BIRTH
PAINS: Pregnancy and Birth in Horror Movies
Conceptual
anxieties, pregnant panic and the birth pangs of horror
The second Golden Age
of Horror was born premature. For though associated with the 1970s,
it began in 1968, with the arrival of two films that would forever
change the genre landscape: George A. Romero’s Night of the
Living Dead and Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby.
Redefining the zombie as a vehicle for sociopolitical commentary,
Romero’s low-budget shocker focused on death, the theme with which
all human experience ends and with which the horror genre is most
closely associated. Polanski’s film, conversely, explored the other
end of the spectrum, dealing with the fears that can surround
maternity and birth, where all our lives begin. This was horror at
its most (literally) conceptual, and it would beget a preoccupation
with panic-stuffed pregnancy that the genre has ever since been
unable to get fully out of its system. INFERNAL arrives on DVD
from 24th August, 2015, courtesy of
Signature Entertainment in which the unrivalled joy of a newborn
baby rapidly descends into fear of the highest order, we take a look
at the most gruesome horror films that feature pregnancy, birth and
disturbed children.
INFERNAL
As newlywed couple
Sophia and Nathan move into their new home together Sophia delivers
the news that she’s pregnant. Nathan digests the news, proposes to
her and they get married, hoping to live happily ever after... The
couple welcome their first child into the world shortly after getting
married, but their joy quickly turns to panic when the young girl
starts acting strangely. The unrivalled joy of a newborn baby rapidly
descends into fear of the highest order when unexplainable things
start happening around the house. Fearing their daughter could be
possessed, the parents call in a priest to perform an exorcism, but
when that goes horribly wrong, the parents start to wonder if they
will ever be able to rid their daughter of the evil power lurking
within her...
Rosemary’s
Babies
Caught between her
oldworld Catholicism and her hip metropolitan modernity, Rosemary
Woodhouse (Mia Farrow) has just moved into a New York apartment with
a shady history, hoping to make “a new beginning” there.
Impregnated while passed out in bed, Rosemary grows ever more anxious
and paranoid about the intentions of her self-absorbed, controlling
husband Guy (John Cassavetes) and the interfering old couple next
door – and once the seed of an idea about witchcraft has been
planted inside her, it grows and grows as her pregnancy continues,
until eventually some sort of truth must out.
Key to Polanski’s
film is the question, never fully resolved, of whether Rosemary is
genuinely falling prey to a Satanic coven, or suffering from “the
pre [and post] partum crazies”, as she struggles, like all mothers,
to come to terms with the thing growing inside her, both a part of
herself and something other. For the society that Rosemary is
entering – and helping to build – fills her with doubt,
reflecting the ambivalent feelings that many would have harboured
about the changing world of the Sixties. Though born of the
recombinant materials of the past, babies are the future – and in
turbulent ’68, the future, though pregnant with revolutionary
possibilities, seemed very uncertain.
Relocated to
contemporary Paris and considerably expanded (padded, even) in
length, Agnieszka Holland’s 2014 two-part reimagining for
television fills in the narrative gaps, focusing as much on the
Satanic seduction of Guy as the infernal insemination of Rosemary.
Yet for all its creepy set-pieces, this Rosemary remake entirely
aborts the original’s crucial ambiguity, and so throws out the baby
with the bathwater. Polanski’s is definitely the daddy.
Alien
Invasions
The biology of birth –
the blood, the pain, all that icky anatomy – makes it the perfect
subject for body horror, and in particular for male anxieties about
feminine physicality and function. So in Ridley Scott’s ‘seminal’
SF-horror Alien (1979), the conventional modalities of reproduction
are overturned as Executive Officer Kane (John Hurt, indeed) is
orally raped by a newly hatched alien ‘facehugger’, and then
internally incubates and gives chest-bursting birth to the creature’s
next lifestage – aboard a spaceship whose computer system is
ironically named ‘Mother’. By the time the film’s heroine,
Ripley (Sigourney Weaver), has out-toughed and outlived many male
colleagues and crash-landed into an all-male penal planet in David
Fincher’s long-gestating Alien3 (1992), she is herself carrying the
embryo of an alien, and struggling to hold onto her own agency as
everyone wants a piece of mother and unborn daughter. Scott’s
prequel Prometheus (2012), ‘consciously uncoupled’ from the
franchise that birthed it, sees sterile archaeologist Shaw (Noomi
Rapace) undergoing immaculate conception via her partner’s
alien-infected sperm, and then forced to perform an invasive
Caesarean section upon herself using surgical equipment designed
exclusively for men.
Meanwhile, the Strause
brothers’ hybridised spin-off sequel Alien Vs. Predator: Requiem
(2007) shows a ‘Predalien’ let loose in a maternity ward,
graphically pumping multiple large ova down the throat of an already
gravid woman whose waters have just broken. It is a grotesque
spectacle not easily forgotten, even if it is perhaps over-egging the
pregnancy pudding.
Big Babies
With its
extra-terrestrial invaders, weird face rapes and rapid gestations,
Harry Bromley Davenport’s Xtro (1982) might sound like an English
Alien ripoff, but the film also ‘delivers’ something new to the
reproductive cycle: the sight of a recently impregnated woman giving
birth, agonising and ultimately fatal to herself, to a fully grown
man who then, as the pièce de résistance, bites through his own
umbilical cord.
Not that such extreme
births cannot be survived. In Miike Takashi’s unclassifiable Gozu
(2003), the yakuza Minami (Hideko Sone) is tasked with escorting
Ozaki (Aikawa Sho), a senior ‘brother’ for whom Minami harbours
repressed homoerotic feelings, to a strange town to bump him off. In
fact Ozaki has a heart attack en route, but Minami must spend the
rest of the film searching for Ozaki’s missing corpse. In the final
sequence, Ozaki witnesses a young woman (Yoshino Kimika) give birth
to the fully-formed and now living Ozaki – and we last see the
three of them walking arm in arm down the street, in a ménage à
trois where sexuality has become incestuously confused.
Even that is topped,
though, by the threesome in Z is for Zygote, Chris Nash’s
contribution to The ABCs of Death 2 (2014). A man heads out while his
wife is in labour, instructing her to eat ‘portlock root’ to
“slow down the baby until I can get here from town.” Cut to 13
years later, and the woman, now enormously pregnant, conducts lengthy
conversations about her sense of abandonment with the grown child
that is still in her belly. When the portlock runs out, the baby,
promising it will never leave its mother, guts and bones her from the
inside and fills out her skin, essentially merging itself with her
body. Finally the husband does return, hoping to try make another
baby with his ‘wife’.
Labour Pains
What with the morning
sickness, the discomfort of increased weight, and eventually the
intense, body-splitting trauma of labour and delivery, pregnancy is
associated with physical pain and maternal sacrifice (or ‘materdom’).
Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo’s bludgeoning Inside (2007)
dramatises all the torment of this process, as the very pregnant
Sarah (Alysson Paradis), who recently survived a head-on collision
that took her husband’s life, spends one last night alone with her
mixed feelings on impending maternity (she is scheduled for an
induced birth in the morning). Except that she is not alone – for a
mysterious woman in black (Béatrice Dalle) has come inside, looking
like death itself, to claim her due. Over one long night the two will
bloodily contest ownership of Sarah’s unborn foetus, in a grimly
grotesque parody of the struggles and travails of birth.
The short sharp shock
of a car accident is often used as a vivid analogue of birth pangs.
Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook (2014) opens with a primal scene, as
Amelia Vanek is being rushed to hospital in labour, a violent crash
both kills her husband Oskar and ushers in the arrival of her son
Samuel (Noah Wiseman) – and the deep scars that this simultaneous
death- and birthday leaves in Amelia will, seven years later, come
back to haunt the Vaneks.
Similarly, in Paul
Solet’s Grace (2009), Madeline (Jordan Ladd) is widowed by an
accident that also kills the baby in her belly, but she refuses to
let go, insisting on carrying the dead foetus to full term – while
her post-menopausal mother-in-law Vivian (Gabrielle Rose) wants to
mother (and breastfeed) the baby herself. All that maternal madness
engenders a miracle – and a monster – that “needs special
food.” Madeline’s cat Jonesy shares its name with the on-board
pet in Alien – much as Grace shares that film’s interest in
perverted birth.
Meanwhile, Zach
Parker’s Proxy (2013) begins with what ought to be every expectant
mother’s nightmare. As Esther (Alexia Rasmussen) leaves an ob/gyn
checkup, she is attacked in the street, knocked unconscious, and then
battered repeatedly about her pregnant belly with a brick. In
emergency surgery, doctors remove her foetus by C-section, too late
to save it – and yet, as we gradually get to know the bruised
Esther and another woman (Alexa Havins) whom she befriends at a child
bereavement group, these two reveal themselves as like-minded
fantasists with some very strange ideas in embryo. And so it becomes
clear that some women are maybe just not cut out to be mothers –
except of invention.
Engendered
Birth
If Alien presents male
viewers with the nightmare of having to endure the kind of labour
pain that so many women go through as a matter of course, then Jacob
Vaughan’s Bad Milo! (2014) plays out the same fears for grotesque
laughs. It opens with an ultrasound – but the patient is not a
mother-to-be, but Duncan (Ken Marino), and his ‘baby’ is in fact
a large growth in his colon. That tumour will grow inside Duncan, and
eventually, painfully, emerge from his rectum as Milo, the monstrous
(yet baby-like) incarnation of its stressed-out host’s repressed id
– and Duncan, despite his stated fear of parenthood, must learn not
just to let out the beast (repeatedly), but to mother it.
The final image of
Matsumoto Hitoshi’s extreme sex comedy R100 (2013) is of its
protagonist, the salaryman Takafumi Katayami (Ichi the Killer‘s
Omori Nao), sporting his own very pregnant belly. The path that has
led him to that state is hardly a straight one. With his wife in a
three-year coma, his son coming of age in a single-parent family, and
his own renascent, guilt-riddled libido tearing him apart, Takafumi
signs up with an exclusive gentlemen’s SM club, and learns painful
lessons in how to combine the rôles of father, pervert and, yes,
mother.
Hybrid
Gen(r)es
Conception happens when
sperm collides with egg, creating an admixture of two different
genetic codes. Yet this need not be an altogether natural process. In
David Cronenberg’s The Fly (1986), scientist Seth Brundle (Jeff
Golblum) finds himself in sexless genetic union with an insect via an
experimental teleporter. Most of the film is concerned with Brundle’s
tragic Kafka-esque metamorphosis – but a key subplot sees Brundle
impregnating his friend Veronica Quaife (Geena Davis) with his mutant
seed. After having a nightmare in which she births a giant pupa,
‘Ronnie’ declares, “I want it out of my body now!” – but
before she can have an abortion, Seth kidnaps her, hoping to fuse
her, himself and their unborn baby into “a family of three merged
together in one body.” Seth is killed before that can happen –
but we never do find out what happens to their baby… at least, not
until The Fly II.
Genetics prove just as
madly incestuous in Vincenzo Natali’s Splice (2009), in which
childless biochemist couple Elsa (Sarah Polley) and Clive (Adrien
Brody) unethically engineer a female creature from animal and human
(indeed Elsa’s) DNA, and secretly raise it as both specimen and
baby. Growing rapidly, the adolescent ‘Dren’ (Delphine Chanéac)
seduces Clive before changing sex and raping Elsa. The film ends with
a pregnant Elsa agreeing to carry to term the monster within.
If both The Fly and
Splice represent successful genetic fusions of the science fiction
and horror genres, then Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead’s Spring
(2014) is an unexpected hybrid of horror and romance – allowing
this article to end on something like a positive note. The heroine of
Spring, Louise (Nadia Hilker), is a mutant who can regenerate herself
– and remain eternally youthful – by getting pregnant every 22
years and then using the embryonic stem cells to metamorphose into a
rejuvenated merger of herself and her partner.
Only now, for the first
time in two millennia, she is falling in love with her ‘donor’,
Evan (Lou Taylor Pucci) – even if that love may lead to a more
normal birth, and the passing down of Louise’s freakish physical
makeup to the next generation. This is a film of monstrous
transformations and aberrant biochemistry, but at its heart Spring
addresses the Darwinian pursuit of self-replication that lies at the
heart of every procreative act. In its exploration of both mortality
and the infinite via a very unusual form of pregnancy, Spring
delivers alright.
By Anton Bitel
***
INFERNAL
is released on DVD
on
24th
August, 2015, courtesy of Signature Entertainment.
