The Autopsy (2022)

There was something about the plot description that never really caught my eye with this one, yet it ended up being one of my favorites of the bunch. The central performances from F. Murray Abraham, Glynn Turman, and Luke Roberts were all incredible. They all understood the assignment, as weird as it was. It manages to blend a lot of different horror elements into the story and create something rather unique. It plays as a procedural, a body snatcher story, and plays with our fears of autopsies and being dissected alive. They do an impressive job building the background and mythology of the space creatures the story centers around, more so than other body snatcher rip-offs I have seen (and oh boy, there are a lot of them). At the beginning the threads felt rather loose and disjointed but they ultimately come together beautifully making this both eerie and fun. This reminds me a bit of a great low budget indie horror film from a few years ago called The Vast of Night. Both manage to give off big trippy cosmic horror elements while being rather small scale. There is no big invasion, just a few unlucky souls interacting with a perplexing otherworldly being. As JJ mentions, if you like X-files vibes this is a great choice. 4.5 out of 5 sacs of blood.

—Tori Potenza

Plots are lost on me, as are opening flashbacks full of easter eggs, but I can dig a solitary night at a mineshaft morgue with an old guy talking to himself into a reel-to-reel as he dissects a cosmic horror. By the third episode of this series, the deep, dark, hyper-articulated but murky atmosphere is well established. Passageways are infernal, labyrinthine, stacked with bodies and eldritch filth. Which rules. The Autopsy has an X-Files vibe—one of the trippy existential extraterrestrial episodes—but without the catholic guilt, authority fetish, and other Chris Carter bullshit. It’s also a unique and super out-there take on the possession narrative. If an autopsy takes us inside a body, how far can we go into death? 4 out of 5 sacs of blood.

—J †Johnson