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reginasrandomthoughts · 21 days ago

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I watched the found footage horror movie Megan is Missing and have some feelings that I want to let out in a space where my bestie has the chance to skip it.

I went in completely blind. I knew only the title, nothing more (no description, trailer, review, stills, poster, nothing) and boy did this movie do a number on me.

TW: child sexual abuse, rape, exploitation

The movie is bad. It is a D-tier movie that wants to talk about real issues without understanding the people who live them. The script is bad, the acting is bad, the plot is bad.

And it is not about Megan, which is just one of the reasons why I am pissed off.

I was trying to be charitable to the movie, try to look at it as one of those low budget horrors from inexperienced directors that is trying to make a good point but is just missing the mark but at a certain point as a creator you have to look into the mirror and ask yourself whether you are well equipped to handle a certain subject and have the spine to be honest about it. Because with certain subjects, missing the mark negates any good intentions and slides right over to exploitation.

And make no mistake, Megan is Missing is exploitative in a very disgusting way.

The titular character Megan is a 14 year old survival of ongoing sexual abuse. In the first 40 minutes of the 89 minute movie we see her coerced into performing (fortunately very unconvincing) oral sex, is implied to be coerced into performing oral sex off camera in exchange for drugs, she describes in graphic details being orally raped as a 10 years old by a 17 years old and admits to being raped multiple times by her step-father betweem the ages 9 and 11. She is shaped by these ongoing traumas. She talks about how her mother blames her for her step-father going into prison but the "you must have done something to seduce him" angle people makinf excuses for predators often use is left unsaid and largely unimplied by the movie, which is a shame bc that could have been used to draw awareness of how damaging that language is if the movie was about Megan (which it isn't). Megan reacts to her trauma with hypersexuality both as a measure to take back some agency (she describes the oral rape as a salacious piece of gossip about the first tome she "gave" oral sex) even if it means participating in her own abuse and to try to earn love through trading sex (she says point blank you can do anything to her as long as you say you love her).

This behaviour leads her to chat up a guy one of her friends tells her about and arrange to meet up with him, twice. First at a party where she spends hours looking for him only later to learn he was there but was just watching her look for him, then to later they arrange a date and a meet-up behind a restaurant from where Megan is abducted.

A better film would be about how Megan's past and current abuse, parental neglect (at best) and environmental influences primed her to ignore obvious read flags like a guy making excuses why he cant use camera, the inconsistently in the excuses or not wanting to be seen with her in public. From her perspective he talks to her decently, the date he proposes is way more innocent than any of her other activities and he cared enough to remember what he wore to the party he did not approach her at... she thinks she found a good one.

And then she gets abducted, imprisoned, tortured, sexually abused and exploited, has fetish images of her produced and uploaded to the internet (photos ARE shown in the movie and they are disturbing), gets murdered and then her corpse is showed into a barrel and left to dicompose.

We see the moment she is abducted, we see the images produced of her and we get a glimpse of her dead body but we do not see her time in captivity bc ultimately, the movie is not really about her.

It is much more about Megan's freshly 14 best friend Amy, who is from a well off, stable family who is religious, nerdy and sexually inexperienced. While Megan dresses and acts in a way to present herself older Amy is very childish, she even hid away her favourite teddy bear in an outdoors location when her mum told her to throw it away.

Amy is the fist to notice Megan is missing and she is the only one who knows Megan was chatting with this guy so she approaches him to ask if he knows anything about Megan. He gets really creepy really quickly and all but admits to kidnapping Megan at which point Amy reports him to the police.

As retaliation he abducts Amy (and the teddy bear) and takes Amy's camera she used to film her video diaries that he later dumps for some reason with 22 minutes of footage about Amy's imprisonment.

Megan disappeara at about thw 40 minute mark and we spend approximately 20 minutes with the search for her that culminates with Amy's abduction.

The next 22 minutes is just the footage on Amy's camera. The footage includes: Amy imprisoned in a cellar cell only in her underwear, Amy bribed with her teddy bear to eat out of a bowl like a dog, a two minute long footage of a close up of Amy's face as she is pressed down on the table from Megan's CSAM images as she is raped, footage of Amy being stuffed into the barrel with Megan's decomposing body and real time footage of the abducter digging a whole for the barrel and burying it while Amy begs for her life (some 7 minutes of that).

And just to be clear: i did not want to see either of these girls abused, i don't think the movie needed to show that to get its clumsy stranger danger message accross.

But I think it is telling that it was pure, virgin Amy's abuse, rape and murder used for shock value and not Megan's whose history of sexual abuse and exploitation was already well established. It's as if the movie agrees with the abductor who tells Amy he didn't do anything to Megan that Megan did not allow others to do before. As if Megan's past abuse would make her abuse at the hand of her muderer not shocking enough for the film's purposes.

There is also something deeply uncomfortably fetishistic in the idea that the rape we are shown might be Amy's first sexual experience, the loss of her virginity which is stengthened by the idea of her rapist putting his bloody hand next to her head near the end. The movie says Amy just turned 14 and even mistakenly calls her 15 once, but she is constantly infantilized using her teddy bear as a visual cue.

The found footage aspect of the movie adds to the visceral experience of watching it, but it also blurs the line between this and a snuff film someome might watch for geniune pleasure.

Having to watch that made me feel unclean, like I need to take a shower to wash off the experience of beind made a spectator to this.

If the horror of the film works to shock, scare and disturb it is because of the viewer's capacity for empathy and not because of the skills of the film makers. In this way, I feel the film's writer/director would have much more to learn from the average audience member than the average audience member would from this film.

#tw: sexual abuse #tw: child sexual abuse #tw: rape #megan is missing

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reginasrandomthoughts · 1 month ago

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Tw: mentiones of gore, graphic injuries

I just watched The Autopsy of Jane Doe and I want to talk about me because it really got to me. [Me from the end of the post: this is going to be incoherent].

For anyone who sees this post and hasnt seen the movie the base premise is that somewhere in Virginia the police finds the perfectly intact dead body of a young girl in the basement of a house where the entirw family was brutally murdered. Nobody knows who she is and the police asks the coroners, a father-son duo, to do her autopsy as soon as they can. Things start to go wrong.

It is a really good movie of about 80 minutes, i recommend it. That being said, spoilers ahead.

The movie is really good at playing to the base fears humans have around death and dead bodies ans especially those of people who have died violent deaths.

On the surface level, her body is completely intact, not a single bruise, blamish or sign of decay. She looks like she is sleeping so the first stages of the autopsy just look like they are inspecting a sleeping person.

And they are just doing their job, and are not inproper as far as coroners go, but she looks just like she's sleeping and you as the viewer know that she is not as dead as she looks like, so when they get to the point where they do a vaginal sweep to check for semen to see if anybody violated the corpse... that feels like a violation. I almost recoiled and had the urge to say "you are not supposed to do that".

And the movie is really trying to get into your head with this idea that she is not as dead as she looks from the very beginning.

In one of the early scenes, before her body even gets to the morgue, we are shown a body that has a soul bell tied to its feet and the father explains that back in the days it was really hard to tell when someone was just in a deep coma as opposed to dead so they used the soul bells to catch small movements. You are told from the very beginning to look foe signs that what is on the table isn't a dead body at all.

And this is a very long standing fear in humanity, that you will be buried alive, that you will be given your funeral preparations, may that be an autopsy or preservative work, before your body is dead. The fear that the body you arw handling might not be dead and you trying to bury it ans do right by it might be what's killing the person. That you are committing murder and causing pain by preparing the body for its final rest.

And you can see that play out with Jane Doe: when they cut into her, she bleeds. As the cuts becomes more extensive, she is cut open, her bones are broken to give access to her chest cavity, as the autopsy is becoming more invasive, the activity the father and son experience ramps up as if in protest to what they are doing.

The movie really wants you to look at it as her experiencing the same pain as if it was done to a living person because at the end of the movie there is even a scene where the father confirms that some of her cells are acting as if she was alive. That in some shape or form she is alive.

And that recontextualises the movie in some way.

They figure out early on that the body was put through some truly horrific abuse: broken joints, torture-type vaginal truama, a tooth was pulled out and she was force fead it wrapped in a shroud and at the end of the film we also see that there are ritualistic symbols tattood on the inside of her skin accross the upper body. Horrifying amounts of pain.

And they figure out that she was most likely a victim at the Salem witch trials and the symbols and rituals were meant to bound her.

To the movie's credit the father verbally says that there were no witches at the trial, only innocents and they figure that the ritual being done to an innocent is what turned her into this vengeful spirit that's trapped in her body.

During the entire haunting the body doesn't move unless it is moved. She can play extensive mind tricks, but she cannot move to protect herself.

Throughout the second half of the film we have the impressiom that she made the other corpses in the morgue come alive and move, that there is physical danger to our protagonists but when our protagonists decide to fight these reanimated courpses and actually take one down, it turns out that what the father took down was the son's girlfriend who came to the morgue to pick him up.

It's a really great scene, well-acted too, that to the attentive viewer gives the whole thing away.

At the beginning of the film we get a scene with the son and his girlfriend where he asks her to postpone their date becuase he has to stay and help with this autopsy that just came in and they agree that she will come back to pick her up at 11. This happens between 7:30pm and 8pm and I even made a mental note that she will be coming back.

When she leaves, we get a clear shot of thw weather. It is dusk so you can make an argument that the sky is gray because the sun is setting or that there are clouds covering it. And then the weather report says during the autopsy thag a storm rolled in and during the haunting the storm is getting worse, the reporter talks about flash flooding. And i thought that she is manipulating the weather amd wrote the girlfriend coming back as not possible, especially when they tried to get out of the morgue that is in the basement of their house through this trap door outside and they couldnt get it open bc of the wind and the rain that poured in when they tried.

They try to reach out to the sheriff's office, but there is no cell reception and their landline is cut.

That is to say, I completely forgot about the girlfriend so when she appeares, I was like "how did she get here" but we were in the closing action and I set that aside. But after everybody dies we get another weather report where the reporter says that the day after is their 4th consecutive sunny day. The storm wasn't real. The wind and rain keeping them trapped wasn't real just like how the walking corpses weren't real.

And i really like thaz because the movie managed to pull the wool over my eyes despite me knowing that not everything that is happening is really happening.

There are a couple of scenes in the movie where I got the feeling that the father is not seeing the same thing as the son: the door to one of the body storage unita opening, blood in their fridge, but these little hints just made me confident that I know what is going on.

Like when she started messing with the radio, changing channels until this spooky song came up. A part of me feels so stupid for not seeing this foe what it was because I even noted, okay the spooky song is all her there is no radio channel playing it but I never jumped to "nothing that comes out of the radio can be trusted".

So when the girlfriend dies, it puts things into perspective and you start thinking back on other incidents. If the walkimg corpse wasn't real and it was just projected over the girlfriend then was the cat the father had to mercy kill really injured? There is no actual evidence that she can physically hurt someone or move anything so it is pretty likely that the father just snapped the neck of his late wife's cat based on a hallucination and the cat was fine.

I really like how the movie manages to build the scares from both directions.

From her perspective, it is the fear of being trapped in your body as others treat you as if you were dead, it is pain and the torture and the helplessness. And from the other side you get this fear of losing your grip on your sanity and reality and ending up hurting yourself and others.

She never had the power to directly hurt them, she just could play with their mind until they hurt each other even if in the process they hurt her more.

And like r.i.p. to the human protagonists but what got to me immediately after I watched it is her helplessness. She is less of a monster that comes after you than a curse object you shouldn't have tampeted with. The haunting is seemingly triggered by her being in pain. It would be easy to not trigger her if she was laid to rest, but unfortunately, that cannot happen without an autopsy because she looks too fresh. People, even well intentioned people who just want to help, will keep triggering her for a very long time.

Time is another aspect of the horror that is happening here. She is a victim of the salem witch trials, that's in New England and her body turned up in Virginia over three centuries later. The implication is that across the centuries her body keeps getting moved around, which is not a fictional phenomenon. There are a lot of dead bodies that have not been laid to rest but been kept on exhibition or passed around as private memorabilia and the Ask a Mortician youtube channel has a lot of great videos about this but the one that came to mind is the one on Julia Pastrana, a woman who lived a life of exploitation and abuse because she was born with conditions that made her a "freak" in a freakshow exhibit and after she died her corpse was paraded around for 100 more years.

It's this idea that the pain and abuse doesn't stop with death, that even in death the abuse continues.

This too is a very old fear that had been with humanity perhaps since the dawn of our species. The idea that sensation does not stop at death, that the soul keeps experiencing some version of life and senaation is baked into every religion that has an afterlife. If you've lived a good life, your soul goes to a place where it will experience good things and if you are evil, your soul will go to a place where it will experience suffering. Funeral rituals throughout the ages have been developes to make sure the soul goes to a good place including prayers for earthly sins to be forgiven in death. I think all my Egyptology girlies will know that ancient Egyptians took their funeral rituals very seriously because an improper ritual can condemn a soul to not go to the afterlife but to stay here om Earth and wander lost for eternity.

This is essentially what happened to the Jane Doe of the movie. She was innocently accused, tortured, killed and in death instead of a proper funeral they performed a binding ritual on her that inadvertently turned her into a witch and trapped for centuries in her body that she is unable to move as any passerby can do to her body whatever they want to.

If pain is what triggers her, you have to wonder what have the people in the house where she was found have done to her? It was a very bloody murder scene and if she cannot hurt others physically you have to wonder what kind of people were they to have had this kind of violence in them.

What have all those people across the centuries who moved her body done to it.

Beyond the metaphysical and spiritual, this is a very real fear for a lot of women. There are a lot of stories about men violating women's corpses. The idea that you are not safe from abuse even in death is not jusr a religious one, it is also a practical consideration.

So what this film does is that it speaks to all of these fears: the fear of being mistaken for dead, the fear of mistaking a living body for a corpse, the fear of the consequences of an improper funeral, the loss of autonomy of body and mind, the helplessness of not being able to do anything against your abuse, the fear of having your humanity removed from you and the fear of the vengeful dead.

The last one is always present in movies about hauntings but I felt it less present in this one. The idea that the dead can avenge themselves on the living is there, she is doing what she is doing because they are hurting her but here it felt more tragic than scary. The father and son did not set out to cause her pain, that is just a consequence of her condition but it does not matter. Every character acts in a way that makes sense for their character and situation, they are just in a horrible situation that will keep on repeating because there is no undoing the kind of evil that was done to her so she will be forever stuck in this hell where the only thing she can do is lash out when hurt.

#rambles #the autopsy of jane doe

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