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.
One of the essential Troma films, this seems to have been conceived as Rock’n’Roll High School with Evil Dead-styled makeup effects and lots of moronic bad taste humour
A completely deranged film from Hong Kong’s Shaw Brothers involving the resurrection of a dead wife to exact retribution. Full of ghost sex, gore and madcap creature effects
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
Fairly trashy low-budget British copy of Alien with several well-known actors running around a series of caves after Judy Geeson becomes impregnated by an alien embryo
One of the most influential films on this site, producing a host of sequels and making the careers of all involved. At heart, a simple monster on a spaceship film, it is made into a classic through Ridley Scott’s relentless suspense and H.R. Giger’s design work
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
This was the first of Larry Cohen’s sequels to his killer mutant baby film It’s Alive. Here Cohen uses the occasion to expand the themes in richer depth and makes a work that stands up as well as the original
The one moment of triumph from director William Girdler who takes a work that sits just on the threshold of schlock and transforms into something incredibly eerie with an injection of H.P. Lovecraft and American Indian mysticism
Adaptation of an early Dean R. Koontz novel about an A.I who imprisons a woman in her own home with the intention of impregnating her. A variant on Rosemary’s Baby conducted far more tastefully than you might think
Scientist Rock Hudson brings an unborn embryo to life as beautiful emotionless Barbara Carrera. Though it uses the trappings of modern science, this still has its feet in the creaky old mad scientist film
A blatant Italian copy of The Exorcist. An exploitation film made with almost zero directorial style that only has the schlock amusements of its attempts to outdo The Exorcist going for it
TV movie with a script from Richard Matheson in which Barbara Eden becomes mysteriously pregnant. The film seems to be a copy of Rosemary’s Baby before it is suddenly turns into an alien impregnation film
The film about a killer mutant baby that made the name of director Larry Cohen who developed a cult following. Cohen infuses it with rich imagery and dark sense of humour. Several sequels followed
Obscure 1970s horror that generates a certain creepy effect with four girls gathered at a big old house for sinister purpose. before going sidewise during the second half amid a profusion of competing tropes
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
TV movie set in a dystopian future where law mandates that couples can only have one child, concerning a couple who go on the run after becoming pregnant a second time
Psycho-thriller about a woman who has an abortion and then years later is married and pregnant when she is stalked by her ex-boyfriend demanding that the child is his. From an early Larry Cohen script
Classic film and one of Roman Polanski’s finest works, the comically paranoid story of a housewife who increasingly comes to believe that the child she is pregnant with was fathered by The Devil
Hammer Films offer their take on the werewolf film starring a young, unknown Oliver Reed. Director Terence Fisher creates a lush film rich in symbolism, made with the full weight of Hammer’s production values
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