Horror Films Understand the Terror of Pregnancy

We are told we will forget the pain, as though all the trauma of childbirth evaporates from our minds. But it did not for me.

In the classic Alien films, Captain Ripley, played by Sigourney Weaver, does a heroic job of avoiding pregnancy. While on a mission in space, her crew discovers alien pods that begin to terrorize them: A crablike creature latches onto the face of a crew member, planting its fetus into his body. In one of the most iconic birthing scenes in horror cinema, an alien later tears forth from his belly, and havoc ensues in the strange entrails of a ship called Mother. Grotesque insect-like creatures keep trying to use Ripley as a host. By the third movie, the creature succeeds: Her body is implanted with an alien fetus. The Company, a large megacorporation driven by profit, wants to confine Ripley in order to allow the alien to come to term. But Ripley objects. The creature is monstrous and destructive. She has no way to abort the alien, so she leaps into a boiling, lavalike pit to avoid giving birth.

Even before the recent reversal of Roe v. Wade, I had been thinking about birth as an inherently traumatic experience—a fear that horror cinema has long played on. It’s often men who say that watching their baby being born is the most magical moment of their life. I mean, sure. If I saw someone else give birth to my baby, I might find it a delightful experience too. But it’s a brutal, inexplicable invasion of your body. We are told we will forget the pain, as though all the trauma of childbirth evaporates from our minds. But it did not for me. I can remember the pain and horror of it as though it were yesterday. I wondered why there wasn’t some sort of support group for those suffering trauma from birth.

Until the eighteenth century, women and midwives were almost exclusively in charge of pregnancy. They put the life and well-being of the mother first. They sat with the mother in labor, using experiential wisdom to help her through it. When male physicians took over obstetrics, the practice of midwifery was outlawed and they set the midwives and all their practical knowledge literally on fire. Women were brought to hospital wards, where they began dying en masse, and the modern experience of birth as we know it took shape.

I was recently invited to a book club to discuss my latest novel, which has an abortionist as a principal character. One of the women in the book club was a psychologist. She said women kept coming to her office and complaining about having PTSD from childbirth.

“Tell me more,” I said.

Even before the recent reversal of Roe v. Wade, I had been thinking about birth as an inherently traumatic experience.

“They find the experience alienating. Because they are surrounded by doctors who are caring for the baby, monitoring its heartbeat. While they lay there, feeling ignored and dehumanized.”

That was how I felt when I was giving birth. As though I were no longer a person.

*

I got pregnant when I was in university. Boys were always trying to get me back to their grimy apartments, so they could have sex. They weren’t at all interested in what was going on in my head, only whether or not they found me physically attractive.

Their college experience came at the expense of the female students. If I tried to ask for something, they were put out and angry and refused. They were taught they liked sex more than women. So the sex was entirely about them and their desires, and birth control was expected to be a girl’s concern.

It was the era of the “cool girl.” You had to pretend to be sexually adventurous. To have a lot of lovers. To wear ripped lingerie out to the bar. But how could I enjoy sex if I was worried about getting pregnant or contracting an STD, or when I would have to sit squashed in a clinic for up to five hours waiting for Plan B?

When I thought I might be pregnant, I kept putting off going to find out. My period was always irregular because I was underweight, but I knew something was different this time. When I finally went to the clinic, I fell into a numb shock. You know that moment in zombie films when a character lifts up their shirt and realizes they’ve been bitten? I felt as though poverty had found me hiding out. I was parading around like a McGill student who had all the same opportunities as the other students. But I was a poor kid who got pregnant.

I did not feel happy or content whatsoever. It felt as though my body were a haunted house I was living in. I had a chronic feeling of dread and grief that I could not shake, as if everything I loved was being taken away from me. Songs that I had previously liked horrified me. I would ask people to turn off music. They reminded me of a freedom I had that I’d lost.

*

Horror films depict intimately this terrifying loss of autonomy. There is something horrifying about the independent growth of a creature inside us, who cares not for your situation or personality. Women are often nine months pregnant in horror films. It heightens the tension of everything else going on when you know she might give birth at any time. Pregnancy becomes a doomsday clock, the impending birth a terrifying event.

The horror genre is known to shine light on what is wrong and unspeakable about society—in this case, that women often give birth in the most inhospitable of circumstances. Delivering a baby is a traumatic experience, but this is not the image of pregnancy that we are fed. To exclude this from the discourse turns motherhood into an alien state of being.

Seeking stories that understood this terror, I went to the audiovisual department in the basement of my school. I took out the 1968 film Rosemary’s Baby, which is about a young woman whose husband clandestinely arranges for her to be impregnated by Satan. I liked that Rosemary was pregnant and young. She was still a few years older than me in the film, but at least she looked my age.

I was also so happy that her pregnancy was horrifying. She was pale and in chronic pain. She wears a charm around her neck that she finds revolting every time she smells it. I knew exactly how she felt. Everything smelled like death to me. I couldn’t stand the smell of Chris, my boyfriend who’d gotten me pregnant. Anytime a man got too close to me, I wanted to vomit. Their shoes. Their underarms. When they took off their jackets.

I felt seasick all the time. I went to the supermarket. I stole a steak. I put it inside of my coat. I went home and dropped it on a pan. I barely fried it. Then I ate it right off the pan. There’s a scene where Rosemary eats raw meat over the sink, and I remember thinking, Yes, pregnancy is savage.

Everyone assured me the pregnancy was going to ruin my life. I went to meet my father on a bench in a park. When I told him, he said, “Well your life is over.” I was shocked that I was no longer considered a human being with a future. Couldn’t I become stronger by having a baby?

In Susanne Bier’s 2018 film Bird Box, the main character is pregnant when the world is taken over by aliens. Before the apocalypse, she was ambivalent about being a mother, unsure how she could balance it with being an artist. Then she finds herself, after giving birth, balancing motherhood with being pursued by aliens who drive you mad when you see them and a roving pack of escaped inmates. In fact, motherhood makes her more effective at overcoming these ludicrous obstacles. Similarly, I didn’t drop out of school. I took extra courses to finish two years in one, so that I could graduate shortly before giving birth. I continued trying to figure out how to write, and I performed in plays. I became more productive because everyone was telling me the odds were now against me.

*

Chris said we should move in alone together. At the time, I was living in a large apartment with nine other people and a magical cat. There was always someone to talk to. We would discuss the most ridiculous things with the utmost seriousness. Then we moved into a tiny apartment in a huge building. This was what a nuclear family was like, I realized: terribly tragic and lonely.

In Darren Aronofsky’s 2017 film Mother! Jennifer Lawrence’s unnamed character is living with her much older husband in his damaged, secluded mansion that she has restored plank by plank after a fire. It is not really her house; it is clear it is his, despite the transformations. Eventually, she becomes pregnant. People keep arriving at the house to visit her husband. They ignore her, making themselves at home and destroying the house she has spent so much time building.

After she gives birth, she has two people to take care of. Two people to treat as though they are geniuses, to whom she should devote her entire soul and energy. The baby is Jesus. The husband is not Joseph but God.

This is the situation pregnant women too often find themselves in: They are suddenly no longer considered people with their own dreams and aspirations. Men earn more money and fare better in society once they are fathers. After giving birth, women typically see a 30 percent drop in their salaries. While fathers, conversely, make 20 percent more than men without children. But even if Chris had been someone with a job and ambition, I wouldn’t have felt I should give up my dreams for him.

*

In John Krasinski’s 2018 film A Quiet Place, the most dramatic scene in the movie occurs when a pregnant woman is in labor. Evelyn Abbott and her family are living in a world that has been colonized by aliens who, upon hearing the smallest noise, will rush over to hunt the source. Look, even in the apocalypse, women can still have unwanted pregnancies; don’t judge her. She is alone in the house when an alien enters and the shock of it sends her into labor. She hides in the bathtub and begins to attempt to give birth silently. It’s an entertaining spectacle about both the impossibility of monitoring the pain of childbirth and the isolation of that pain, as no one can share it with you.

I found myself in a tiny white hospital room all alone when I started to go into heavy labor. The shock of the pain was more than I expected. Here was the Biblical punishment for being a woman. I opened my mouth and screamed louder than I thought I was capable of. I pressed the button for a nurse, but no one came. I began crying out for help, begging for help, but still I was all alone. I did not think this was the way I would go about having a baby. From the television commercials, I thought a person ought to be surrounded by a medical staff and loved ones, all cheering them on. Even though I was yelling at the top of my lungs, no one was responding.

Eventually a doctor came to my room and administered an epidural and pushed my bed to the delivery room. I could not feel my body at all. They put a heart monitor up to my belly. When they detected the baby’s heartbeat accelerating, they yelled at me that it was time to push. They had to cut open my vagina to make room for the baby. Mutilate me. Why not?

Chris walked into the delivery room wearing scrubs and a face mask. He was high as a kite and in a fabulous mood. Right after shooting up, for about half an hour, he would become the most agreeable person on the planet. He snapped into action.

“Let’s do this. You can do this. You’re going to have to push. That’s it. That’s beautiful. You’ll get the baby out in no time. Just relax. We’re all here for you!” He was there when the baby emerged and then he disappeared again.

*

When I came to the next day, I noticed there was another woman in the room with me. Her table was covered in bouquets of flowers and balloons. She had relatives visiting all day. Then it happened: I began to cry. It was as though a storm cloud had broken in my brain. And the rainstorm began to pour. What a tragedy to be a mother. You no longer have the same agency over your life story. The feeling flooded and wouldn’t stop.

While I was crying, someone from Child Services entered the room. She sat on the bed and explained to me that now that I was a mother, my child had to come first. Oh, I had been hearing this a lot. I was so insulted whenever anyone said the needs of the baby had to come first. She was a baby. Surely we were at least equals. Why did her life co-opt my own? What did that even mean? People say it so often, it’s become absolutely meaningless and perverse. She proceeded to warn me about the consequences of doing drugs or anything of that nature now that I had a baby.

“Trust me,” she said. “You do not want us in your life. Once we are in your life, we don’t get out.”

Why? I remember thinking. Why did it have to be a big scary thing? Why couldn’t they offer to help without threatening to ruin my life and take the baby away?

I would be monitored by the state. But to no end really. They never offered to help me. They only made it clear that I was an unfit mother, even though the baby had just been born.

Why couldn’t they offer to help without threatening to ruin my life and take the baby away?

The idea that mothers are some sort of virtuous paragon cherished by society was a lie. Or it was only a certain kind of mother that society vaunted and praised. I had come from a lower-class family. You have to be a white woman, middle-class, and married to a man. Otherwise you were creating another member of your class that would be a social burden.

You are supposed to have a perfect nest to bring the baby home to. But babies start growing in bellies, irrespective of real estate.

*

In the Middle Ages, it was believed that a male implanted the seed of a baby in a mother’s womb, which was merely a type of flower pot for the baby to grow in. But there was a part of me that still didn’t quite accept that a man had anything to do with what had happened to me. I was the one who seemed to have all the guilt and worry about being pregnant. I was the one whose body was going through absurd transformations. I was all alone in this fate.

Often in horror films, like Alien and Rosemary’s Baby, the woman is not impregnated by a man at all—a reflection of how men are not given the same responsibility for pregnancies as women. In Julia Ducournau’s Titane, about a female serial killer who has sex with cars and is on a quest for unconditional familial love, the main character is impregnated by a Cadillac. Oil leaks from between her legs and breasts, and she gives birth to a baby monster, with metallic parts.

Perhaps I hadn’t been impregnated by any man at all. Perhaps I had been reading an erotic novel by Anaïs Nin and swallowed a hard candy. It slowly dissolved in my belly, and that was how I became pregnant.

*

I recently struck up a conversation with a young woman in her twenties who was sitting next to a baby. “Don’t get me wrong,” she said to me. “I love the baby, but I regret becoming a mother so much. I just feel angry that nobody talks about how awful being a mother is.” It is taboo for women to talk about having children in any way that criticizes, complains, or exhibits regret. Such feelings are regarded as cruelty toward your children. So we keep it to ourselves. And because nobody talks about it, it seems normal to send a mother home in stitches, after undergoing a horrific bodily mutilation, as though nothing traumatic has happened to her.

We need to create a world where mothers are not regarded as hosts for monsters but are supported and helped. Then birth will no longer be the stuff of horror films.