On Horror Movies and What It Means to Rewrite the Dead Girl

The main character of The Autopsy of Jane Doe doesn’t move or speak.

She is pale. She is still. She is naked and, as much as this is possible given her lifelessness, she is beautiful.

She is a corpse discovered at the scene of a grisly multiple murder, but she herself has no visible injuries, no obvious cause of death. Determining how she died may provide some insight into how or why or by whom her fellow victims were massacred, so her autopsy must be completed by morning. Tommy Tilden and his son and assistant Austin take on the job.

The nameless “Jane Doe” is the visual and narrative center of the story. The camera returns to her face over and over, almost as often as it delves into the recesses of her body as the coroners methodically take her apart. Her facial expression seems to shift subtly throughout the film, as though she is observing the dissection of her body, but withholding comment. She is that most iconic image of the horror genre: a young, beautiful, white woman—gutted. In Western culture, the body of a young white woman is both venerated and fetishized, powerful even while denied agency. It’s easy to get a reaction by destroying a valuable object. The Autopsy of Jane Doe does so with relish.

At every step of the examination, the Tildens discover traces of brutality. Jane Doe’s wrists and ankles are broken; her lungs are burned; her skin is scarred on the inside. Her horrific death should have left external marks, but somehow didn’t. Like many women, Jane has managed to undergo devastating trauma without letting it show.

As the night deepens and the coroners develop and reject potential explanations for Jane’s internal anomalies, external anomalies begin to pile up. A storm moves closer, and the lights go out. The morgue goes from an organized work station to a labyrinth of chaos and fear. Dead bodies rise and walk, the bells on their toes ringing, but Jane is not among them.

Jane lies on the table, naked and motionless, throughout it all.

Jane Doe is perfectly passive. She is the page on which the story is written. Her body is a crime scene, and the victim of the crime, and the perpetrator of a crime, all at once, but the clues she contains are for someone else to assemble. Her objectification is absolute. She goes from tragedy to mystery to monster when the men who catalog her organs say she does.

Her examiners—Captors? Torturers?—eventually come up with a story that, wild as it is, they believe fits the evidence. From details like the peat under Jane’s fingernails and the fabric inscribed with Bible verses she’s been forced to swallow, the Tildens conclude that she is a victim of the Salem witch trials, wrongfully convicted of dark magic. Through her ritualistic murder, her executioners accidentally imbued her with the very power they sought to eradicate. She can make the dead walk. She can summon the storm.

Imagine lying still and unblinking while someone describes out loud the worst thing that ever happened to you, and someone else writes it down. Any woman who has ever filed a police report can relate, at least a little, to Jane Doe. Any woman who has ever listened while people with more power than she has argue about what happened to her and what it means.

Jane Doe’s body tells a story of horrible death, and then that story comes to life. Because she wishes it to? Or simply because violence retold is violence reenacted? Is she conscious? Malevolent? A plague carrier? A cycle of abuse? A metaphor for post-traumatic stress, the brain stuttering over the same awful moment over and over, unable to relegate it to memory?

Horror movies make this dissection literal. They acknowledge what teenage girls already feel: that it hurts to be looked at.

It’s not clear whether Jane Doe is supposed to be consciously vengeful, or whether she is simply the conduit through which an atrocity perpetuates itself. The dead girl does not explain. The Tildens do that for her, to the best of their ability. But Jane is still the monster in this story. Unmoving, unseeing, she is a catalyst. She is to blame.

*

There’s a dead girl in my story too. Her name is Heather, and when I was thirteen, she was my best friend.

She was also my best friend when I was sixteen and twenty-two and twenty-five, which is when she died. But I want you to picture her as my best friend at thirteen, because that’s the year that made us who we were, individually and together.

Thirteen is the worst year of girlhood. It’s an unlucky number. It’s when a girl is still as powerless as a child, but can see, with the dawning of adult perception, the many ways in which the world is either out to hurt her or doesn’t care if it does. Thirteen is chaos and thrilling hope and bottomless rage.

At thirteen, a girl is unmade. If she has a best friend, they can help put each other back together.

People started looking at me when I was eleven and got breasts. By thirteen, I wore a C cup. I became hyper-aware of eyes on me at all times. In eighth grade, I got a shirt with a strip of Velcro across the front, and Velcro letters that could be attached to form words, across the spot on my body to which gazes most often strayed. I liked to use the letters to spell “BOYS READ SLOW.”

My clothes were aggressively unfashionable, a hodgepodge of Hot Topic clearance rack, thrift store finds, and my grandmother’s weird vintage jewelry. I couldn’t become invisible, but I could do my best to make people who insisted on looking at me uncomfortable.

Heather had curves early, too. She wore a denim Blossom hat decorated with puff paint and shoulder-scraping skeleton earrings. We got each other. We saw each other. Thirteen-year-old girls are uniquely attuned to the distinction between being looked at and being seen.

With your thirteen-year-old best friend, if you’re very lucky, you find someone who looks at you and gives you power, rather than taking it away. Where the gazes of boys and teachers and parents felt like they were whittling me away, making me smaller, in Heather’s eyes I felt bigger. There was more room for me to breathe.

Heather was strong. Heather was brave. Heather was bold. So maybe, in her presence, I was too.

*

Heather and I loved horror movies. The Blockbuster near her house never asked us for an ID to rent R-rated movies; with our breasts and black lipstick, we must have looked like short seventeen-year-olds even when we were still in middle school. This is how I remember her best: curled on her couch or in her bed, in a pile of pillows and blankets and junk food, marathoning every fright fest we could lay hands on.

Girls died on her television screen a thousand different ways. Boys and men and women and dogs and zombies, too, but more than anything else, girls. Katharine Isabelle in Ginger Snaps, her burgeoning sexual appetite foreshadowing her transformation into a flesh-eating monster. Rose McGowan in Scream, trying to escape her killer through a dog door that isn’t big enough for her hips. Sissy Spacek in Carrie, alive with furious power until her own mother plunges a knife into her back. Shelves and shelves of films where women bleed and die for being too strong, too sexual, too abrasive, too mean, too much. Annihilated by the role they played in other people’s stories.

We watched these movies like some people watch football games, cheering for the girls who fought back, pumping our fists in the air when a terrified babysitter plunged a knitting needle into her stalker’s throat. Their victories were our victories. But when they failed, our cries of gleeful revulsion were a kind of triumph, too. We shared with them the ecstasy of fear, and emerged unscathed.

In her book Men, Women, and Chainsaws, Carol Clover describes the relationship between horror viewer and fictional victim as one of cross-gender sympathy. She posits that that audience for horror is primarily male, but that a male victim screaming in pain or fear is considered emasculated. The women who die onscreen, then, are a way for men to vicariously experience the catharsis of terror.

Men no longer dominate horror viewership. Women flock to films in which the characters we might be assumed to identify with are stalked, mauled, sexually assaulted, and killed. Why do we allow horror directors—a field that is disproportionately male—to sell our nightmares back to us for a profit? A study by the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media found that, of all film genres, horror is the only one in which women statistically appear onscreen and speak as much as men do. Perhaps women would rather see ourselves battling for our lives than not see ourselves at all.

Everyone is always looking at women. The uncomfortable awareness of being observed sets in for girls during adolescence, and is inextricably entangled from our complicity as observers. In a media landscape saturated with women’s glamorized, perfected bodies, to exist as a girl is simultaneously to watch yourself from the outside, to scrutinize and dissect.

Horror movies make this dissection literal. They acknowledge what teenage girls already feel: that it hurts to be looked at. They turn the pain of being observed into, itself, an object of spectacle, an aesthetic achievement.

The women in horror movies are provocative, a misogynistic term intended to shift responsibility for bad behavior onto its victim. A provocative woman is to blame for anything that happens to her, simply because of some ingrained, perhaps imagined, character trait. She provokes. She invites. Just by existing, she says what Heather said to me so many times: “I dare you.”

When women watch horror movies, we vicariously experience both the injury of being seen and the power of seeing. Just as women are changed by being watched by men, horror movies are changed by being watched by women. Tangled together on Heather’s couch, our arms and legs braided together in the easy platonic way of teenage girls, we weren’t just consuming stories of pain and trauma and death. We were criticizing them, second-guessing them, trying to anticipate their endings, laughing at them, speculating about them.

*

The dead girl means something different to each of us.

The day Heather’s husband wakes up to find her dead on the couch, a Law & Order DVD endlessly repeating the same few seconds of menu screen music, her friends and family gather at her mother’s house to cry and drink and laugh and reminisce. There is no Heather anymore. We bring whatever pieces we can gather and begin the eternal, impossible task of trying to put her back together. Remember the time she packed nothing but six-inch platform shoes for a hiking trip? The time she kicked her sandal off in a mosh pit and never found it again? Remember her laugh? Her perfume? How she’d pick up the phone no matter what time it was?

Grief is another kind of objectification. Heather, in life, was complicated and funny and quick to anger and made choices I didn’t like or understand. In death, however, she can be arranged and displayed to highlight everything I loved most about her. I can skip over her contradictions, minimize our disagreements. She’ll never jump in to correct me again.

I’ve called Heather my best friend, but I wasn’t hers, or at least not her only one. At least half a dozen people thought of Heather as their best friend. If she chose you to receive her love and loyalty, nothing else could ever compare. She could look at almost anyone and see them with incredible depth, compassion, and clarity. I wonder, now, if I or anyone ever saw her that clearly.

Everyone who loved Heather has an opinion about her, about how her life should have been different, and whose fault it is that it wasn’t. Some of the people who knew her grew closer after her death, bonded by loss. Some of us sundered irrevocably.

Blame is transferred through the body of the dead girl. In her sightless eyes are all our failings.

A year after Heather’s death, her widower lashed out on social media—at me, at Heather’s mother, at other friends he nursed grievances against. He listed all the things Heather ever resented us for. He blamed us all for her death, for not seeing how sick she was, for not helping her sooner. I blocked him. Everything I wanted to say in return have been rotting under my tongue ever since. Heather forgave so much in the people she loved, things which, without her, we can’t forgive in each other.

Blame is transferred through the body of the dead girl. She is a lens through which we each see ourselves. In her sightless eyes are all our failings.

The bereaved pick over what’s left of her like scavengers, or like curators, taking the pieces we like best. We build the story of her from the evidence of our own memories, from photographs and birthday cards and yearbook signatures and mix CDs. There are huge gaps in our understanding, but it’s easy to ignore those. It’s easy to pretend I knew her perfectly, when she’s no longer right in front of me, inexplicably loving someone I hate.

I rearrange the clues, write down the evidence, but I am not trying to solve Heather’s death. A real coroner, somewhere, discovers the undiagnosed heart condition that interrupted her life at twenty-five, but this isn’t the answer I need. Nor am I struggling toward some holistic comprehension of her as a person. What I want is simply a story I can live with. It doesn’t have to be true.

*

The spectacle of Jane Doe on the table is grisly, but also, in some way, appealing. It’s an organized slaughterhouse, an archive of gore, though the actual blood is minimal. The camera returns over and over to her face, as though asking the corpse a question: Do you feel that? What about that? What about now? It’s nauseating, watching flesh carved open without the catharsis of a scream or a cringe. All that’s left is the calm, utterly brutal reduction of a human woman’s body to every cruelty it’s ever experienced.

Horror movies traffic in images of the body: hurt, dismembered, imperiled, violated, disfigured, dead. These images create the physical sensation of fear in the body of the viewer. Muscles tense, mouths go dry, pulses race, stomachs clench. The Autopsy of Jane Doe can be read as a metaphor for the experience of watching a horror movie, or for the impact of vicarious trauma. A woman is tortured by men, and because of this, men are tortured. She isn’t the perpetrator; she’s the medium through which pain is transmitted.

It’s so easy to find metaphors in horror movies. Mental illness, trauma, abuse, grief, toxic relationships, anxiety, jealousy, predators—every Jason or Leatherface has done stints as many of these. Everyone has something they’re afraid of, something that hurts them, something they’re running from. Horror movies make those things literal. Rearrange the pieces over and over. Make what you need.

I write about Heather, now, as the perfect mirror. I take what means the most to me and discard the rest, even though the rest is what made her a person. The chasm between words and real, human life is impossibly vast.

But maybe I’m not trying to write Heather back to life. Maybe I’m just trying to recreate what I needed most from her, what hurts the most now that it’s absent: the sense of being seen. She knew me when I was a whirling tornado of fragments, a disaster trying to become a woman. She helped me invent my own identity, piece together my own story.

After she was gone, I spent years feeling invisible, or feeling broken—disarticulated, as though the separate facets of my self weren’t communicating with each other. Some days, I couldn’t connect with my grief at all, not as though it were healed, but as though it were a body part gone numb for lack of circulation. It sent me no signals, but its weight was still present. I had to let the blood flow back through it until I could understand what it was telling me again. I had to write about Heather’s death in order to become intelligible to myself.

The dead girl is a key—not to a lock, but to a code. She makes it possible for us to read our own stories back.

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