The Autopsy is the third episode in Guillermo del Toro’s horror anthology series, The Cabinet of Curiosities. Most of the episodes of this show tend to become important tales of the human psyche, going beyond the scopes and tropes of horror. David Prior’s The Autopsy, starring F. Murray Abraham, Glynn Turman, and Luke Roberts is no different.

The story begins with a man jumping on an elevator in a mine and then somehow causing an explosion that kills him and everyone present in the carriage. It then moves to Sherriff Nate Craven asking his old friend, Dr. Carl Winters, to perform autopsies on the bodies of the deceased victims of the incident.

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Craven also informs Winters that an individual called Joe Allen was responsible for the incident, and it is believed that a spherical object he was carrying with him was responsible for the explosion.

Winters, who is suffering from stomach cancer and has only six months to live, decides to go in alone at night to perform the autopsies. He begins recording his observations of the bodies by saying that these observations are for his friend Nate only, and that the official document will be a written one.

After he is done working on a couple of bodies, Winters suddenly notices that the corpse of Allen, who had also died in the explosion, has suddenly reanimated, and even starts speaking. The new being, who is not Allen himself, tells Winters that it is an alien. Viewers can guess that Allen had found it when he had gone to see a meteor shower earlier in the episode.

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The alien tells Winters that it feeds on the body it inhabits, and since it was done with Allen, Winters is its new target. The parasitic alien explains to Winters that his cancer would be an ever-growing source of its nutrition.

However, as soon as the alien cuts itself out of Allen’s body and creeps towards him, Winters picks up a scalpel, gouges out his eyes, and slices his throat, thus making sure that he, along with the cancer inside, is dead before the parasite takes control of his body. In this way, it won’t be able to sustain itself for long.

It is the doctor’s presence of mind and his innate sense of doing something good that helps him get the better of the monster. Winters even writes a message on his chest to his friend, Craven, asking him to bury his corpse.