Father and son coroners receive a mysterious unidentified corpse with no apparent cause of death. As they attempt to examine the "Jane Doe," they discover increasingly bizarre clues that hold the key to her terrifying secrets.
In the late 19th century, a brutal land baron slaughters a Roma clan, unleashing a curse on his family and village. In the days that follow, the townspeople are plagued by nightmares, the baron's son goes missing, and a boy is found murdered. The locals suspect a wild animal, but a visiting pathologist warns of a more sinister presence lurking in the woods.
Doctor Palmer, a former pathologist, wrote a fictional book based on his real cases. In the book, the madman gets caught, but in reality he is still uncaught. After the book is released, Palmer's editor is kidnapped. Palmer soon is sent a present containing a page of his book, and a bone from his editor. Together with the police, Palmer tries to find his editor, who might still be alive. In addition, his own son becomes one of the main suspects. Written by Julian Reischl
A pathologist experiments with a deaf-mute woman who is unable to scream to prove that humans die of fright due to an organism he names The Tingler that lives within each person on the spinal cord and is suppressed only when people scream when scared.
A single mother and a childless morgue technician are bound together by their relationship to a little girl they have reanimated from the dead.
At a morgue, forensic pathologists conduct autopsies of the corpses assigned. "S. Brakhage, entering, WITH HIS CAMERA, one of the forbidden, terrific locations of our culture, the autopsy room. It is a place wherein, inversely, life is cherished, for it exists to affirm that no one of us may die without our knowing exactly why. All of us, in the person of the coroner, must see that, for ourselves, with our own eyes. It is a room full of appalling particular intimacies, the last ditch of individuation. Here our vague nightmare of mortality acquires the names and faces of OTHERS. This last is a process that requires a WITNESS; and what 'idea' may finally have inserted itself into the sensible world we can still scarcely guess, for the CAMERA would seem the perfect Eidetic Witness, staring with perfect compassion where we can scarcely bear to glance." – Hollis Frampton