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.
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
Roger Corman produces a blatant copy of Alien with a group of people being pursued around a desert laboratory by a rubbery mutant creature
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 British mini-series that offers an ingenious modernised reconeptualisation of the vampire genre, depicting the activities of a secret agency of vampire hunters
Roger Corman produced film where Brooke Adams realises that something sinister might be happening with her pregnancy
Irish horror about a couple who inherit a house with faerie creatures at the end of the garden
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
Classic adaptation of the John Wyndham novel about the women in a sleepy English village being impregnated and producing emotionless alien children with vast psychic powers. This translates the paranoia of US alien invasion films with considerable effectiveness
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
Slapped with a misleading pandemic-related title, this is an Argentinean zombie film made with an admirable ferocity
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
Head-scratchingly strange Italian film that seems made as a crosshatch of 1970s Devil Child films and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Makes no sense in terms of story but worth watching for the bizarreness of its imagery
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
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
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
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
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
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
A British-made copy of Alien that has been construed as a series of bizarre images and scenes that make no real sense – even the title is given no explanation
SF film set in a future that is so overpopulated that childbirth is treated as an executable crime. Although sometimes naive in its speculations, this creates a dystopian scenario that imaginatively turns many familiar aspects of the present on their head