Eventually you can see something moving through what looks like fog, and the lights flicker on and off. Tommy grabs the ax axis. It approaches, and the corpse is approaching them. Austin puts Tommy in the elevator as the doors open and as they start to close, then the power cuts out, so the doors open just a bit.
The corpse keeps coming though, and Tommy’s standing in the elevator with the ax, and as it gets the elevator, he just lashes out with the ax and it hits the floor.
Stephen: Now, the minute that happened, I’m like, huh, dead body. They hit him with the ax and it hits the floor. This is not gonna go well. I don’t know quite what it is, but I know something’s not.
Rhys: And the lights come back on all of a sudden and we discover it was actually Emma,
Stephen: ah, it didn’t go right.
Rhys: She is in the process of dying. Austen’s over her body, weeping. The elevator starts back up and they start riding it up, but then it comes to a halt leaving them in the dark and the elevator sitting on the floor, austen’s staring desolate into the opposite corner.
Tommy checks his ribs and they’re looking really bad. Austen blames himself for telling her to come back and Tommy says it’s his fault cuz Austen shouldn’t even be here anymore. Austen says she couldn’t have known. And Tommy says, that’s what everyone told me about your mom. And here we get this more background very weird spot, but okay. Yeah. Yeah. But it’s a lull in the storm, right? Where they can come out and have a true confessional kind of moment. It seems like she killed herself while she silently suffered from depression that Tommy didn’t notice. So there you have something hidden under the surface causing damage.
No one else can see cuz you have this Austin wanting to leave, never talking to his dad about it. His dad be grieving over the loss of his wife, never talking about it. His wife killing herself cuz she was struggling with depression and never talking about it. And then you have Jane, which is everything’s hidden under the surface and she can’t talk about it.
Stephen: And then you gotta wonder if they’re trying to say some bigger statement about society. I wasn’t quite sure about that. That’s always something that gets discussed in book. Discussions, but in horror movies we’ve said our great vehicles for lots of statements about they are life and stuff.
So there, there could be, but I wasn’t picking up on it so much.
Rhys: I was gonna say, my kind of takeaway was like don’t let stuff fester. If you wanted to boil it down to a simple sentence, deal with stuff when it happens. .
Stephen: Don’t wait 300 years. Austen wonders why she hasn’t killed them yet.
Rhys: He says there’s something she doesn’t want them to find. The crematory is just lights on its own and smoke is just rolling out. Austen wants to go back, figure out how she died. Cuz if he thinks he, if he can, this whole thing will.
They stop outta the elevator. Austin pauses to look at his dead girlfriend. Tommy pulls a cloth out, nowhere puts it over the body. Out of respect. Now they see the smoke rolling down the hall and the two of them head into the smoke using the wall as a guide to try and find their way back to the morgue, which is a good idea as long as that wall’s not on fire.
Stephen: right? As long as it’s, he’s throwing it out there. As long as it doesn’t like change and move, which happens in
Rhys: movies. Yeah. Somewhere along the way they end up slightly separated. Tommy’s attacked. It sounds like he’s being stabbed. And there’s this shambling figure moving through the fog towards him, but Austin finds him first, helps him to his feet, and the two of them continue on and into the morgue itself.
Austin bars the door, he turns on what has to be, it’s gotta be like the last light in the place.
Austin’s scalor. And then they cut into her brain cavity and her brain looks normal and Tommy’s there’s gotta be something. The rest of her body had been so scarred on the inside, there’s gotta be something. So it cuts out a ti a sample of tissue. Austin puts it under the microscope and he’s puzzled.
Tommy comes over and takes a look at it and he’s puzzled because the tissue is still alive, right? And Austen’s that’s impossible. She doesn’t even have a heart anymore. We cut it out of her. Discouraged Austen heads over to where that cloth bag that held the tooth was laying, he folds it over and notes that the num Roman numerals aren’t necessarily nomen numerals at all.
Everything lines up, like when you fold it over like that and backlight it, it says Leviticus 2027. And for all of you non Bible scholars out there, I’ll be quoting this from the NIV v. not the King James. I should have used the King James cuz the NIV V basically says, any man or woman who works with spirits, she will be stoned to death.
Their blood will be on their own heads. The King James, they say which, right? The Niv V doesn’t say that. And here’s the part that I thought was a little lazy in the writing. They instantly leaped to the Salem witch trials 1693,
Stephen: which wasn’t Virginia so much. No.
Rhys: And there’s no reason why every American culture witch tale has to revolve around Salem, Massachusetts, ,
Stephen: right?
Rhys: Now they’re from England, so maybe that’s like the only thing they know about it. The other thing that’s weak about this thread is that Tommy knows everything about the Salem witch trials. He’s throwing out names and everyone was innocent and he’s just got all this information. The camera does this thing, and this is why Andre is so ingenious.
The camera pauses on Jane’s face and instead of just being a lifeless corpse with her mouth open, her face looks almost smug. Like the actress is yeah. You’re starting to get it now. And it’s not like it was a secret. She didn’t want them to know. I don’t think she cared,
Stephen: really. This, you’re right. This is, it started to feel almost like the movie should have been five more minutes to lead this. It was definitely okay, we’re running out of time. We have to get this out to the audience so they’re with us. But arguably it doesn’t hurt the movie that much. It, it was just I had seen somebody do a review of the film and that was like his big thing was Salem Witch Trials again, it’s always gotta be the Salem Witch trials.
Yeah, agreed. I get it. But considering I was in Salem last year with the sole purpose of researching and writing a witch story so it was nice to see something different. . Yeah.
Rhys: Yeah. Tommy suggests that everything they did to her, cuz they thought she was a witch, actually turned her into this kind of monster.
She wants them to feel the pain she’s experiencing cuz she’s not dead. She can feel everything that’s being done to her. And if
Stephen: you’re lying and that’s why she’s around for 300 years, you’ve gone a little crazy. Oh
Rhys: yeah, for sure. You remember that show Heroes? Oh yeah. They did that in the third season where there was a guy who was immortal and he was like the bad guy.
And the time traveling dude goes back in time and traps him in a coffin that gets buried. He can’t die. He’s trapped in that coffin. Construction comes along, they break him out, and here he is like some sociopath. They created him as a sociopath by taking him back in time and depositing him in that coffin.
So causality kinda thing too at one point. Yeah. So he says they need to suffer like she did. It’s revenge. It’s a ritual of her own making and nobody must have gotten as close to the truth as they have. She’s still suffering and she won’t stop until, and right then something smashes on the door.
It’s smashing to get. Austen goes over to deal with it. Tommy leans in close and whispers to her and says, I won’t fight. You just let Austen live. Suddenly the smashing on the door stops and there’s this nice shot between them, Tommy and Jane from one set of dead eyes to the other. Then Tommy’s expression turns, don’t wanna pain.
Pain and Jane’s expression almost changes from smug to satisfied now. Yeah. And you can see his joints start to break on the inside. And hers you can see being fixed subcutaneously.
Stephen: Yeah. That was pretty gruesome. And the sound effects were good. Yeah. Her eyes start to de cloud.
Rhys: Her eyes de cloud the incisions they make start to seal shut.
Everything starts to retract back. He opens his mouth and expels smoke. He’s experiencing everything. She has His eyes cloud over. Now one of the super cool things that they didn’t do that I really appreciate, they show in, you see her eyes clear and Austen’s sitting there, sadly watching his father die.
Tommy’s reaching for a scalpel to end his own life. And like I fully expected Jane to sit up and walk over and just kill Austen by hand. But they didn’t do that. Yeah, they just left her there on the slab, which I thought was
Stephen: great. Yeah, actually, yeah. It’s like she’s in the spirit world controlling things, right?
Rhys: Austin sees the scalpel, sees Tommy reaching for it. Tommy asks Austen to kill him, and Austin does manage to do it. Tommy’s head rolls back and he stops breathing and he’s dead. Okay. Happy ending. Austin gets away. That’s the end guys. No, Austin’s caressing his father’s face. He’s weeping. He rolls to the side and sits staring at the door.
His lights come back on. The mor doors are closed. The radio starts back up. Nothing’s any different except there’s two dead bodies in the hall. You can hear voices crying from outside as the sheriff’s trying to get in. So apparently that phone call got through right
Stephen: enough. Yeah.
Rhys: Austin heads down the hall and there’s chainsaw cutting.
He steps over his dead girlfriend. He’s trying to open the door and it still won’t open. And the sheriff insists it’s cleared. And then the sheriff starts saying, open up. Open up. Open up your heart and let the sun shine in. And Austin’s freaked out. He backs up. He hits this railing on the stair balcony.
He hears the sound below him, and when he turns back, he sees his father and he startled and he breaks through the railing, falling to the floor, breaking his neck. So she was not holding up her end of the bargain. .
Stephen: She’s crazy and wants revenge.
Rhys: Yes. There you go. Yeah. You have a daytime shot of the house outside.
There’s lots of sheriff cars in the driveway. You’ve got all those evidence tags everywhere. Medical examiners broken mirrors. Ax wound to the door, the sheriff walks into the morgue, looks down at Tommy with a scalpel in his chest, and Jane’s body lying on the slab like nothing was done with it. It’s just laying there.
The sheriff wants the body taken all the way outta the county and delivered to a different morgue somewhere else. He’s let them deal with it. Yeah. , they load her into a van and take body bags to the other corpses from the house, load them into the second van. And I thought this was a really interesting shot cuz both vans are pulling out of the driveway and the one with Tommy and Austin goes to the right and the one with Jane goes to the left.
Yeah. The guy driving the van with Jane in it, he’s driving along and he turns the radio on and there’s some fire and brimstone preacher, and then it switches to open up your heart and let the sunshine in. And then there’s this long slow pan across Jane’s body. It stops at her feet and she’s got a toe tag on and it looks as though she’s been walking around cuz there’s dark patches on her heels and on the balls of her feet.
And just before the screen goes black, her left big toe wiggles slightly ding. And you got credits.
Stephen: Yeah. Yep. And so that, that ending, I would’ve been just quite happy if once the boy fell and died, if that kind of would’ve just been the end. And then you wonder what happened to her body because no Deo Yeah.
Showing her in the ambulance and the toe thing that. Almost a little too cheesy for this movie. It just didn’t seem to fit the rest of the movie. Yeah,
Rhys: it’s kinda sequel
Stephen: leading. That’s it, that’s how Halloween two is at the beginning. He’s in the ambulance and he sits up and then kills everybody in the ambulance and we, and he goes back to the hospital to get Jamie Lee Curtis.
So yeah, it was, that was like the homage to Halloween there. Which may, I guess to me made it feel a little more cheesy for this movie, . Oh,
Rhys: maybe it was, maybe I never heard him say that, but maybe it was like a nod from him too. Halloween, he had a shining reference in it.
Stephen: But then again like a lot of the horror movies, you get some of the same things that happened because that fits, yeah. People sitting around drinking tea with sunflowers doesn’t make you into the scary mood, but ambulances with bodies does Yeah. Ambulances bodies always puts me in a scary mood. Yeah. I, no matter what the background,
If I drive into a restaurant and there’s an ambulance there, I keep driving.
I don’t stay at that restaurant.
All right, there’s Autopsy of Jane Doe, which again it was very interesting cuz it had the feel of some big budget movie. It was written like a seventies horror almost didn’t have a lot of the typical jump scare tropes and stuff. So definitely different if you’re in the horror movies. And it’s
Rhys: also one of those ones that I, that for me became more fascinating the more I found out about it.
Like the whole thing using an actress for Jane through the whole thing, right? And shot, all of a sudden Overdog just is I wanna make a scary horror movie that’s not, find me a script. And I learned about the blacklist. I’d never heard about that before. And the whole thing I thought was a nice little journey on from my
Stephen: end.
Yeah I agree. This is one of the few in our three seasons so far that if somebody said what would you recommend that I watch? Start off with this one because it’s very approachable, very close to what most people would be used to as a horror movie. Yeah, a
Rhys: little more depth. I also and I know it’s really late cuz it’s the end of the third season or approaching the end of the third season, but I came up with a brilliant way to listen to our podcast.
Oh, okay. What you should do is you go through the titles of all the movies and if you find when you you listen to the podcast until we introduce the actors, and then after we introduce the actors, stop the podcast. Watch the movie and then come back to listen to the second half of it.
Stephen: We’ll have to start telling people that in the podcast.
Okay. Hit pause. Hit pause on your record. Record, yeah. , stop. What’s the next movie? We looked that up before we started recording.
Rhys: The next movie is The Ritual.
Stephen: Ritual. And yes, we’ve had a lot of one word titles, it seems lately, of the Apostle and Midsummer and ritual. The ritual, yeah.
Rhys: The Autopsy of Jane Do.
Stephen: Oh wait that’s a few words, , but we do have our annual Halloween Fest coming up here. We gotta figure out a night for us to get there and do that. We should record and then edit, just like our comments and stuff on the movies. Maybe not showing the movies and getting ourselves in legal trouble.
Edit our comments so people can listen to us talking. We could stream it live on Facebook. I wonder how that would go. get one poor person that would stumble on it and
Rhys: Jack might watch
Stephen: it. Yeah. Jack .
Rhys: And that’s gonna beg the whole question too. What movie are we gonna watch?
Because I could bring titles or we could pick one that neither one of us have seen and go from there. Let’s do that. Let’s each pick out several movies and then we’ll put ’em together and see which ones we wanna actually do. Because last year we did Freaky with Vince Vaughn cuz it was newer.
Stephen: I wanted to see it. Neither of us had seen it, so that was nice. And then the other movies you had seen and the one we saw, the musical stagefright, I found the remake of it, which is nowhere near as. Comedic. Guess that one? I didn’t know they remade it. Yeah, I’ve got a remake of it. I found it at the Exchange.
Gotta love the exchange horror section. Wow. I guess so.
Rhys: Yeah. And we also watched the house, the October
Stephen: built. Yes. Which there is a second one, but I don’t know, but yeah. Yeah, I saw that. So let’s yeah, let’s each come up with a couple movies and then we’ll have a special bonus Halloween episode.
Awesome.
Rhys: We’re rolling. That will be our bonus episode for the season.
