Horror Cinema for the End of Roe

Last week, the day came that we all knew was coming. The U.S. Supreme Court issued a ruling that overturned Roe v Wade, thereby eliminating the constitutional right to abortion in the country. This decision has far-reaching implications that go beyond the horror this inflicts on people who can get pregnant, but I’ll leave that to the legal and political commentators. Partly because it’s not really my field of expertise, but also partly because I’m still processing the gut-punch of a ruling that comes in the wake of a surge in anti-trans hate and the seemingly unstoppable wave of mass shootings that a disturbing number of people are fine with, so long as they get to keep jacking off their guns.

I for one have been coping by playing really pointless idle and clicker games on Steam (I like Cookie Clicker), and finding solace, oddly enough, in The Sting. But that’s not what this is about. A while ago, when to be clear we all already knew Roe was on the chopping block, I started working on something to tie in with a screening I caught part of in Denver. At the Sie Film Center, as part of a tribute to Larry Cohen, the ongoing horror series Scream Screen showcased one of Cohen’s most vital works: the It’s Alive trilogy. Cohen, as I’ve alluded to before, was a kind of sci-fi horror prophet; his best work, including Q: The Winged Serpent, The Stuff, and God Told Me To, alongside It’s Alive, is infused with a forward-thinking social commentary disguised by the trappings of low, even blasphemous, cinema.

So it is that with It’s Alive, Cohen used the distinctly controversial figure of the monstrous killer infant to speak to anxieties that could, in a sense, only be tackled by such a hot-button subject. In 1974, just a year after the decision in Roe v Wade, the Davis baby was born.

The Davis baby and the babies that follow take the shape and narrative position of horror movie monsters. They seem to kill instinctively, and in It’s Alive the Davis baby’s reign of terror is only ended by the child’s death at the hands of police. In It’s Alive 2: It Lives Again (1978), Larry Cohen’s social commentator takes over, and the film is dominated by discussions of the philosophical ramifications of interventions into the births of more children who are like the Davis baby.

Frank Davis, the father of the child at the center of It’s Alive, appears in It Lives Again to champion the right of parents to give birth to such “monsters” as his own child was. The films engage the topic of reproductive rights by appearing to invert the discussion from “pro-abortion/anti-abortion” to “pro-birth/anti-birth”. It’s a tricky inversion, one that might lead a viewer to miss the fact that the It’s Alive films are staunchly pro-choice works. The films certainly speak to anxieties surrounding abortion while coming to the ultimate conclusion that it must be the choice of those involved, not any external entity, whether a pregnancy can be carried to term.

But that’s just the beginning. Now, with Roe v Wade overturned an extremely conservative Supreme Court, it’s worth revisiting what Larry Cohen had to say. In many ways, It’s Alive is a trilogy tailor made for a time in which reproductive rights are being upended in a way that, to be clear, absolutely does not stop here. They will go further. They will always go further.

One of the predecessors to It’s Alive, 1968’s Rosemary’s Baby, is a helpful reference point. It’s much easier to see pro-choice content in Polanski’s elegantly high art work of proto-body-horror, centering as it does on Rosemary struggling to hold onto her bodily autonomy in the face of a deceitful husband, meddling neighbors, and a controlling doctor, each of whom feels an entitlement to decide Rosemary’s fate as reproductive vessel. Rosemary’s Baby speaks to a fear of pregnancy and childbirth that directly run contra to what Jessica Valenti called “the lie of fulfillment”, the misconception aimed at mothers “that parenthood will fulfill you”.

In contrast to Rosemary’s Baby, It’s Alive trades on the visceral reaction to infants and childbirth, and particularly a perversion of the so-called sanctity of life that conservative anti-abortion rhetoric has been trading on for decades. For that alone, It’s Alive is worth watching. Too often the debate has been held on the terms of the anti-choice movement. But the beauty of It’s Alive is that it seems to anticipate the conservative talking points and buzzwords and preemptively turn the entire conversation on its head. Consider this exchange in the first film, following the birth of the killer Davis baby:

Doctor: “I noticed that you did inquire about abortion eight months ago.”

Frank Davis: “Doesn’t everybody inquire about it nowadays? It’s just a question of convenience and we decided to have the baby.”

Lt. Perkins: “We all make mistakes.”

Aside from the reference to the recent nature of Roe v Wade, Frank Davis here not only frames the conversation as unimportant and unremarkable, but also strips the decision of the emotional and moral weight often wedged there by conservatives. Convenience may seem like a flippant term, but what it really means is the ability to give birth and ultimately raise a child and all the calculus that goes with that decision, calculus beyond any dogmatic blather about souls or life. Then, of course, there’s the wisecracking remark that inverts the whole framework of what, exactly, counts as a mistake in the abortion debate.

While It’s Alive forces difficult questions about birth, life, and parenthood, the trilogy also highlights the question that anti-abortion advocates always neglect: what happens to the children after they’re born? While the Davis baby and other similar children seem like monsters, they’re also seen to respond their treatment and their environment. It’s never as easy as simply identifying the monsters, and monstrosity is subjective anyway. Robin Wood famously suggested that in horror, “normality is threatened by the Monster”, but everyone has a different normal. Sometimes normality is the horror, as in the case of The Stepford Wives (another key piece of cinema for a post-Roe world), and in some ways It’s Alive (along with Cohen’s filmography in general) functions the same way. The desperate desire for normality — including the zealous desire for traditionalist control over women’s reproduction — produces monstrous results.

In another realm of horror, The Wicker Man illustrates the tensions between traditionalism and a society that rejects such traditions. When Sergeant Howie arrives on the isolated Summerisle, the straitlaced, devout Christian finds himself in a realm of paganism that frightens and disgusts him. The film is structured by the closedmindedness of Sergeant Howie in the face of religious traditions he considers illegitimate compared to Christianity, his normal. Howie, truly one of the most unpleasant protagonists in film history, spends the film flexing his police authority and furiously demanding to know why villagers, particularly the children, are not brought up into Christian beliefs. The sergeant’s suspicions, and the repeated threats of legal intervention against the isle for the crime of non-Christianity, are a clear example of Christian fascism in action. The image of a lone policeman scouring a small town for wrongdoing purely on the basis of religion resonates all too strongly following a series of rulings by a few robed theocratic authorities forcing their faith upon a dissenting populace.

In the end, famously, Sergeant Howie finds himself burned alive in a pagan ritual, and he pretty much deserves it. So does Nicolas Cage by the end of the 2006 remake, but as much for his crimes against acting as anything else. In the remake the reclusive society is reimagined as a bee-keeping matriarchy in which a man is little more than a “drone” used for labor and breeding (and sacrifice, of course). The film unfortunately fails to grasp its own implications; the end result reads more like a sincere evocation of what Barbara Creed called “the monstrous-feminine” than a commentary on modern structural misogyny.

Similar allegorical confusions plague the 2004 version of The Stepford Wives. While the original stands as a strong commentary on women’s position in patriarchal structures, the remake is overly burdened by zany comic devices and a revised ending that can generously be described as a reminder that some women, generally those with a lot of power already, are complicit in the perpetuation of sexism. More than anything both the new Wicker Man and Stepford Wives suggest filmmakers who imagine a post-sexist world where the feminist gains of the previous decades were quite enough, and the world couldn’t possibly slide backwards. How’s that strain of thinking working out?

People will die as a result of this ruling. Unfortunately, in the wake of such news, I have little to offer but obscure films and my own interpretations. In this case, I think the entire It’s Alive trilogy is a foil to the brutality of this decision, and more importantly the brutality of the thinking that led up to this moment.

In 2011, Wicker Man director Robin Hardy unleashed The Wicker Tree, which is both indisputably a bad movie and one that seems to miss the point of the original. When two American born-again Christians travel for a mission trip in Scotland, they find themselves beset by sexual temptation and pre-Christian theology. The sole usefulness of The Wicker Tree is in making explicit another particular reading of The Wicker Man: that the sacrificial pagan religion is little more than a means of controlling a populace beset by problems for which leadership has no other answers. In The Wicker Man, this is the failure of crops. In The Wicker Tree, it is an epidemic of infertility which the community leader knows was caused by a nuclear accident. In both cases are human beings sacrificed purely as misdirection.

“Killing me is not going to bring back your apples!” shouts Howie at the end of The Wicker Man. To those celebrating the demise of Roe and the loss of abortion rights (and the rights now set before the chopping block), remember that this is a project undertaken by Republican leadership solely as a distraction from your real social and economic struggles. Ending abortion won’t raise your wages. Killing us won’t bring back your apples.