Growing Bellies, Failing Mothers, Scary Offspring

Abstract

This chapter addresses so-called ‘gynaehorror,’ the type of horror that deals explicitly with female reproductive bodily functions. While first addressing Woolf’s childlessness, the chapter opens with references to the early work of Agnes Varda, Diary of a Pregnant Woman (1958) and One Sings the Other Doesn’t (1977) to then turn to the female version of Rosemary’s Baby with Lyle (Stewart Thorndike, 2014) and Alice Low’s pregnancy-horror film Prevenge (2016). Jennifer Phillips’s film Blood Child (2017) is a chilling story based on true events where a miscarriage is translated into the raising of a ghost child. Furthermore, this chapter looks at complicated mother-daughter relations in Ngozi Onwurah’s The Body Beautiful (1991) and in Deborah Haywood’s Pin Cushion (2017); and at mother-son relations in We Have to talk About Kevin (Lynne Ramsey 2011), Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook (2014) and Goodnight Mommy (Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala 2015). The chapter also discusses some other family relations from hell as depicted Dark Touch (Marina de Van 2013), System Crasher (Nora Fingscheidt 2019) and Family (Veronika Kedar 2017). Lucile Hadžihalilović’s Evolution (2015) takes pregnancy to a post human level and in that sense resonates with some of Butler’s writing, especially her short story ‘Blood Child’.