2024 was rich in horror movie releases in which pregnancy or motherhood were related to Satan, exorcisms, the nuns chosen to conceive and give birth to the Antichrist, or to ghosts, although in recent years female filmmakers have changed the focus towards feminism.
The revival of Rosemary’s Baby (Polanski, 1968), the masterpiece and pioneer of the subgenre, which is currently being screened at the Cineteca Nacional de las Artes of the National Arts Center, as well as the commemoration of the Day of the Dead, are the pretext to talk about pregnancy and motherhood in world horror cinema, which has recent representatives in Mexico, such as Huesera (Michelle Garza Cervera, 2022), or a strange combination in Disappear completely (Luis Javier Henaine, 2022).
Filmed in the infamous Dakota building in New York where John Lennon livedin front of Central Park, a few steps from where the former Beatle was murdered, while in Los Angeles Charles Mason’s group brutally murdered Polanski’s wife, Sharon Tate, in a satanic cult, Rosemary’s baby is the masterful story of a woman raped by the devil under the auspices of a satanic clan that hides in the apartments where she moved with her husband, an accomplice in the ritual.
This masterpiece of cinema, based on Ira Levin’s 1967 best-seller of the same name, received a prequel: Apartment 7 A (Natalie Erika James, 2024), now directed by a woman who takes an even feminist approach, in which a short-lived character from Rosemary’s Baby, Terry Gionoffrio (Julia Garner), literally sells her soul to the devil for a role in a musical, but she rectifies and, instead of giving in to the plot in which the evil neighbors Roman and Minnie Castevet participate, she ends her pregnancy.
Only in 2024 have films been seen on commercial screens or on the cultural circuit such as: Immaculate (Mohan, 2024), where Sydney Sweeney, producer of the film, is a novice who arrives at an Italian convent where she discovers that her true vocation is to give birth to the Antichrist himself.
Pray for the Devil (Pray for the Devil, Stamm, 2022), in which Jacqueline Byers plays a young woman abused as a child by her psychopathic mother, who is ordained as a nun after giving up a son for adoption; He joins a network of exorcist priests and discovers that he has the gift of exorcising, especially a woman whose sense of guilt for having had an abortion gets into her body like Satan.
And, to continue with the prequels, The First Prophecy came out (The First Omen, Arkasha Stevenson, 2024), another female vision of a horror classic, The Omen (The Omen, Richard Donner, 1976). It is also a story of satanic rape, as in Rosemary’s Baby, in which the young novice Margaret (Nell Tiger Free) discovers that a convent in Rome to which she was sent by a supposed protective priest, is the scene of experiments with young women to impregnate them with the Antichrist.
The subgenre of horror films about motherhood and/or satanic or monstrous pregnancies is not new in world cinematography, although in recent years, female filmmakers, mainly, have given a vision charged towards feminism and questioning motherhood as a patriarchal imposition.
Also in 2024, the Norwegian film Malignant Nightmare premiered in Mexico last September (Kjersti Helen Rasmussen, 2022), in which Mona (Eli Harboe) moves with her boyfriend Robby (Herman Tommeraas) to an apartment in a building where the young woman begins to have nightmares about her pregnancy. He meets his neighbor, the mother of a baby who dies in tragic and mysterious circumstances.
Evil nightmare thus takes sides with the psychology of a woman forced to be a mother and postpartum conflicts, very far from simple films about ghosts or satanic possessions, without being a pamphlet.
In the Peruvian-Mexican production of 2022, Huesera, which obtained 17 Ariel nominations and won two for Best Original Screenplay and Best First Feature, the young Valeria (extraordinary performance by Natalia Solián) literally “suffers” from a pregnancy with a supernatural transformation of her body, which leads her to resort to old witches and black magic. As in Malignant Nightmare, dreams are essential for the protagonist to question motherhood as a social and cultural imposition.
In the Mexican film Disappear completely (Henaine, 2022), although the protagonist is a man, the red note photographer Santiago (Harold Torres), his pregnant wife Marcela (the wonderful Teté Espinoza) and he become trapped in a witchcraft curse in which the unborn can be the salvation.
Added to these are other classic films about motherhood or satanic pregnancies, with a questioning of the social reproductive role of women, such as the jewel Swallow (Carlo Mirabella-Davis, 2019), where Hunter (masterful performance by Haley Bennet) begins to swallow sharp or toxic objects when, in an unhappy marriage, he discovers that he is pregnant; or the winner of the Palme d’Or at Cannes, Titane (2021), by the brilliant French filmmaker Julia Ducournau.
Behind it there is a very long tradition of decades of horror or suspense films where women confront their condition, like Carrie (1976), Brian de Palma’s classic based on the novel of the same name by Stephen King, where the protagonist (Sissy Spacek) defends her femininity through supernatural powers.
Another cult film for lovers of the subgenre, Also directed a decade ago by another female filmmaker, the Australian Jennifer Kent, she brought terror to question pregnancy and motherhood with The Babadoock (2014), in which Amelia (Essi Davis) loses her husband in an accident when she She heads to the hospital to give birth and then has to raise a son, Samuel (Noah Wisseman), alone, who plays with magic. The terror of lonely motherhood transforms into a monster out of a mysterious red book, which the child finds in his mini-library at home and Amelia reads it to him with horror.
Also from France, Sinister Instinct stands out (A l’interieur, 2007), directed together by Julien Maury and Alexander Bustillo, with Alysson Paradis and the diva Béatrice Dalle (Betty Bleu), in which a pregnant and widowed woman is attacked by a demented intruder who seeks to take her to the unborn of the womb.
Other more traditional horror films can be added to these films. that relates pregnancy to the devil or the supernatural, such as The Curse of the Unborn (The Unborn, David S. Goyer, 2009), the Canadian The Unborn (Still/Born, Christensen, 2017) or the French Baby Blood ( Robak 1990).
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