Autopsy and the unhinged decadence of Giallo
Necrophilia runs rampant in Armando Crispino's roughie
It didn’t take long for gialli to evolve beyond its simple, albeit grimy, origins. By the mid-1970’s it was a runaway train of a genre that wouldn’t run out of steam until the 90’s as film studios around Rome struggled to scrape the very last crusty bits off the bottom of the barrel. Even Dario Argento, the undisputed maestro of the genre, struggled to squeeze any life out of it. But even at the peak of the crescendo in the mid 1970’s, the genre lurched in every possible direction, represented by ecstatic heights of achievement from the aforementioned Argento, but joined by stellar output from Lucio Fulci, Umberto Lenzi, and the ostensible father of giallo, Mario Bava. But a frequency wave is as much a series of peaks as it is valleys, and giallo isn’t without an equal number of absolute dogs or, to be kinder, utterly weird shit on the fringe which goes to insane lengths to carve out of a space of its own. The popularity of these movies couldn’t possibly be any more saturated in this moment in history. How do you keep asses in seats when everyone came to see a Mario Bava picture at the giallo double feature and your feature ends up on the ass-end of the bill? Every giallo that made it to release had to ensure that its script ran strictly by the numbers. The lead actress had to be fully nude in the first fifteen minutes and engaged in sapphic romance before the end of the second act. You couldn’t rely on prurient interest alone anymore, even if your cast featured fully-frontal-nude American expats in the twilight of their career. You had to do something wild with your movie if it was going to cut through the noise and your name on the poster in the directorial credit wasn’t going to bring them in. You had to do what Armando Crispino did with Autopsy and eagerly engage with the vile and forbidden.
Crispino is a bit of an anomaly among the genre directors of Italy. He wasn’t terribly prolific, directing only nine features during his career, and with only twelve writing credits to his name, only three of them are not his own features. Even among those statistics, Autopsy, falls late in his directing career, a fact which might explain a few technical and stylistic qualities of the movie. The qualities which set gialli apart from simple murder mysteries outnumber my cynical qualifications mentioned above, of nudity and sex. There were stylistic flourishes therein that you only found in Italian horror movies. There was dramatic lighting and a love affair with Italy, urban and pastoral. The murders, though not always, bore a lot in common with the American slasher and the plot at the center of the film was often so contrived that it stretched the limits of credibility taut. Autopsy has some of those qualities, enough to have it generally considered to be among the body of giallo, writ-large, but their presence presents a paint-by-numbers scenario. A list of must-haves handed to Crispino by a producer and joylessly rendered to frame in the running time of the movie. To make things interesting, at least for himself, Crispino shoehorned a positively rank-and-file giallo mystery into a disgusting tableau that set Autopsy apart from its contemporaries, and for that it tends to live in the shadows, misunderstood by aficionados of the genre whose expectations went unmet
Autopsy’s plot is fairly banal business: Pathology student, Simona — played to peak hysterics by Mimsy Farmer, who’d made a name for herself with histrionics — is working toward her master’s degree, her thesis about staged suicides versus real suicides. She works overtime in a Roman morgue amid a mid-summer epidemic of suicide. More and more dead bodies roll into the morgue, dismissed as still more suicides by the stereotypically useless giallo police detectives, but Simona isn’t convinced and neither is the brother of one victim, a priest with a shadowy past played, again to maximum histrionics, by Barry Primus. The body count climbs, the police hand-wave it all, and in typical lower-end giallo fare, the mystery manages to sort itself out by the time the credits roll.
But I wouldn’t be talking about this movie if that’s all there was, would I?
What sets this movie apart from its contemporaries is a quality that I find genuinely disturbing. I can’t decide if Crispino added it by design or if by some hidden quality of his psyche, whispering to the audience through the script.
Though the flick does eventually cool it and slow the pace, it comes out of the corner throwing haymakers. Autopsy wastes no time with a close up on a pair of tette Italiano as their owner slits her wrists, bathing the lens in blood. There’s more suicides and then things take an even darker turn as we’re taken to the morgue and introduced to our protagonist, Simona. But not before there’s more nudity, this time the naked body of a woman bearing numerous gaping stab wounds. They could have brought her in covered! There’s no reason for her to be presented both as a dead body and a source of titillation. As a matter of fact, everyone in the morgue is naked, except, of course, for the attendants. This could be perceived as ordinary as clothing impedes an autopsy but the lens of the camera leers at the nudity, fixating on breasts and bush. Our introduction to Simona takes place as she’s being harassed by one of her co-workers, a man who very politely asks if she’d mind if he showed her his penis and then, later on, attempts to violently rape her. Things take an even darker turn as Simona, without explanation begins to experience a series of rather terrifying hallucinations where the bodies get up off of their tables, one of them smiling broadly as he approaches, intending to have sex with her. Another pair of corpses engage in sex on the cold tile floor, and still another is clearly horrified by his unlife and simply screams. These visions plague Simona as the movie goes on. To such a point, in fact, that they interfere with her sex life. She even suffers a recurring delusion in which she is one of the corpses, again presented from the waist up, both a dead body and a piece of sexy meat. Later on, her boyfriend’s aggressive attempt to have sex with her in his car results in a sleazy shot which fixates on her panties, suddenly exposed during the struggle, and a scene not fifteen minutes later which results in another salacious upskirt shot. The sleaze-factor sails smoothly to a score of ten out of ten when Simona’s harasser from the opening morgue scene erotically feels up one of the corpses and then tops off neatly as Simona’s philandering father is introduced, leaping out of a swimming pool and playfully trying to pull his daughter into a hug while wet. But two things push this into creep territory as Simona is a grown-ass woman and daddy dearest ultimately kisses her on the lips in a way that is portrayed as, firstly, totally unwelcome and incestuous, and secondly, way too long.
The constant blurring between themes of death and sex are textbook Freud but if Bava or Argento represent the state of the art, these themes in their hands would be deliberate and appropriately tie themselves to the film’s plot (while being no less misogynistic). Autopsy, however, is strictly Chef Boyardee-grade giallo. It’s a story so bland that its own auteur kept himself invested with a wraparound story that is positively drenched in grotesque themes of sexual violence, abuse, and incest and then lets them go, presented without comment. And that’s what makes the sexual subtext of the film so fucking fascinating to me. How could such a hack turn out a lazy horror movie but pack the loose ends with such a sophisticated psychological expression, no matter how morbid? Numerous scenes hint at a larger macabre tapestry but simply drop the lead, as though reminded that necrophilia isn’t the point here. Simona’s father’s girlfriend, like Simona, also seems to be preoccupied with images of death, a scene between herself and Simona taking place at a museum exhibit of grisly suicide tableau and a rapid-fire imagery of crime scene photography of mutilated corpses. Later, the juxtaposition of boyfriend Edgar’s collection of low-stakes old-time porno and Simona’s collection of autopsy photos speaks volumes to this point, remarked upon by a victim-to-be, “You don’t get off on these, do you?”
Well, does she? When attempting to express herself in perfectly normal sexual means, she freezes up and melts down and isn’t able to taste freedom until submitting to Edgar’s advances only after her violent sexual assault at work, fantasizing about the forbidden in a way that may as well be as heinous to Italian audiences in the 1970’s as fucking a dead body: fucking a Catholic priest.
Ultimately, Simona’s delusions are explained away as stress and burnout, but the constant co-mingling of death and arousal is suspect to a fault. It also stands to reason that it plays no larger role in the proceedings than this thing that just sorta happens and is then forgotten about, entirely. Simona is unable to perform sexually with her boyfriend, she is portrayed as frigid and bound, desperately wanting a more ordinary sexual experience, evident in a scene where she and boyfriend, Edgar, look at a series of old-timey porno pictures, but is instead haunted by visions of the corpse that she imagined wanted her sexually in the morgue. The primary plot about the murders practically takes a backseat to the movie’s pathological detours into the psychology of sex and death. And this is to say nothing about the implied incest between Simona and her father and a certain spoilerific revelation at the end. These points of subplot rise up and sail past casually in a way that will haunt me to my grave. Why do these deeper points come up, only to be stomped back down by a lousy, nigh-nonsensical blackmail plot?
I have so many god damn questions. In a genre of film practically bursting at the metaphorical seams with nonsense and questionable plot angles, Autopsy positively fucks with my expectations. What exactly is going on here? Behind the scenes, that is. Or rather, in Cripino’s head. With the exception of Farmer, the abundant nudity is confined to dead bodies, dead bodies presented as objects meant to excite you in the pants region, and more than one character in the movie is sexually excited by the dead. Were this movie made by anyone else these points would have gone somewhere or amounted to something but they don’t read that way at all. They read like a confession given to a priest on the other side of the partition.
Were it not for these fascinating but fucked up qualities, Autopsy would be a completely forgettable piece of giallo. Viewers with the stomach for something particularly morbid are encouraged to check it out but be prepared for a haunting fascination with its subtexts and utterly wet fart of an ending.