The pregnant protagonist in peril is a go-to horror character at this point. With Prime Video’s Dead Ringers series putting maternity under a particularly harrowing microscope, we’re looking back at 10 movies that explore the very worst things you can (hopefully not) expect while you’re expecting.
Please note, for the purposes of this list “horrifying pregnancies” isn’t quite the same genre as “horrifying babies,” and there are plenty of the latter out there if you’d prefer to see some killer infants on a rampage. (Important distinction for anyone who was going to ask about It’s Alive and its ilk.)
Rosemary’s Baby
Not long after moving into a towering Manhattan apartment building with a sinister history, a young wife (Mia Farrow) is delighted to discover she’s pregnant with her first child. Not so delightful is her growing certainty that her husband (John Cassavetes) arranged Satan to father her child as a way to further his stalled acting career. Once the kid’s born, her worst fears are proven; “He has his father’s eyes!” has never been uttered in a creepier context.
A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child
After besting Freddy Krueger in A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master, final girl Alice Johnson (Lisa Wilcox) has to do it all over again in the next movie. This time, however, she’s pregnant with a son whose in utero dreams are being invaded by you-know-who, enabling him to keep picking off Alice’s nearest and dearest while also doing his best to convert the unborn child into a Krueger-esque creature of evil. That is definitely not a scenario covered in any baby book ever written.
Inside
Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo’s notoriously gruesome 2007 release is the ultimate “womb raider” movie, starring Alysson Paradis as a recently widowed mother-to-be terrorised by an older woman (Béatrice Dalle) who’s dead set on ripping the baby out of her body and claiming it as her own. Interior would be harrowing even if news headlines didn’t remind us that this sort of crime has actually been known to happen in real life.
Anthropophagus
Joe D’Amato’s 1980 cannibal extravaganza (starring Tisa Farrow, Mia’s less-famous but cult-beloved sister) offers a convincing argument against taking any spontaneous trips to any remote islands, full stop — a caution that becomes even more urgent when one among your party happens to be pregnant. Let’s just say the events of Inside start to look tame once you add freaking cannibalism to the whole “ripping the baby out of its mother” thing.
The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 1
Sure, they’re seductive as hell — but you really should avoid having unprotected sex with vampires.
The Brood
David Cronenberg, whose Dead Ringers inspired the new Prime Video series, applies an entirely different lens to the idea of motherhood in this 1979 release. Imagine having so much pent-up rage festering inside you that you spontaneously and asexually manifest a pack of monstrous children-creatures, and you’ll have an idea of what Samantha Eggar’s character goes through in The Brood. So yes, this is also a spooky-kid flick, but the way they’re brought into the world is truly the spookiest part about them.
Who Can Kill a Child?
Narciso Ibáñez Serrador’s 1976 tale of vacation terror tricks you into thinking it’s merely a spooky kid movie, as an English couple — who also didn’t get the memo about avoiding any and all peculiar islands — stumble across an isolated community populated entirely by wildly violent children. But as it happens, the woman is pregnant… and her unborn child soon falls under the spell of the hive mind and murders its mother from the inside.
The Fly
Cronenberg again! Imagine realising you’re pregnant — and feeling extreme dread that the father is your estranged boyfriend who’s lately been obsessed with teleportation and is slowly, extremely grossly transforming into a human-fly hybrid. You, too, might have vividly awful nightmares about giving birth to a maggot baby! (The inferior sequel, not directed by Cronenberg, tells the story of the non-maggot but not exactly normal child’s eventual fate.)
Prevenge
This pitch-black 2016 horror comedy stars Alice Lowe (Sightseers, Black Mirror: Bandersnatch), who also wrote and directed, as Ruth, a pregnant woman who believes her unborn child is instructing her to wreak bloody vengeance on the people responsible for her partner’s death. The supporting cast includes Game of Thrones’ Kate Dickie and Gemma Whelan, and What We Do in the Shadows’ Kayvan Novak, and while you would not want what happens to Ruth to happen to you, Lowe manages to make her horrifying plight into a wickedly funny movie.
Prometheus
In Ridley Scott’s 2012 Alien franchise entry, a scientist (Noomi Rapace) who believes she’s infertile has sex with her partner after the mission’s android slips him a drink tainted by space goo left behind by an alien planet’s race of long-gone humanoid Engineers. Don’t worry about those details; just worry about how the scientist finds herself suddenly pregnant with a decidedly non-human baby, and must perform an emergency c-section on herself or die trying. It’s the one scene most people remember from Prometheus, with good reason.
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