Shocks delivered: why pregnancy body horror is on the rise

Nosebleeds, a metallic taste in the mouth, feet that go up a whole size the side effects of pregnancy are their own kind of body horror and a slew of films released this year hone in on just how bloody and brutal childbirth can be. Immaculate, The First Omen, Apartment 7A and Alien: Romulus all feature pregnancies that are invasive, the result of non-consensual sexual encounters. The terror the women in these films experience when they’re at their most vulnerable is heightened by how isolated they are, either in remote locations, by a language barrier, in new cities or in the vast reaches of space. Escape seems impossible – where can you run when you’re hostage to the horrors of your own body?

The past few years have birthed a spate of pregnancy horror films – Clock’s take on the societal pressure to have a child, Baby Ruby’s examination of postpartum depression – marking a significant trend in the wake of the US supreme court’s overturning of Roe v Wade, and several states enacting laws that deprive women of bodily autonomy. Apartment 7A (a prequel to Rosemary’s Baby) is set in the mid-1960s, The First Omen in 1971, Immaculate in the present and Alien: Romulus between 2122 and 2183, but all reflect current anxieties. For all their otherworldly and supernatural frights, they tap into very real fears.

To be pregnant is to experience a loss of control over a body that’s no longer just your own, an idea explored in 2017’s darkly comic Prevenge, in which a pregnant woman (Alice Lowe) is coerced by her foetus to embark on a murder spree. These films underline that helplessness, depicting how powerful institutions, either religious or corporate, treat women as their property. In The First Omen, the restrictions of religion play out not only metaphorically but literally – one novitiate’s wimple is a suffocatingly constricted fit, laced tightly, causing her to grimace. When Immaculate’s priests and nuns repeat the phrase “blessed are the meek”, the platitude doubles up as a pointed reminder for women to know their place and submit to their fate quietly. While Sister Cecilia (Sydney Sweeney) repeatedly encounters people who fixate on her physical attributes, particularly her beauty, Sister Margaret (Nell Tiger Free) in The First Omen has never recognised hers, having missed out on the traditional experiences of girlhood. It’s her roommate who encourages her to feel ownership of her body, to show it off in cute clothes before committing to “hiding it” under a habit forever. And even before Apartment 7A dancer Terry Gionoffrio (Julia Garner) is forcibly impregnated in a demonic ritual, a cruel Broadway director (Andrew Buchan) and producer (Jim Sturgess) derive a perverse pleasure from exerting control over her body during an audition, pushing it to the limits of endurance. Similarly, both Immaculate and The First Omen feature male authority figures who seek out “broken birds” – troubled young women whose bodies they can exploit.

In these films, women are reduced to their reproductive functions. Margaret in The First Omen is simply the latest in a long line of women forcibly impregnated with the Antichrist. All the convent’s test subjects have been named Scianna, their individuality flattened into a single common moniker, a nod to how they are viewed as interchangeable and replaceable. In Cecilia’s case, her pregnancy is the result of the convent’s 20-year search for a “perfect fertile vessel” to carry a new messiah created from Jesus’s DNA. Terry in Apartment 7A is also one of many the coven has chosen to carry Satan’s heir. A previous tenant suffered the same fate before. Audiences know there will be Rosemary Woodhouse (Mia Farrow) after.

As the women’s pregnant bellies grow, their ambitions and aspirations are expected to shrink. The foetus is of prime importance, the life of the mother a mere afterthought. When Terry expresses a reluctance to go through with her pregnancy, coven members Minnie (Dianne Wiest) and Roman Castevet (Kevin McNally) offer to raise the child as their own, sidestepping that this would still necessitate her having to carry it to term first. To them, she’s an incubator and not a person, her concerns about how the pregnancy will affect her career summarily dismissed. “This is a role that you were born to play,” says Minnie of her impending motherhood, mirroring modern rightwing rhetoric. A similar sentiment colours Cecilia’s interactions with the clergy. “No working,” says one nun. “Remember, your only job is baby.” When Cecilia is nearly drowned by another nun, the priests’ most pressing concern is the health of the foetus. The sight of her, still soaked on the examination table, barely registers.

Each of these films also contain harrowing, graphic scenes not only of childbirth, but the side effects of pregnancy. There are violent bouts of morning sickness in Apartment 7A and Immaculate, in which Cecilia also vomits out her teeth. The First Omen rapidly cuts between beads of sweat on a woman’s neck, her dilated pupils and feral screams. In one scene, a scrawny grey hand emerges from the birth canal; in another, hands reach into a gaping C-section incision. The Alien films have always contained allegories for rape – the aliens with their phallic appendages forcibly penetrate and violate human bodies – and in Romulus, crew member Navarro (Aileen Wu) is impregnated by a Facehugger. “Don’t let me die,” are her last words before the Chestburster tears her open amid a spray of blood, its emergence from the wound shot like a baby’s head crowning. Contrasting this against pregnancy that is wanted, Romulus still renders childbirth horrifying. Kay (Isabela Merced) gives birth screaming, with blood gushing from between her legs and her friend Rain (Cailee Spaeny) having to rip her umbilical cord apart with her bare hands. The child, a human-Xenomorph hybrid, doesn’t kill her outright, but drains the life from her, a visual that puts a horror movie spin on the pains and frustrations of breastfeeding.

These are not the only films this year to feature gnarly birth sequences – while The Substance’s is back-breaking (literally!), Beetlejuice Beetlejuice depicts a toddler bursting out of a rapidly expanding stomach, followed by a gush of amniotic fluid. And in Nightbitch, which recently premiered at the Toronto international film festival, the pressures of parenting lead one woman (Amy Adams) to believe she’s transforming into a dog. For film-makers this year, the stresses of pregnancy and motherhood continue to be fertile cinematic ground.