The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
Pregnancy Horrors are stories about malevolent pregnancies and/or births. This is a genre that specifically plays on women’s fears of gynaecological horrors.
The genre began with Village of the Damned (1960) in which women of a village all go to sleep and awaken pregnant and give birth to alien children. The work that popularised the genre was Rosemary’s Baby (1968) in which Mia Farrow is certain that the child she is pregnant with was fathered by The Devil. A great many films followed in which the child is satanic, mutant or alien in origin. Another version is of the heroine sought by a Devil Worship cult in order to impregnate.
Another variant on the theme is where a pregnant women is abducted and imprisoned, or is imprisoned to be impregnated. There are also some films about the attempts to snatch foetuses from the womb. The Alien Abduction film features a number of cases where women are impregnated after being abducted by UFOs.
The zombie film underwent a major revival in the 2000s but by the mid-2020s a horde of low-budget copycats has exhausted most creative possibilities. This shows there is still some originality to be found
YouTube film reviewer Chris Stuckmann makes a directorial debut with this film about the investigation into a mysterious disappearance where he makes a work that is well above the often familiar material it deals with
Did the world ask for a prequel to the events of The Omen, explaining how Damien was born etc? It’s not an issue that has given me sleepless night, but it is a question the film sets out to answer anyway
A horror film where Sydney Sweeney stars as a virginal nun who appears to be experiencing an immaculate conception. This is only a slightly better version of The Nun
Did we need a prequel to the events of Rosemary’s Baby? The original one of the defining classics of the horror genre. Under producer Michael Bay Apartment 7A is just more IP churn
An hilariously black, deadpan film set in a future as a couple undergo assessment for whether they are fit to be parents. This involves Alicia Vikander moving into the house and play-acting being a child with absolutely chaotic effect
A standout modern variant on the Frankenstein film where two women conspire to cross waaay over medical ethic lines to revive a child from the dead
The third screen adaptation of John Wyndham’s book, previously filmed as Village of the Damned, this gives the story an update in some interesting ways
This has an insane plot about Satanists stealing the Shroud of Turin to clone a body to incarnate The Devil and a priest possessed by the archangel Michael wading into action with a glowing sword
Slapped with a misleading pandemic-related title, this is an Argentinean zombie film made with an admirable ferocity
The Jeepers Creepers films created a highly original boogeyman with some creepy effect. Mired in controversy, the fourth entry in franchise emerges from Finnish director Timo Vuorensola
Irish horror about a couple who inherit a house with faerie creatures at the end of the garden
A low-budget adaptation of the H.P. Lovecraft story Dreams in the Witch House about a student who moves into a house with occult geometry and stirs dark forces
M. Night Shyamalan gets more of a bad rap than he is due. I am happy to argue that this, which is set around a beach where people rapidly age, is one of his best films to date
Julia Ducournau’s Cannes award-winning film is a challenging work that pushes boundaries into uncomfortable places. Not to mention comes with human and car sex scenes
A low-budget adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s The Shadow Over Innsmouth. That is if you can imagine Lovecraft’s story about fish people mating with humans relocated to a California AirBNB
Unexpectedly excellent film where an elderly Satanist couple abduct a pregnant woman in order to incarnate their grandson in her unborn child. This deflates the cliches in a series of alternately funny and wild twists
Another multi-director horror anthology – in this case a quartet of horror stories from Bollywood directors that comes with one standout episode in particular
A South African variant on a film like Starman where a man is inhabited by an alien and stumbles through a series of encounters on the seedier side of life
Darren Lynn Bousman is a director that leaves me wondering why he keeps attracting money to make films. Here he makes a work about a couple caught up in sinister rituals while tourists in Thailand
An interesting slow burn film about an ex-soldier who accepts a job as a handyman with a woman and her ailing mother that soon heads off in some very strange directions
A horror anthology with a mordant sense of humour with Clancy Brown doing a great turn as an octogenarian mortuary attendant who tells several stories of the bodies he has tended
Really quite funny film in which a teenage girl becomes pregnant with a body-snatching parasite. Think Mean Girls meets The Hidden
The Woman was one of the least likely films to ever warrant a sequel. But this is what we get here and directed/written by no less than Pollyanna McIntosh who played The Woman in the original
Another film with a sinister adjectives for titles we have had since Insidious. This concerns a pregnant woman finding that the fetus she is carrying has been replaced by an evil spirit.
Tales from the Hood was the novelty of an African-American made horror anthology. 23 years later the principal talents (including producer Spike Lee) reunite for a sequel
Film where a woman in an asylum insists that her baby has been stolen from her womb and that she has psychic powers. Or equally possibly she is delusional. This sits on an ambiguous fence with some subtlety
Saw series director Darren Lynn Bousman makes a film set at a convent for unwed mothers in the 1950s. Is there any chance this might be a work about institutional cruelty or the plight of unwed mothers in the era? Hardly, all it really is is Bousman inflicting a series of tortures on the girls
Skyline was a modest alien invasion film; this is a long-planned sequel. The new director has simply turned it into an action film and tediously deals with every alien encounter with gunfire, stunts and explosions
Turkish director Con Evrenol made a splash with the horror film Baskin; this was his follow-up, an often head-scratching film about a housewife who is drawn into the mind-bending activities of a sinister cult
London couple find the perfect room to rent in the home of a very strange aging husband and wife. What starts out seeming an oddball comedy gradually slides over into horror movie territory but in truth this is not a very well made film on all fronts
This has cult midnight hit written over it. It’s a loopy trip into people doing drugs, alien impregnation and government conspiracy that should have been quirky and funny but sort of goes asleep at the wheel
In his follow-up to Manborg, Steven Kostanski abandons the affectionate homages to 1980s video-released genre films he has specialised in so far. A homage to the works of H.P. Lovecraft, this should be seen for the utterly wild and outlandish makeup effects that Kostanski delivers
A throwback to the 1980s/90s psycho-thriller that came out after Fatal Attraction featuring a surrogate mother who develops a stalkerish fixation on a husband. The crucial difference is that this is played with an all-Black cast but in a way that sends out weirdly uncomfortable racial messages
Another in the spate of multi-director horror anthologies with each episode here being set around a holiday. As with these films, some of the episodes work well, some end with a puzzled WTF and most fall somewhere in between
Danish film about an immigrant agreeing to become a surrogate mother only to believe she is inhabited by something malevolent. This does well in the build-up but a crucial failure to put a finger on what is going on makes for a frustrating experience
This, which is sort of The People Under the Stairs by way of Wait Until Dark, was greeted with terms like ‘an instant classic’. It is a well-oiled machine that produces some undeniable jumps but little remains in memory after it is over
Directed by and starring actress Alice Lowe, this comes in a blackly funny vein. Lowe plays a pregnant woman driven by the voice of her baby as she starts dispatching everything from sleazy men to those who annoy her
The 2007 Inside in which a pregnant mother is pursued by a woman with a pair of scissors was one of the most brutal viewing experiences amid the French Extremism fad. This is the English-language remake
From Cody Calahan who made Antisocial, a reasonable modernisation of the Jekyll and Hyde story with a girl at war for ownership of her own body with an evil alter ego
This feels like mostly a series of horror tropes – ghost hunters with cameras in an abandoned building, backwoods occultists wanting the heroine’s baby – shuffled without originality
This comes with much promise – rune-covered bodies found on a remote island, ritual murders and a secret society that believe they are the descendants of Celtic supermen – that you wonder what caused the filmmakers to let it slip through their hands
James Wan has an exemplary track record in one’s opinion, you think this would extend to anything he produces. Here all we get are series of tired haunted house cliches before a twist ending that makes no real sense
An amnesiac girl returns home to a large estate in the English countryside only to be made prisoner by her family. Reminiscent of one of the 1960s Hammer psycho-thriller, this is well-made and builds out a fine sense of alienation
The return of director of Pontypool should be anticipated. But this kills a near-foolproof premise – masked children come after a heroine on Halloween night wanting her unborn baby – with a pink lighting scheme
Another effort from the near-ubiquitous Blumhouse horror company. A film that teases many things – occult rituals, cultists after the pregnant heroine’s baby – that prove red herrings as it eventually telescopes down to a frustratingly ordinary explanation
Blumhouse thriller about an old school friend who inserts himself into the lives of a successful couple and proceeds to stalk them. This produces several effective twists but ultimately feels too mannered
From David Keating who made Wake Wood, this falls into the Folk Horror genre and becomes a well-made variant on Rosemary’s Baby as a schoolgirl accepts a Devil’s Deal to save her father
The tenth of the Japanese Ju-on/The Grudge series. Newcomer Masayuki Ochiai has some effective touches but the series is running out of original moves
Sequel to the hit multi-director anthology has a less high-profile line-up of directors, nor hits the astonishingly perverse heights of its predecessor. As always some entries never do much but the film finds its stride in the last few episodes
Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby was a classic film that popularised the modern interest in occult and deviltry on film; this sad remake is something that only parrots the cliches that have set in in the ensuing 46 years and clumsily mishandles all of Polanski’s comically edgy paranoia
A Found Footage film that seeks to overhaul the Satanic impregnation film a la Rosemary’s Baby. Both the Found Footage and the Satanic impregnation genres feel well-mined by now and this fails to offer anything new
The second film from The Pact director Nicholas McCarthy. What is happening is kept deliberately vague and elliptical – as you are trying to piece everything together, McCarthy manages to pull some incredibly eerie jolts
A Found Footage vampire film. This only follows where The Blair Witch Project went before, while the long build-up to the revelation of its creature proves a damp fizzle
Neither of this film’s titles do it justice – Wandering Rose seems either about a girl who hitchhikes or is very promiscuous, while Demon Baby pushes it over into a devil pregnancy film. What we instead have is a film set in the Scottish Highlands that creates a great sense of dis-ease, even if it never fully delivers on it
The first occasion I have had to review a horror film from Peru – a thriller about a young woman imprisoned and forced to bear a child. This is never a work that particularly reinvents the wheel, just turns out a solid and suspenseful imprisonment thriller
Film about ghosthunters investigating a reputedly haunted California winery. The scares are about as generic and forgettable as they come, although the end takes a very strange left field turn
From the creators of Reno 911, a comedy spoofing possession, exorcism and diabolical pregnancy cliches. This assembles material that feels as though it should have been funnier than it is
A very odd Folk Horror film set among two backwoods hillbilly families whose lives are dominated by a pit in the woods they worship
Roger Christian was art director on Alien but will always be remembered as director of the notorious Battlefield Earth. Here he is stuck making a cheap, tatty and frequently incomprehensible copy of Alien about alien impregnation
This was the first Found Footage film to deal with the Satanic pregnancy theme, prefiguring the more high-profile Devil’s Due. This draws on the plotting conventions and cliches laid down by Rosemary’s Baby in every way
From the director of the Terrifier films, a horror anthology in which a babysitter and kids sit down to watch a mysterious videotape on Halloween night. The first screen appearance of Art the Clown
Ridley Scott’s promised prequel to Alien. The first half creates epic mystery but the answers provided are not nearly as interesting as promised, while the latter half disappointingly settles for doing the Alien standard with decidedly lesser effect
Unique anthology that offers 26 episodes from different directors, each ending with a death. The episodes vary wildly in quality but a sufficient number ignore all good taste and/or travel waaaay across taboo lines
An anthology of five short Found Footage horror films each from a different director. As with any anthology these are variable in tone but are on the whole mostly effective and contain a number of alternately unearthly and spooky moments
A Dark Horse Entertainment film that traipses through a tired serial killer plot that comes out resembling a weak episode of CSI before a frankly unbelievable twist ending
Adam Gierasch, known for his gore-drenched horror films like Autopsy and Night of the Demons, takes a change of direction into the haunted house genre
The point where the Twilight series collapses under its pretensions and draws every detail of its wedding out for an excruciating hour. A series that has been all about preaching chastity then segues into Right to Life advocacy
Troma film that ventures back into their regular bad taste territory. This often feels like a film that never coheses into a particularly clear idea of what it is trying to do, possibly the result of six different directors
This Australian thriller has a captivating premise – pregnant women are abducted, C-sectioned and imprisoned where they must fight to the death to get their children back
Low-budget occult film about guests at a motel trapped in a mysterious twilight zone. A work sits between the cheap and occasionally effective
A disturbingly effective story of a mother who gives birth to a baby that is not human. An immensely assured directorial debut that eschews cliche horror effect and becomes a chilling study in psychological disintegration
A low-budget indie comedy about a house that is plagued by demons and vampires. This comes with moments of appealing silliness
South African-shot film that pretends to be set in The Philippines. Utterly generic on every level, the film seems to be about Filipino vampire monsters but everything is vaguely sketched
The long-awaited return of Frank Henenlotter, the cult director of Basket Case fame, with a film about people with mutant genitalia – a work that proves extraordinary in its mind-bogglingly perverse imagery
Larry Cohen’s 1974 cult classic about a killer mutant baby gets the remake treatment. Even though Cohen co-writes the script here, the remake manages to wring anything interesting out of the original
Nicolas Roeg returns to screens after a long absence in what would be his last film, a Fay Weldon adaptation about pagan rites, pregnancy and witchcraft that manages to sound far wilder in synopsis than how Roeg directs it all on screen
The most difficult to watch of the films to come out of French Extremism about a pregnant woman pursued by a mystery woman determined to tear the baby from her womb
Alfonso Cuaron film set in a near-future afflicted by an epidemic of infertility. Cuaron’s depiction of a dystopian world comes with a richness of casually layered detail that makes for a stark and powerful film
This rehashes the basic set-up of Rosemary’s Baby but with a spin where a couple move into the perfect apartment only to find their neighbours are health obsessed seniors with a sinister agenda
Charlize Theron becomes paranoid and suspects her space shuttle astronaut husband Johnny Depp of returning possessed by an alien. Essentially an SF version of Rosemary’s Baby
Horror director Brian Yuzna jumps aboard the alien abduction and impregnation theme that was popular at the time thanks to tv’s The X Files. All of Yuzna’s films have a fascination with sexual perversity so here the emphasis is placed on the impregnation
A British mini-series that offers an ingenious modernised reconeptualisation of the vampire genre, depicting the activities of a secret agency of vampire hunters
From a Larry Cohen script, a side-splitting effort with Kevin Dillon as a psychopathic sperm donor who forcibly intrudes into the life of his baby’s mother
Director John Carpenter did amazing things with his remake of The Thing but was not able to replicate such with his remake of Village of the Damned, which misses the taut atmosphere of the 1960 film
Danish tv mini-series co-directed by Lars von Trier set in a haunted hospital. This comes with a blacker-than-black sense of humour in its interwoven character strands plus moments that are genuinely eerie
A Roger Corman produced cheapie about genetically engineered dinosaurs that was quickly rushed out to exploit the success of Jurassic Park. Corman went on to make two sequels
Julian Sands returns in a sequel to Warlock where the frequently unserious effects of director Anthony Hickox turn it into a silly comic-book of a film
Third of the Alien films, a directorial debut for David Fincher. A better film than was perceived at the time, this explores new character depths, while Fincher imprints his own visual style on the film
The last of the popular Hong Kong comedy series about hopping vampires. While the other sequels became very silly, this goes out on an inspired final note
An entertaining B-budget film about malevolent toys from low-budget producer Charles Band, known for the Ghoulies and Puppetmaster films. One of the first works from screenwriter David S. Goyer
One of the earliest works about Alien Abduction, predating the fascination with the topic that came not long after with tv’s The X Files. From genre regular Dan Curtis, the creator of tv’s Dark Shadows
A film written/produced by Dario Argento, an occult giallo in the vein of his Three Mothers films in which a teacher is surrounded by a series of occult happenings and deaths
Roger Corman produced film where Brooke Adams realises that something sinister might be happening with her pregnancy
Frank Henenlotter takes the commercial route and makes a sequel to his no-budget cult film. A bigger budget allows the film to become a comic variant on Freaks featuring a series of way-out makeup effects
A wildly deranged and gore-drenched ride. Imagine Rosemary’s Baby with an Alien chesburster where a woman is impregnated by a parasite that maintains a monologue as it urges her to kill and drink blood to feed it.
The original version of the Margaret Atwood novel made way before the tv series. This aims in the general direction but is more a film that achieves a sense of disquiet rather than the true horror of its’ heroine’s situation in this world
Roger Corman produces a blatant copy of Alien with a group of people being pursued around a desert laboratory by a rubbery mutant creature
A much more elevated version of an Omen-styled Biblical End Times film with Demi Moore worried if her child can save the world
The third of Larry Cohen’s killer mutant baby films that began with the cult It’s Alive. Cohen’s humour is again present but the film feels like a hodgepodge of ideas left over from the other films