1970s Horror: Monstrous Infants
The first hormonal birth control pill was released in 1960, but it wouldn’t become fully legalized until 1965. Abortion was legalized in 1973 with the landmark case Roe v Wade.
Keeping that in mind, it’s probably not at all surprising that the 1970s might have some anxieties about childbirth and parenthood that would leak out by way of their horror movies. We watched two of them this week.
Eraserhead, 1977, was written, directed, and produced by David Lynch, his first feature film. Despite not meeting with much in the way of commercial success (not that I think that was ever the goal or intention) it’s gained some notoriety among filmmakers and art-house film lovers.
It’s also a bit of an experience to watch. Shot in black-and-white and with very little spoken dialogue, the film is reminiscent at times of the very early horrors from the 1900s -- more concerned with images than words, evocative rather than story-driven. What it lacks in dialogue it makes up for in surrealist imagery and a backdrop of industrial noise. The story runs on dream logic, scenes unfolding with a combination of bizarre scenarios and weird imagery, and the whole thing resembles nothing so much as a long nightmare you can’t wake up from.
The plot, such as it is, revolves around Henry Spencer, an ineffectual bumbling Everyman type who lives in a bleak little apartment (that is inexplicably filled with dirt and vegetation) and is pressured into marrying his girlfriend after she gives birth to...uh, something (”They’re not sure it IS a baby,” the girlfriend muses at one point). When his new wife can’t handle the baby’s incessant mewling, she flees the house and leaves Spencer alone to care for it, which ends...badly. Very, very badly.
The baby itself is of course the star of the show. It’s still debated how exactly the prop was made -- apparently Lynch went so far as to blindfold crew members while they worked on the thing -- and there’s speculation that it was made somehow from an embalmed fetal sheep or skinned rabbit. But whatever the thing is in real life, the prop is frighteningly real and both disturbing and pathetic. It’s clearly inhuman, and it fusses and cries incessantly.
The ending sequence is extremely disturbing. Also, just in case you thought the film would provide any sort of answer or closure, it does not. It remains both baffling and haunting, a movie that crawls under your skin and then just lingers there, daring you to make sense of it.
It’s Alive! was written, produced, and directed by Larry Cohen in 1974. It’s the first of a trilogy following the same general concept, though I haven’t seen the other two films so I can’t say whether they bring anything interesting to the table.
It’s Alive is blessedly simple in both premise and execution compared to Eraserhead, so it was a bit of a palate cleanser in that regard, but the subject matter is equally disturbing, and the themes of infanticide and reluctant fatherhood are the same.
The film revolves around the Davis family, who are eagerly expecting their second child. That soon goes horribly wrong when the baby, uh....escapes, killing hospital staff in the process. The killer baby will continue to terrorize the neighborhood, despite roughly a million police searching for it, and news of the situation spreads all over town, damaging the family’s reputation and leading the father to lose his job.
By the end, we determine that the baby isn’t a homicidal animal so much as just a very frightened, confused creature who fights back when people try to hurt it. Unfortunately, that’s not enough to save it from trigger-happy law enforcement and a pharmaceutical company that’s eager to cover up the baby’s existence (it’s speculated that the deformities could be caused by medications the mother had been taking).
Apparently there’s a novelization that goes into much greater detail re: the environmental and pharmaceutical influences that cause the monster-baby. In the film, it’s a bit hard to follow, but maybe because we spent a lot of the vital exposition scene recoiling in horror at the scientist’s terrible facial hair.
The troubling thing about It’s Alive is how difficult it is to decide whether the male lead is meant to be the hero or the villain. By modern sensibilities, he is awful. More concerned with his reputation than his wife’s trauma (or the fact that his murder-baby is killing at random), eager to kill this baby that he keeps insisting is not his.
At one point, the wife -- who, we remember, was strapped to a table as an 11-pound baby was pried out of her, only for the thing to get loose and kill the doctor and nurses before escaping into the vents -- is trying to watch TV, presumably to get her mind off things. She has at this point already been betrayed by a nurse trying to secretly record her story in order to write about it (since the news is so sensational), and she’s been denied the ability to talk to her oldest child or have him come home, which would probably give her some comfort. So instead she’s watching TV, and the husband comes into the room and begins yelling at her for the volume and how “Nobody respects my feelings!”
A little later, when the murder-baby ends up in their basement and the dad tries (and fails) to kill it, the wife gets upset (hysterical one might say) so the husband just...casually slaps her, hard, twice, in front of their elder child, and then runs off to chase the baby.
The story may have been intended as a lesson on the dangers of birth control and fertility drugs (?) but in 2019 the takeaway sure seems to be that men sure are useless assholes.
