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Authors
Advisor(s)
Abstract(s)
The Autopsy of Jane Doe (2016), directed by André Øvredal, is a horror film that was widely
acclaimed by the critics and audiences alike, due to the originality with which it tackled horror
and manipulated both its Gothic features and the supernatural.
The plot is quite simple, but its underlying implications are far more complex. Two men, father
and son, both coroners, are asked to examine the body of a young woman whose origins are
unknown. The corpse, named Jane Doe (because its origins are unknown), is supposedly
connected with a crime, since it was found partially unearthed in the cellar of a house whose
owners appear to have been brutally murdered.
What contributes to render Øvredal´s cinematic narrative interesting, is the mise-en-scène of
certain tropes and references that tie in with the American Gothic tradition. Eerie ambiances,
psyches on the verge of disintegration, latent family tension, doppelgängers, and the house
itself seem to carry echoes of Edgar Allan Poe’s tales, such as “The Fall of the House of Usher”,
“Ligeia” or “The Black Cat”. Moreover, we must not forget that at the centre of this visual
narrative, lies the inert body of a young woman, recently unburied, an image that is quite
recurrent in Poe’s literary works.
Within this suggestive framework, the purpose of this paper is to underscore the Gothic
influence of Poe’s fiction upon Øvredal’s film, highlighting the relevance of the feminine
presence (connoted with a female monster) as a crucial engine that propels the visual narrative
forward, eventually turning a medical act, an autopsy, into a horror tale.
Description
Keywords
André Øvredal Edgar A. Poe Gothic Horror Corpse Autopsy Witch
Citation
Lopes, E. (2019).Edgar Allan Poe’s Gothic Revisited in André Øvredal’s The Autopsy of Jane Doe (2016). M. A. Lima, Everything is a Story: Creative Interactions in Anglo-American Studies. Évora, Portugal: Universidade de Évora, Associação de Estudos Anglo-Americanos. Vila Nova de Famalicão, Portugal: Edições Húmus, pp.125-136