By Maria Lewis
There are few things more horrifying than childbirth. Any mother who has had to pee something the size of a wriggling, screaming watermelon will tell you that. And scary movies – for their part – have spent the past 40 years trying to recreate and capture that horror on the big screen.
For as long as humans have existed, there have been fears, panic and a growing anxiety of the unknown surrounding pregnancy. Not only does the human body go through a physical transformation so extreme it would make body-horror pioneer David Cronenberg giddy, there’s the psychological aspect as well. What is this thing growing inside of you? Who will they be? And can they love you as much as you hope you will love them? These are all logical and normal fears that – compounded with the chemical reactions swirling through a pregnant body – can be the source for some of the most inventive, bizarre and downright terrifying horror.
Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby is considered by many to be the birth *ahem* of pregnancy horror, with the director expertly wielding the suspense to the point where the audience – like the protagonist – is uncertain whether the fears are imagined or ever-present. The 1968 movie was nominated for two Academy Awards (Ruth Gordon wining one for best supporting actress) and just over a decade later, Ridley Scott delivered his version with Alien in 1979. Sure, on the surface it’s a movie about survival in space. Yet once you dig a little deeper, it’s about subversion: the reverse pregnancy and the anti-maternal instinct. Ripley, we later learn a mother herself, is forced to take on and destroy something that impregnates itself in the host, gestating for hours before violently bursting forth in a spray of blood, guts and gore (in many ways, not that different from regular birth). The face-hugger dies to give birth to the xenomorph, who penetrates through human flesh with its living host also dying to give birth to it. It’s the kind of live, die, repeat cycle that Doug Liman would be proud of.
Outside of the more famous titles, there has been room for the concept to grow into adolescence with a mix of horror movies that range from terrible (Demon Seed) to actually really interesting (Prevenge). Grace from 2009 is a pretty fun example, if you consider the concept of a woman carrying her stillbirth to term only for that corpse to revive upon birth and develop a hankering for human blood to be ‘fun’. It’s a schlocky premise that is executed better than its B-movie aspirations and when combined with last year’s Prevenge for a double-bill, you’re given back-to-back female driven narratives that are hella refreshing. The Unborn from 1991 hit right at the time IVF was being discussed in the mainstream media and taps into a lot of those fears (the 2009 movie of the same name is truly not worth mentioning).
There’s also Splice from the same year, with the compelling duo of Sarah Polley and Adrien Brody. It plays in that interesting area between horror and science-fiction, much like The Fly and Species, which both dealt with extraterrestrial births in different ways. In Splice, it’s scientists Polley and Brody who bring their lab experiment to life and raise it like a child … up to a point. It becomes clear their creation has the ability to be incredibly dangerous and a conflict begins to emerge as they battle with the ramifications of what they have done.
Earlier in 2017, Darren Aronofsky was able to separate himself from his one, true love – scarves – for his new film mother!. Along with having the stupidest punctuation since a Fast and Furious sequel, it’s one of the most divisive movies of the year. A central plotline is birth: conception, pregnancy, delivery and then… other stuff (no spoilers here). While the film as a whole reads like a pretentious art school project that just so happens to star A-Listers, it does tap into key elements surrounding the horror of pregnancy and birth. That’s not to mention the fears and insecurities that come afterwards as a parent.
Yet there are better interpretations of this everywhere you look in the genre landscape. The Omen – yes, even the 2006 remake – is every parents’ worst fear manifested: their child being Satan incarnate. The result of the birth being the source of the horror itself is a clever development and expansion on the original themes, which we’ve also seen in The Last Exorcism, Children Of The Corn, Morgan, Village Of The Damned, Little Evil and even The Ring (to a degree). And as long as we continue to be terrified and fascinated in equal measure by reproduction, it will remain an inspiring source of fear gestating inside its own subgenre of horror.
Maria Lewis is a journalist and author previously seen on SBS Viceland’s The Feed. She’s the presenter and producer of the Eff Yeah Film & Feminism podcast. Her debut novel Who’s Afraid? was released in 2016 with the sequel – Who’s Afraid Too? – out now. Her new book It Came From The Deep is available worldwide in eBook format. You can find her on Twitter @MovieMazz
