Wake up! You're having a nightmare.

Why traumatic births are the new trend in horror movies

Oct 19, 2024

Welcome to the weekend edition of The Experiment, your official hopepunk newsletter. If you’d like to support my work, become a paid subscriber or check out the options below. But even if you don’t, this bugga free. Thanks for reading!

*So many spoiler alerts, especially if you haven’t seen Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.*

The best way to get a project greenlit in Hollywood these days is to pitch a horror movie. The Avengers and other comic book heroes have abandoned our cineplexes, leaving us in a hellscape of jump scares and nightmare fuel. This is not great for me. The other day I bought a ticket to Longlegs, the new Nicolas Cage movie, without knowing anything else about it. When I got to the theater I read a blurb that it was like Silence of the Lambs, but gorier and scarier. I bought some popcorn and left.

“Yeah, dad, that is not for you,” said my oldest son Henry, who loves horror and knows that I do not. I walked my sons to elementary school the day after Sandy Hook, and they grew up experiencing lockdowns all through high school until COVID, when we all shutdown to hide from the airborne plague. To Henry and his brother, horror has been normalized, and their normal terrifies me. I don’t need horror movies. Donald Trump is plenty.

But the other day Henry pointed out a new trend in horror movies: 2024 is the year of scary birth scenes in horror movies. And since horror movies have been a reliable source of social commentary over the years, he offered to go where his fraidy-cat father feared to tread.

2024 is the year of scary birth scenes in horror movies.

Judging by his report, we’ve progressed, sort of, from the formulaic rules of the Scream franchise in which if women have sex, they die. That was at least an improvement, I guess, over the gruesome deaths in the Friday the 13th movies in which three-quarters of all female victims were killed via penetrative deaths in acts of sexualized violence, including once with a curling iron.

There was a harbinger of change the first year of the Trump administration with Mother! in which Jennifer Lawrence marries a famous author played by Javier Bardem, “and everything after this point in the movie just gets worse and worse,” writes Henry. His fans start showing up at their mansion, turning their home into an “apocalyptic religious microcosm full to the brim with Bardem’s radical zealots.”

This already sounds like a nightmare for a writer, introverted as we are, but things take a turn for her. “Lawrence’s character is not super psyched about his whole thing, especially since she now has to give birth around all these strangers. Her baby is taken from her by Bardem’s character and her guests then pass it around, kill it, tear it apart, and eat it.” Got it. Women’s needs are secondary to a cult worshipping a dude. Children will be separated from their parents. Nailed it.

Then came Dobbs.

A lot has happened since the 2020 election: Jan. 6, a second impeachment, inflation, high interest rates and the related problems in the housing market, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan, the ongoing humanitarian crisis on our southern border, Oct. 7 and the war in Gaza and now Lebanon, and Biden’s rapid and largely concealed decline. All of which injured us and in some cases continue to do so.

Dobbs was a chemical change. Paper burns into ash; we are different now.

But those are all physical changes. They might leave scars, but we can heal. Dobbs was a chemical change. Paper burns into ash; we are different now. In many states, getting pregnant carries a new, non-zero nightmare risk of death. Before, if a woman was losing her pregnancy, hospitals would take care of her. Now, in many places in the United States of America, a woman losing a pregnancy has to be for-sure dying before a committee of lawyers will allow a doctor to save her life. Maybe.

Republicans say that Democrats are just talking about abortion to make it a political issue, gaslighting women who know different but who have to walk around like everything is normal. Most American women, especially those of child-bearing years, are watching horror movies. Is it any wonder sex isn’t what is killing women in horror movies these days? With maternal mortality rates almost doubling since 2021, it’s mortality, not morality, that is terrifying women.

Alien Romulus is about a bunch of friends, one of whom is pregnant, who try to hijack a drifting space station to get off-world and see the sun for the first time. One thing leads to another, and “dozens of facehuggers they didn’t notice also begin to thaw out, and … as one could imagine, they have a bit of a xenomorph problem,” writes Henry, while one of them “begins acting a little strange, like that one kid in political science 102 that just read Atlas Shrugged.” Yadda yadda yadda, and… Well, I’ll let my son tell you the rest:

“Kay is infected by the xenomorph black goop thing from Prometheus, and as she’s put in a cryo-pod by Rain, has quite possibly the most inconvenient and painful birth in recorded human history as she births a hybrid human-prometheus alien guy that rapidly grows up and eats her, played by the tallest human alive (Robert Bobroczkyi standing 7’7”), right out of her vagina in a way that not even states without abstinence only education can explain. Rain sends this hybrid out into the vacuum of space and she puts herself in a cryo-pod, ending the movie.”

France’s Titane is about a woman who commits serial murder with hair spikes. She “has sex with a lowrider, and catches a case of pregnancy,” writes Henry. “In case you thought this is the worst part, she begins to leak oil, have her chest torn open by the metal cube in her uterus, and dons a disguise to pretend to be a fire chief’s long-lost son and try to have sex with him. She dies in her fake father’s arms as she gives birth to a humanoid baby with a metal spine… I sincerely hope everyone involved with this movie is okay.” Needlessly, Henry adds, “Please don’t watch this one, Dad.”

This phenomenon shows up on televisions, too. House of Dragons has apparently replaced the rapes in Game of Thrones with “many horrific birth scenes,” according to Time, which notes that unwanted pregnancies and traumatic births have popped up in Succession, The Last of Us, Yellowjackets, Fleishman Is in Trouble, Dead Ringers, This Is Going to Hurt, The Retrievals, and Exposed. Of those, only Fleishman Is In Trouble led the viewer to a place of empathy and not horror. Honestly, I wish I’d never seen Yellowjackets. Now I have to live with that inside me, which, now that I think about it, might be a fair result.

“If this is true… If I am pregnant… Then I need it out of me.”

There are not one but two horror movies about giving birth to the antichrist, including The First Omen which includes the line, “If this is true… If I am pregnant… Then I need it out of me.” She ends up giving birth to a son (the antichrist) and a daughter (not important, apparently) in a cult chamber in front of the cardinal, orphanage employees, and her own roommate who ends up stabbing her.

Likewise, Immaculate, which nearly recycles The First Omen’s plot, has its hero, Cecilia, as the victim of the Catholic Church which “has been trying to scientifically go about making the second coming occur, by forcibly impregnating women with their own Personal Jesus, to very little success.”

Cecelia proceeds to go on a rampage, braining Mother Superior and burning the priest to death and stabbing him with the Jesus nail, all while in labor! She escapes the church but can’t escape biology, and gives birth to the antichrist in a field standing up. She then answers the baby Hitler question in a way only someone from Detroit can, and kills her own baby with a rock. Credits roll.

Henry calls this “a classic White House Down-Olympus Has Fallen situation.” Shortly after the rise of the anti-government Tea Party and the rightwing strategy to nullify Barack Obama’s presidency through total opposition, two movies came out in 2013 dramatizing rightwing, fascist coup attempts against an Obama stand-in played by Jamie Foxx in White House Down and the admittedly non-Black Aaron Eckhardt in Olympus Has Fallen. Sometimes the culture trips over itself in expressing anxieties. A decade ago it was rightwing violence opposing Obama. Now it’s theocratic insistence that women are birthing vessels. Some of you will recognize The First Omen and Immaculate as modern takes on 1968’s Rosemary’s Baby. Roe v Wade followed five years later.

The culture is bigger than what we think the news is.

The culture is bigger than what we think the news is. We think we’re making rational decisions while our subconscious struggles to make sense of a society in which men no one voted for allow men we never voted for to force our daughters and granddaughters to live in a world in which biology is a mortal threat.

The election will come down to turnout, to whether Republicans who don’t want to vote for Trump bring themselves to vote for Kamala Harris, and to whether Harris can win back young men of color.

But this will also come down to whether white suburban women, who for the last 50-plus years have lived in a world in which they had the right to make decisions about their own bodies. That language sounds political, but the words are, for politics, admirably direct, basic, and true. And now, in many states, none of these words apply to the daughters and granddaughters of suburban women who for most of the last 50-plus years have been voting for the politicians who have finally succeeded in doing what they have been telling us they wanted to do for the last 50-plus years.

Politicians who have finally succeeded doing what they have been telling us they wanted to do for the last 50-plus years.

Other than money and odious nostalgia, there is no reason for Beetlejuice Beetlejuice to exist. The 1988 original told a complete story. Wynona Ryder’s Lydia avoids being forced to marry Michael Keaton’s Betelgeuse, and everyone, except Betelgeuse, lives happily ever after.

Except in the sequel, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, in which Lydia ends up forced to marry Betelgeuse, and her daughter gives birth to a monster baby who looks not like her own husband, but Betelgeuse. Lydia wakes up, answering perhaps, a question she asked in the first movie: “What if this is a dream?”

Except it’s not a dream. It’s a nightmare, because what else could you call it if a monster of a man forced you to marry him against your will after you thought you had already won that fight a long time ago? What else would you call your daughter unwillingly giving birth, much less to a monster who, in the dream logic of it all, must have impregnated her against her will? What else would you call it if your children and grandchildren were less free than you were at that age?

Wake up. You’re having a nightmare.

PS-Throw my oldest son a follow on Twitter/X. He’s hilarious.

Jason Stanford is a co-author of NYT-best selling Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth. His bylines have appeared in the Washington Post, Time, and Texas Monthly, among others. Follow him on Threads at @jasonstanford, or email him at jason31170@gmail.com.