In the penultimate scene of 1979’s The Brood, mentally disturbed Nora Carveth gives birth to something — not a human child but a dwarf-like creature from a “psychoplasmically induced” external womb.
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The audience is led to believe that the small monster represents adult Nora’s unreconciled anger from systematic childhood abuse. The “offspring” joins several more hiding in the attic of the clinical research center where she is a patient. These minions often sneak away and kill the targets of their mother’s unrestrained fury.
Much blood is spilled, including Nora’s, before her ex-husband and natural-born child escape, though her small daughter is already exhibiting symptoms of her mother’s horrifying malady.
The Brood isn’t just another violent psychological thriller lacking redemption but the apex of nearly a decade of movies in which childbirth itself is the horror, where women have lost control of womb and womanhood, becoming vessels for monstrous immaculate conceptions.
As Halloween approaches, it is instructive to see how the horror-film industry over the decades has reacted to the social and political dynamics of American life. The 1950s led to, on one hand, space-race fears of alien invasion (The Thing from Another World, 1951) and, on the other, mass societal conformity (Invasion of the Body Snatchers, 1956). The nuclear age and the Cold War sparked a legion of paranoid, apocalyptic thrillers like 1964’s The Last Man on Earth and 1962’s Panic in the Year Zero!, as well as radiation monster flicks like the Japanese Godzilla series in the 1950s and Them! in 1954.
Meanwhile, Soylent Green (1973) and the British No Blade of Grass (1970) sprung out of the ecological-dystopian genre that had scarce resources, plagues, or other climate-induced crises undermine the civilized world. Of course, George Romero touched off the zombie-apocalypse craze in 1968 with Night of the Living Dead, which reflected neuroses from domestic political strife and war. (RELATED: Andrew Klavan’s House of Horror)
“Gynaehorror” (a term coined by author Erin Harrington) is a genre of its own, but the years between 1970 and 1980 are unique in that they coincide with three compelling social-political trends coursing through the fraught American decade: women’s liberation, abortion rights following 1973’s Roe v. Wade ruling, and the new and dramatic rise of divorce. According to surveys since, both nation-wide abortion and divorce rates peaked after this period and then began downward declines in the early 1990s.
Unlike 1968’s Rosemary’s Baby — in which the maternal instinct overpowers the urge of the mother to recoil from the fact that she just gave birth to the devil’s own — this era’s films make the babies either alien infestations or grotesqueries that threaten not only the mother’s life but those of everyone around her.
While The Brood wins the award for the sickest portrayal of repression and victimhood, it is not the most garish or cartoonish of this thankfully short-lived genre. That may go to I Don’t Want to be Born, starring Joan Collins, in 1975. Collins’ character, a stripper, spurns the handsy, off-stage advances of — again — a “dwarf” named “Hercules” in her act. He curses her: “You will have a baby…a monster! An evil monster conceived inside your womb! As big as I am small and possessed by the devil himself!”
Not surprisingly, the “baby” is born and starts punching people who coo and chuck his chin. His face, by the magic of the period’s cheesy f/x, changes intermittently into Hercules’ menacing adult man visage. He leaves dead mice in teacups, trashes his nursery, and kills Collins’ nurse and husband. (READ MORE: Beauty Is Truth Against Woke Fantasy)
Meanwhile, The Manitou (1978), a film about a powerful Native American shaman who grows inside an external womb on a white woman’s neck, only to spring forth to promise death and destruction to the modern world, may have been a perverse attempt by Hollywood to reconcile America’s bloody frontier history and dispossession of tribal lands. Instead, it is an insult to everyone — mothers, organized religion, and Native Americans alike.
Again, the main character, played by Susan Strasberg, has a seeming immaculate conception, with a “fetus” growing from a lump on her neck. Her friend, played by Tony Curtis, a self-righteous fraudster who shakes down old ladies, employs a host of pseudo spiritualists and a medicine man to stop the “Manitou” from killing its host and wreaking havoc on San Francisco. In what can only be described as the most cringeworthy final scene of any horror movie, ever, modern science and the “mother” team up to blast the half-formed god, which looks like a Muppet gone horribly wrong, into another dimension. (READ MORE: 11-Year-Old Forced to Have an Abortion)
It’s Alive (1974) is a bit of a twist. A murderous baby, whose first victim is the doctor who delivered him, “lurks around outdoors, killing several people, including a milkman.” This hideous mutation, according to the synopsis on Wikipedia, may have been the result of the “contraceptive pills” the baby’s mother was taking in the years before he was conceived. We’re not entirely sure if this movie is a warning against pregnancy or trying to prevent one, but, like abortion, the use of birth control pills was absolutely on the rise in the early part of this decade. According to Elizabeth Siegel Watkins, who authored the 2012 study “How the Pill Became a Lifestyle Drug: The Pharmaceutical Industry and Birth Control in the United States Since 1960,” by 1973, a year before It’s Alive was released, some 36 percent of American women were on the pill, compared to 27 percent in 1965.
Hollywood can be really good (and really bad) at interpreting the popular zeitgeist. During this period, legalized abortion and no-fault divorces were sweeping the states. The concepts of traditional marriage and family were suddenly competing with the growing mainstream popularity of alternative sexual lifestyles and choosing how and when (if at all) to have children. That this cultural milieu resulted in a series of tasteless, exploitative films in which directors felt they had license to debase birth and babies as a threat to life and sanity should come as no surprise.
Gynaehorror has moved on, but its ruminations on our presumed collective psyche have not. Films reflect an era of couples struggling to get pregnant (Blessed, 2004; False Positive, 2021) and grief/fears of losing a child (Grace, 2009). B-team Rosemary’s Baby “giving birth to the devil” spinoffs are never in short supply. Today’s gender politics can be seen in the proliferation of the extreme childbirth depictions in films/series across the gambit. Here, women are nearly broken by the nature of their gender as weak men watch from the shadows (House of the Dragon, 2022), and forced childbearing is used as a political/ideological weapon (The Handmaid’s Tale, 2017).
Where it will go next, as birthrates plunge and science gallops ahead to allow for new alternatives in natural conception and genetic engineering, is anyone’s guess. But let’s hope that the 1970s era of baby-monster infestations, recalling a very real time of political and social disintegration in America, never gets a redux.
