Pregnancy Is Uncomfortably Perfect Fodder for Horror Movies

One is that pregnancy is innately horrific—like the description of a normal pregnancy sounds like a sci-fi script, when you read it. It’s just the most visceral, bloody, terrifying, traumatic, bodily thing that humans do on the regular. And in Rosemary’s Baby, which is sort of the seminal pregnancy horror film, if you think about it, Rosemary’s Baby was directed by Roman Polanski, so watching a movie about a woman whose body is taken over by men who make decisions without consultation, written by somebody who is a sexual predator and rapist, is scary. It has real-world implications.

What are your favorite and least favorite depictions of pregnancy in horror movies?

I love False Positive, because it was definitely a movie that was written and directed by a woman about an experience of a woman. A bad one… maybe Aliens? I feel like that was the one where the guys just jumped into this. I mean, I obviously love the birth scene, but I think we see a bit of men making horror movies sometimes, where they know they can’t compete with us, so they keep essentially making and re-making The Human Centipede. But pregnancy is right there, guys. You don’t actually have to invent a new way of torturing the body. You have it. Aliens was a pretty, pretty clear demonstration of how men are like, “We want to get in on the pregnancy horror, too.”

Speaking of False Positive, gaslighting and psychological manipulation have become such a central theme in scary movies lately. What do you think of how they’re applied to pregnancy in False Positive?

You have this really rich tapestry of the crush of societal expectation and all of the turmoil going on within yourself, and then people are gaslighting you simultaneously. I mean, a lot of pregnancies involve being gaslit—people will tell you that everything is going to be fine, whether it will or not, strangers will touch your stomach and tell you that’s normal. Like, we’re just told that everything is OK all the time, and we’re not allowed to talk about the things that frighten us. That is a really scary experience. I think False Positive does a great job portraying the reality of being a pregnant woman today. And ultimately, that’s scary even without the horror elements.

Even in a movie where pregnancy is more tangential, like A Quiet Place, what’s the impact of Evelyn Abbott’s (Blunt) pregnancy—does it add to the horror?

There’s a stomach drop that happens whenever you see a pregnant character at the start of a horror movie, because you know what’s going to happen. You know that character is going to give birth under horrible circumstances. Being pregnant in the zombie apocalypse is sort of the worst case scenario. And that’s what a horror movie is. As soon as you place a pregnant person in a situation like that, it’s already horrible. You’re picturing yourself in that situation.

Every pregnant person is in an incredibly physically vulnerable situation, where they are regularly dependent on people they don’t know, people they haven’t consented to trust, strangers, bosses, employers, their husbands, everybody. So when you see that in the film, it touches on some essential truth. Even though, sure, pregnant people are not usually required to stay silent so that monsters won’t kill them.

Speaking of male directors, pregnancy, and metaphors, what did you think of the pregnancy at the center of mother!?

What’s funny is the director, Darren Aronofsky, said it was a metaphor for climate change. I was like, no, you just made a pregnancy movie. Male directors will keep trying to push a metaphor for something deeper, but I think they should ask themselves, why do you keep going for that imagery? Why is that imagery of pregnancy so compelling? Not because it tells you about something deeper, but because it tells you about pregnancy and how scary it is. In mother!, the pregnant woman is totally out of control of her circumstances, and that’s what happens to a pregnant person in a horror movie and real life. They will become entirely out of control of their own safety and circumstances.

I’ve read Aronofsky talk about the husband representing God and the pregnant woman representing Mother Earth in mother!, which feels a bit… dehumanizing?

Right, like, sure, you can have allegories about everything. But here’s a pregnant woman who was being controlled by her husband. Nobody respected her personal space or wishes. And the movie winds up with her being violated every way in her own home, in her own body. So, you can say it’s about climate change. But more than anything, it’s a pregnancy story.

I don’t really feel like there’s a lot of preachy pregnancy movies out there, but maybe we’ll see more of that with the fall of Roe. I feel like these movies tend to open conversations and leave people with a lot to say. I can’t think of a boring pregnancy horror movie. There are so many that aren’t necessarily about pregnancy, but feature pregnancy, allude to omens about demons, planting demonic seeds, giving birth to literal evil—there’s a lot of ways to interpret it all.

Pregnancy and birth are often gory and unpleasant enough in real life. What visual cues or camera work make it clear that this is a pregnancy in a literal horror movie?

It’s things like, say, the speculum. It’s the tools of the pregnancy, how cringy and scary it is to see those. You always have that establishing shot, where you see the tools there on the table. It’s the table itself, the idea of being physically restrained in any way. You can’t see what’s happening at the affected area. That’s a terrifying thing in its own right. Looking at the masks of people that you don’t know who are talking about you, but not to you—that is a very scary experience. The nakedness—you’re not wearing clothes, you’re in the most physically vulnerable position you possibly can be.

And there’s usually the sense that the pregnant woman is being watched, like she’s not alone in the house, or there’ll be a scene showing that it’s difficult for her to do something easy. She’s loading the laundry with difficulty, and it’s like, oh, it’s gonna be hard to run. So, they do these little establishing shots, like the scene of Emily Blunt [in A Quiet Place]. If you see a nail on the stair, and you see the pregnant woman, you know what’s gonna happen.

In our post-Roe world, how does an older horror movie featuring pregnancy, like Rosemary’s Baby, hold up?

I think that you watch that movie differently as a woman now, because now, it’s so suffused with Polanski. The movie has a predatory gaze, which is one of the reasons it’s so frightening. You have the sense that she’s being stalked throughout. Even before the dark turn, it’s claustrophobic. She’s got close-ups on her all the time. It’s predatory, and that’s why it’s a good horror movie. But it was made by a predator, who generally treated women like objects that did not deserve to be in control over what men did to their bodies. Watching it now, I can’t appreciate it as a good horror movie—it’s just scary. I wasn’t too freaked out by Rosemary’s Baby the first time I saw it when I was like 20. Now I don’t even really like to think about it too much.

What’s really scary to me about pregnancy in horror movies as a pregnant-capable person who wants kids someday is the visceral, physical discomfort they elicit. Is the horror around on-screen pregnancy as visceral for people who can’t or know they never want to be pregnant?

I’m sure people could make really, really scary movies about all kinds of ailments that men suffer, or are unrelated to pregnancy. But what’s unique about pregnancy is that it can be this naturally occurring event that a lot of people hope for. Similarly, there’s nothing as physically traumatizing that men routinely go through. There is no point when men give up their bodily autonomy in a comparable way like pregnant women do. There is no point in manhood where that is expected to happen, as routinely.

Is there a male equivalent of the on-screen horrors of pregnancy?

Watching somebody with testicles get kicked in the testicles is especially horrifying for people who possess testicles, right? I can watch that and be like, well, that really looks like it hurts, but my husband is going to go home and I can tell that he’s feeling it. I think the same is true for anybody who’s capable of being pregnant. At some point in your life, even as you came to the decision that you don’t want to be pregnant, you thought about it. There are so many elements. Your body will change, its actual physical dimensions will change, your bones will realign, you will use your body to feed another entity, and that entity will decide what it does to your blood sugar levels, and you’re not in control of any of that. You know you’ll be poked and prodded by all manner of medical professionals, some of whom you will like, likely some who you will not. And then you’ll go through what is largely known as the most physically painful experience in life. It’s so visceral and real to watch, because you’ve probably devoted some pretty serious thinking to pregnancy at some point in your life.

Why do you like or not like this trope?

I think it’s great. Any place where society reckons with how we treat pregnant people is good. Does every movie do it in a way that is productive? No, of course not. They’re making movies and some of them are just fun. But we stifle all the discussion of the terror, the grossness, the pain of pregnancy, of the recovery, like we don’t want to let people learn what happens to their bodies during pregnancy until they get pregnant themselves. So, any place where people are having these conversations, where people are telling these stories, is interesting and valuable. And now that there are so many more women who are making horror movies, I’m very excited to see where it goes, because I think we’re going to start getting really rich, complicated, terrifying stories.