“Having observed that the most suspenseful part of a horror story is before, not after, the horror appears. I was struck one day by the thought... that a fetus could be an effective horror if the reader knew it was growing into something malignly different from the baby expected. Nine whole months of anticipation, with the horror inside the heroine!”
In my humble opinion, this week’s theme is the most terrifying of all. There is a moment for every woman, not long after college graduation but before starting retinol, when hypothetical children become a main topic of discussion among family, friends, and strangers. It is like discussing a ghost that never lived, a shared delusion.
“How many do you want?”
“When are you going to have one?”
“You should have one!”
“Have you guys talked about it?”
“Does he want one?”
“You’ll make an amazing mother.”
Most of this is harmless curiosity. I’ve asked it myself. It comes so easily at a certain age, like asking someone’s major or their favorite television show, but unlike a preference for Game of Thrones or The Office, the desire or dislike of children has become a much harder line among women of my generation. We are now more vocal about out individual rights as mothers and the motherless, but our bodies are monitored more than they have been in over half a century.
If you weren’t already scared, this is where the horror comes in…
As mentioned in the above quote by Ira Levan, there is a significant difference between the anticipation of an event and the reveal after an event. The imagination is consistently scarier than reality—welcome to the anxiety age!
The theory of “terror” vs “horror” has been a long standing tradition in horror literature since its was penned by Ann Radcliffe, author of The Mysteries of Udolpho and a founding mother of the Gothic genre. Terror is dread before an event happens—before the monster or murder is revealed, before the door is opened or the light turned on. Horror is the repulsion felt after the event, after the mask is pulled off or the body is shown. Often, terror is considered the more sophisticated of the two, but I’ll leave that one up for debate.
For the purposes of this newsletter, I am focusing mainly on the pregnancy instead of conception, birth, or postpartum care.
It was very fitting to include the Levan quote as he is the author of Rosemary’s Baby and The Stepford Wives, two of the most influential horror texts, but I will not be mentioning either on this list because I want to highlight films post-Roman Polanski.
Gynaehorror, films concerned with “female sex, sexuality, and reproduction”, is a main stay of most horror. Why is that? Well, women are often the source of desire or revulsion. We are often the victims. It is why we have a term like “scream queens” but no kings. In traditional slashers, it is very often the female virgin who is left at the end. (The very act of a killer penetrating their victims with a knife is a whole other topic of discussion.) Hostile takeovers in science fiction (Alien) and possessions (The Exorcist) can be considered gynaehorror because the host is very often female and the release of the parasitic entity is often a symbolic birth in the third act.
I would like to note that most of the films on this list are directed by men. I do not point this out to say that men cannot bring an interesting perspective to pregnancy, but it is unfortunate that even with the influx of female directors, the topic has not been explored more from a woman’s point of view. I have faith that will change in the future.
Pregnancy has always been an incredibly scary endeavor, but it is a necessity to continue the human race. Sometimes I feel like I am being gaslit by human evolution. I am told over and over how natural the experience is, how vital, how intoxicating, but there is something so repulsive about the whole thing. I am left with very conflicting emotions.
I can also acknowledge that like everything in life there is a duality to pregnancy/motherhood, but that is the terror of the whole endeavor, the not knowing. It is about giving up control of ones body, relying on something beyond the everyday, a kind of faith.
It is one of the last unexplored questions—one of the rare few we are given—the only thing really left after that is death. Birth and death. Death and birth. Horror rounding out the corners into a circle.
Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 1 (2011)
Inside (2007)
Impetigore (2019)
Aliens (1986)
Prevenge (2016)
Titane (2021)
Resurrection (2022)