Killer Bumps: Pregnancy as Body Horror

By Ellie Slee

Several years ago, when I was pregnant (and hating every minute of it), I read an article that seemed to have been written precisely for me. It felt as though the author, Dr Suzanne Sadedin, had waded into the foamy hormonal fug of my brain to slice through all the dark, unsettling thoughts I was having about what was happening to me, and to present the truth in all its gristly, glistening terror. Sadedin confirmed what I’d come to suspect: pregnancy is a real-life body horror.

She was answering a question on Quora about why women have periods. The answer is that, well, pregnancy is rough. Not just rough - it’s dangerous. Due to our unusual hemochorial placenta, the human fetus poses great risk to its mother, and our bodies have evolved to reject non-viable pregnancies as best they can. Which is why, unlike most other mammals, we menstruate.

Though I’ve given birth - and would probably do it again, at a push (pun intended), Sadedin’s description of the nuts and bolts of pregnancy still haunts me. She says:

[In humans…] the growing fetus has direct, unrestricted access to its mother's blood supply. It can manufacture hormones and use them to manipulate her. It can, for instance, increase her blood sugar, dilate her arteries, and inflate her blood pressure to provide itself with more nutrients. And it does. Some fetal cells find their way through the placenta and into the mother's bloodstream. They will grow in her blood and organs, and even in her brain, for the rest of her life, making her a genetic chimera.

Though it’s from a factual article written by an evolutionary biologist, this paragraph reads like the treatment for a body horror script. And on top of the fact that the physicality of pregnancy contains multiple horror tropes, there are psychological and social aspects that connect it to the genre, too. I’m aware of the privilege I have as a white millennial cis woman — that my pregnancy is likely to be easier and safer than the pregnancies of Black women, for example, and that, in a wider context, my pregnant (and non-pregnant) body is safer, too. Still, what struck me as frightening when I became pregnant, on top of torturous sounding splitting and stitching, was the complete lack of agency I now had, on multiple levels. There’s a sweeping paternalism across society towards pregnant women; we’re infantilised and governed in a way that doesn’t happen to most people after puberty. During pregnancy and labour, we face myriad infringements on our autonomy, at individual level to on a wider, political scale. These range from being touched when we don’t want to be –  not just at work and family parties, or on the street by strangers, but also sometimes inappropriately by doctors, who are in a position of power when we are at our most vulnerable – to being able to make decisions about abortion. In the UK, though our abortion laws are, globally, comparatively progressive, past twenty-four weeks gestation, we’re no longer allowed to make decisions about our babies. Meanwhile, in other countries, like Ireland, strict rules that legislate and illegalise abortion are used to horrific ends. 

In film, pregnancy is used as a clear plot signifier — in part, because pregnancy is a perfectly designed plot, with a classic three act structure,. It has a soaring beginning (confirmation), a defined middle (gestation), and a clear ending (birth). All three ‘acts’ can be happy, tragic, or horrifying. Because of the visible narrative attached to pregnant women, we instantly recognise them; we think we know their story, and we also want to know them better. We want to touch them, to talk to them, to control them — and for this reason, we rarely casually see them onscreen. They’re seldom extras, used to populate crowds and fade into the background: they’re devices, which is why, in horror, the sight of pregnancy instantly creates such a feeling of unease.

For example, when the titular character in mother! (2017) falls pregnant, we automatically know it does not end well for her or her baby. She lives in total isolation with Him (Javier Bardem), her brooding, distant husband, and spends her days renovating their beautiful historic home. Though to the audience, their home life seems simultaneously claustrophobic and sparse, Mother (Jennifer Lawrence) is content, and when a new character, Man (Ed Harris), arrives at the house, we instantly sense her terror. Shortly after, Man’s wife, Woman (Michelle Pfeiffer) joins him, and then their two sons, Oldest Son (Domhnall Gleeson) and Younger Brother (Brian Gleeson) burst into the house fighting, and one murders the other. There’s an impromptu funeral in the house and Mother comes downstairs to find strangers painting the walls — a perfect metaphor for the lack of control women can feel over what happens to them when they’re pregnant. She’s told, “Please, it’s the least we can do,: and yet she feels confused by the surreal situation, and is also visibly stifled by it. She is at her calmest when she’s plastering and painting walls, and this loss of control over what makes her happy is jarring to her. To Mother, it isn’t a helpful gesture, it’s a transgression, and this moment is recognisable for someone who has been pregnant. So often, ‘the least’ someone can do for a pregnant person – such as tidying up after them, shielding them from bad news or policing their choices – is intrusive and presumptive. 

This scene is mirrored and amplified later in the film, when Him invites hordes of adoring fans into their home. At this point, Mother is heavily pregnant. The fans begin to riot and loot, playing loud, pumping music, and Mother is terrified. Her terror grows and, so too does the intensity of the gathering, which gets more and more violent until it becomes a bloody battle, at which point Mother goes into labour. As she limps between rooms, desperately seeking somewhere safe to give birth, it’s as though her labouring body is the battleground. While she contracts and screams in pain, she is physically, verbally, and sexually assaulted. The audience already feels protective towards Mother, but this scene compounds it. In film — especially horror — we regularly watch women experience horrific violence, but they are seldom birthing at the same time. So, in a way, this scene is one that resensitises us to the plight of women onscreen. mother! identifies the paternalism that exists towards pregnant women, societally, and with the barefoot, nesting, blissfully pregnant character of Mother, ignites it in the audience.

Though mother! is an allegorical film, the experience of pregnancy and motherhood can be read literally, too. In many cultures – across East Asia, the Indian subcontinent and Latin America, for example – it’s traditional for new mothers and their babies to isolate in a period of postpartum confinement. For some, it is the norm for mothers to be protected — and free from visitors — in the first days, even months, of their babies’ lives. In the days after I gave birth, I remember revisiting this idea, and thinking how nice it would be to switch off the lights and pretend we weren’t home. Even though I knew them all, in those first, fragile days, every new person who touched and took and held my child terrified me. For Mother, the feeling of wanting to be alone, and the fears that she feels when she isn’t, are substantiated. The people who wish to hold her baby aren’t interested aunts and uncles who come bearing gifts and foil-wrapped lasagne; they are strangers, violating her privacy and her postpartum experience, trespassing on the first moments of her son’s life, and putting him in danger. The spiralling feeling of terror when she realises Him isn’t on her side — that he doesn’t have the baby’s best interests at heart — writhes uncomfortably inside of her, and is relatable for many birth mothers, when children become separated from their mother, without flesh as protection. Likewise, her screaming fits of rage when her son is then killed and eaten, as she becomes the embodiment of a mother’s greatest fear: to have lost a child.

The maternal instinct, an aspect of Mother’s characterisation that makes us feel protective over her, is pathologised to the point of becoming repulsive in the genre more widely. Baby Blood (1990) is part of a long line of extreme French body horror, predating the New French Extremity movement by a decade but sharing its key tenets of intelligence, shock, and gore. The film centres around Yanka (Emmanuelle Escourrou), a circus performer whose uterus is taken over by a serpentine parasite. The parasite speaks to Yanka, demanding she kill humans so that it can devour their blood. Yanka is torn between doing what the parasite - her ‘baby’ asks - and finding a way to terminate the ‘pregnancy’, even if that means taking her own life. Direct parallels are drawn with vampire stories, as, at the behest of the creature she’s carrying, Yanka murders the men she seduces for their blood, and breaks into blood banks, stealing entire bags to drink. The real takeaway, though, is that it’s the parasite that makes her do these things; the occupant of her uterus, driving her to commit heinous crimes, and she, the mother, is powerless to resist. Actually, there’s a name for what Yanka experiences in Baby Blood: pica, an appetite for non-nutritious substances. Studies have shown that upwards of 30% of women experience the desire to eat non-foods during pregnancy, varying from ice to sand. There’s no doubt that even human parasites can create powerful cravings in their hosts.

Horror-thriller, Grace (2009), about a reanimated stillbirth, puts a dark spin on the ‘natural’ motherhood movement. The film begins with jokes about veganism and water births, and ‘most-natural-thing-in-the-world’ lines like, “If I break my leg, I’m gonna get a chiropractor to set it. But with pregnancy, there’s nothing broken in the first place.” Yet it quickly begins to bring repulsion to the most basic of bodily functions. The only way to stop baby Grace screaming, her mother Madeleine (Jordan Ladd) discovers, is to let her suckle until her breasts are bleeding so she can drink blood. Soon, Madeleine is not enough, and so she begins to drain cuts of meat, before killing to fill bottles with blood for Grace. It’s an attempt to look at the depths of the mother-child connection that clumsily vilifies natural parenting in the process, but there are some shrewd, satirical moments. In one scene, Madeleine screams at her mother-in-law, “You don’t understand! She’s special!” in a wry, funny moment that exposes new mothers’ blinkered view of their children, one that many mothers (and mother-in-laws) might recognise.

Satire or not, in reality, the fetus, and the baby it becomes, do hold a great deal of power over their mother. From cravings during pregnancy to intense, crashing emotions afterwards, the control they exert over their mothers’ bodies is immense. I became completely preoccupied with my own mortality after my daughter was born, and I asked my own mother – the sweetest woman in the world – if she’d experienced anything like it. Completely out of character, she told me of a recurrent dream she had after I was born. In it, an eighteen-wheel truck turned up the slim street we lived on, and crashed into her bedroom, killing me. “Every night, I climbed into the cabin, took hold of the driver’s head, and smashed his brains out on the steering wheel,” she told me calmly. The change in the maternal brain after birth is immediate and dramatic, according to a study published by Nature Neuroscience and reported in Scientific American.Notably, though parents who don’t physically carry the fetus also undergo brain recomposition, it doesn’t happen as quickly. It can be isolating for biological mothers to realise that their (maybe sweet, doting) partner is wired differently, with different priorities postpartum. These different priorities are explored in Honeymoon (2014), via the ultimate patriarchal paranoia: that the creature growing inside a new bride’s belly isn’t her husband’s. The film starts with obnoxious newlyweds Bea (Rose Leslie) and Paul (Harry Treadaway) travelling to a secluded cabin on their honeymoon. In one of the opening scenes, Paul suggests Bea “rest her womb”. She uses this as a point of departure to discuss having children, telling him she doesn’t think she’s ready; he responds with machismo, saying, “I was just teasing about how hard I fucked you,” which she seems visibly hurt by. (Actually, for the first twenty-five minutes of the film, the creepiest thing is Paul.)

Then, Bea goes into the woods one night and returns changed. She’s forgetful, aloof, and confused — all behavioural developments associated with pregnancy. Despite her protestations, Paul believes that she has cheated on him with a summer sweetheart from her youth. Then, she appears to get her period – a sudden rush of blood seeps through her shorts – and he immediately asks her to go to the doctor, angrily saying, “I sat there and watched while you marked the calendar and counted the days, so we didn’t have to deal with it now.” Although there are definitely some odd goings-on —Bea has strange puncture marks on her legs, matching those of another woman they meet — Paul’s fury in the face of his confused wife, his casual misogyny, and minimal understanding of the female body all add exponentially to the horror. When he helps a terrified Bea to ‘deliver’ a parasitic worm-like creature, his immediate response is to leave the room. In this way, the horror is twofold: we watch a woman go through a gruelling ‘birth’ experience, and then we watch her husband recoil from her in disgust. 

mother!, Honeymoon, Grace, and Baby Blood are by no means the only pregnancy horrors — it’s a subgenre all of its own! — but, in their own way, each of these films highlights very real aspects of pregnancy and motherhood through horror’s lens. When we see pregnancy and the postnatal experience in horror, the depiction may seem absurd and egregious but, in becoming pregnant in the first place, women take an enormous risk. To procreate, we first have to outsmart our very selves, defying our bodies’ best interests to keep us safe and allowing part of someone else — a parasitic being — to take up residence in our uteruses, our bloodstreams, our brains. In that respect, it isn’t pregnancy in film that’s absurd and egregious, it’s pregnancy itself.

Ellie Slee is a magazine production editor and freelance writer who focuses on pop culture, feminism and motherhood. You can read more of her work here or tweet her @sleeful

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