Pregnancy in the Horror Film: Reproduction and Maternal Discourses

Abstract

A number of social and economic factors contributed to the rise of the pregnancy horror film from the late 1960s onwards. The Motion Picture Production Code of the preceding decades had, for example, forbidden the showing of images of childbirth (Wallis and Pramaggiore, 2005: 300). While reproduction had been invoked in many 1950s ‘invasion’ narratives, the pregnant woman remained largely absent. Along with the end of the Production Code, a number of various social and cultural factors possibly contributed to the sudden emergence of pregnancy horror from the 1960s. Feminist and social theorists opened up newer and often conflicting discourses about the pregnant body in these years (for example Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman Born (1976) and the Boston Women’s Health Course Collective’s Our Bodies, Ourselves [1973–1984]). Many horror films that featured pregnancy focused on the trauma associated with childbirth, anxieties about health (of mother and child) and fears of the medicalisation of pregnancy. These horror films coincided with the broader representation of pregnancy across all media. However, within the horror film, as I argue, discourses of pregnancy were often superseded by discourses of motherhood. Thus, the films, I suggest, collapse any distinction between the biological state of pregnancy and the psychical imago of motherhood.