STEFFEN HANTKE
Among the many horror films that feature “evil children,” a small cycle of films deal specifically with monstrous, murderous, carnivorous, predatory infants—babies that, rather than being eaten by the proverbial dingo, turn the tables on a harsh and hostile world by preying on those who conventionally prey on them. While the larger cycle of films with a child in the role of the monster has produced numerous horror classics—highly respected films even outside the genre, ranging from Mervyn LeRoy's The Bad Seed (1954) and Wolf Rilla's Village of the Damned (1960), to Jack Clayton's The Innocents (1961), William Friedkin's The Exorcist (1973), Nicholas Roeg's Don't Look Now (1973), Richard Donner's The Omen (1976), David Cronenberg's The Brood (1979), and, more recently, Tomas Alfredson's Let the Right One in (2008) and Vincenzo Natali's Splice (2009)—the smaller sub-cycle of horror films about monstrous newborns has remained as limited in size as in reputation. With the notable exception of Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby (1968), the other entries in the cycle are decidedly marginal in terms of budget and prestige: Donald Cammel's Demon Seed (1977), Larry Cohen's It's Alive (1974), with its two sequels (1978, 1987) and a recent remake directed by Josef Rusnak (2008), and Rodman Flender's The Unborn (1991). 1 As a thematic adjunct to these few films, which form the core of the subgenre, we should also consider the sizable body of horror films in which aspects of procreative sexuality—from conception, pregnancy, and childbirth to early parenthood—are used figuratively, as visual or topical metaphors of monstrosity; one might think of the elaborate procreative mythology developed throughout the films in the Alien franchise, with their perverse oral inseminations and explosively lethal births. Films that deal directly and literally with monstrous babies, however, are few and far between. 2
At first glance, this is surprising. To the same degree that horror films succeed in transforming children of all ages into frightening creatures, why would films dealing with newborns rather than, say, five-year-olds, perform this task so much less successfully? From Christian doctrines of natural depravity, which suspect the newborn in its cradle to be “seething with sin,” to Freud's view of “the newborn as a ‘seething cauldron’—an inherently selfish creature” (Shaffer 39), cultural conventions have laid an ideological foundation for understanding early infancy that plays into the hands of the horror genre, especially if one considers the degree of surplus repression by which infants have been sentimentally transformed, concurrently, into paragons of innocence and cordoned-off sites of extreme anxiety. 3 Dominant contemporary conceptions of the infant's body privilege it as a site upon which external forces impinge, a passive, docile, inert object, incapable of action yet constantly acted upon. Horror films reverse this conception—in fact, monstrous infants in horror films command alarming degrees of agency. In the reversal, they liberate the repressed archaic notions of the infant as a seething cauldron of aggression, selfishness, and sin—a notion which, like everything we pride ourselves on having “overcome” and cast off, returns in frightening, demonic guise. 4
Nonetheless, within the public consciousness, films about monstrous infants are often indistinguishable from their own parodies. For a variety of reasons, there seems to be something inherently ridiculous about a baby as monster. Take, for instance, the episode of The Simpsons , entitled “A Streetcar Named Marge,” in which baby Maggie has led an uprising of infants at her daycare center, heroically retrieving everyone's pacifiers from a grouchy attendant (Season 4, Episode 2). When Homer arrives to pick her up, he discovers that the babies have taken over the facility. He must tread carefully in between scores of impassive infants, the sucking sounds of their pacifiers grotesquely enhanced against a backdrop of ominous silence; on one occasion, a baby weakly paws at his shoe when nudged as if to suggest the potential infant fury waiting to be unleashed. By way of the intertextual projection of the final sequence of Hitchcock's The Birds onto a group of infants, the humor in the scene derives from the lack of proportionality between the ominous threat of predatory animals before the moment of attack on the one hand and a group of toddlers happily sucking on their binkies on the other. 5
While the satire in The Simpsons is relatively gentle and largely a matter of limited intertextual play, Seth McFarlane's animated series Family Guy (Fox, 1999-), with its recurring character Stewie Griffin, goes to much greater lengths to explore the comedic potential inherent in the figure of the monstrous baby. Cleverly depicting Stewie as alternating between infantile and fully adult characteristics, the show's writers frequently depart into intertextual asides during which he is cast as a serial killer, a Chicago mobster, a member of the Brat Pack, a science fiction mutant, and so on. Unlike Maggie Simpson, who is turned into an uncanny creature by way of intertextual superimposition, Stewie Griffin functions as a fully conscious engine of cultural disambiguation. Those negative concepts about early infancy which might have been moved into the collective cultural unconscious (e.g., the infant's aggression and sexual fixation on its mother, its polymorphously perverse sexuality, its anti-social selfishness, etc.) are constantly and explicitly articulated in the show's surface text. Stewie Griffin provides a form of satire that demystifies the cultural dynamics of the monstrous infant to the degree that it shares the show's general approach to sublimation, i.e., to shock or startle by saying out loud the very thing that, when concealed by genuine repression or merely by decorum, retains the charisma of the dangerous and illicit. 6 Consequently, when it comes to Stewie, Family Guy undermines the uncanny effect the monstrous infant possesses by articulating openly why Stewie wants what he wants. Family Guy 's approach to early infancy depends upon and, in equal measure, generates and confirms a sense that the monstrous infant is ultimately a preposterous figure—a subject for satire rather than horror films.
While this explanation may sound persuasive in its broader application, it fails to account for the fact that, among the few films that constitute the cycle about monstrous infants, only Rosemary's Baby —a well respected canonical horror film if there ever was one—seems to have transcended the debilitating yet inescapable inherent preposterousness of its subject matter. While Cammel's Demon Seed , Cohen's It's Alive , and Flender's The Unborn are, by and large, dismissed as camp and banished to the margins of the genre's cinematic canon, Polanski's film commands respect even outside the horror film community. Rosemary's Baby raises a number of questions: are all horror films about monstrous infants preposterous and thus doomed to a shadowy existence in the cultural margins? Or is the success or failure of a horror film about monstrous infants a matter of intelligence and skillful execution? In order to untangle these questions, I would like to take a closer look at the core texts within this small sub-cycle of films, especially at the cinematic iconography they mobilize and the ways in which they visualize the infant body, a body densely encoded through cultural interdictions and taboos. A critical examination of the visual strategies brought into play during the cinematic representation of this body will, I hope, provide insights into the larger representational politics at work when horror film takes on a subject matter that is, simultaneously, as serious and preposterous as the monstrous, predatory infant. The most efficient way into the minutiae of these films is to look at the climactic closing scene in the key film of the cycle—the final few minutes of Polanski's Rosemary's Baby —released to great popular and critical acclaim in 1968. 7
In this closing sequence of the film, Mia Farrow's eponymous character, alerted to the presence of an infant in the neighboring apartment, enters a room in which all those who have conspired to have her impregnated with the devil's own child are gathered. In an alcove by the window, fussed over by a viciously protective elderly woman, stands a cradle draped in black from which the crying of a fussy baby emanates. Rosemary goes over and peeks inside, only to be startled by a sight Polanski decides to withhold from his audience. Instead of a reverse-angle shot or a downward camera tilt, which would reveal what Rosemary sees, the film provides a medium close-up of Rosemary backing away from the cradle in horror asking, “What have you done to his eyes?” Having raised the audience's curiosity with this conspicuous visual ellipsis—we want to see what causes this paroxysm of fear—Polanski follows the moment with a lengthy sequence of shots in which the assembled group of Satanists reassures the distraught mother that “He has his father's eyes,” that is to say, yes, the child is not her husband's but that of the devil himself. “Look at his hands,” one of them prompts. “Or at his feet,” another chimes in. Disregarding these visual prompts (“Look at …”), the camera instead follows Rosemary, observing her mounting hysteria as she staggers around the room in a state of shock. Finally, in a medium frontal shot, Farrow raises her hands to her eyes, and only then does Polanski provide a superimposed image which shows, in a blurry extreme close-up double exposure, the same pair of yellow eyes, surrounded by mottled grayish skin that were visible during the sequence in which Rosemary barely registers, in a drug-induced haze, that she is being raped by the demonic creature in the guise of her husband that is to be the father of her child. 8
The most striking feature of this scene is the curious visual restraint Polanski exercises when he withholds the sight of the monstrous infant the audience has been anticipating for most of the film. After all, the sight of this baby would let us determine whether Rosemary is delusional or whether there really is a Satanist conspiracy. While the decision to never let the audience see Rosemary's eponymous baby is a deliberate attempt to frustrate expectations, the visual ellipsis also functions paradoxically as a confirmation of the crucial significance of the (withheld) visual experience. In other words, the most important thing is what we do not see. It is this conspicuous visual gap in the fabric of the diegesis on which the entire narrative ultimately hinges—a fact driven home by the curious overdetermination of the scene, the densely layered presence of a variety of discourses that all converge upon this crucial moment. 9
The most obvious explanation for why Polanski never allows the audience to see Rosemary's baby is a straightforward diegetic one. What Polanski substitutes for an unobstructed shot of the monstrous infant—visualizing what we already know as his abnormal eyes, hands, and feet—is a repetition of the superimposition we see during the earlier scene in which the child is conceived. Significantly enough, the repeated use of the image at this moment fails, in the final instance, to disambiguate the events mimetically; just as the Satanists may simply be a group of deluded eccentrics, Rosemary's rape fantasies, as well as her abhorrence of what she perceives as the infant's physical abnormality, may simply be the product of a heightened state of hysteria, which the film reproduces on a visual level, marking the images as subjective by their lack of clarity and persistence and their unmooring from the diegesis. In other words, whatever bodily abnormality the film shows exists in Rosemary's mind; we never see the monstrous infant because there is no monstrous infant.
This cognitive dimension of the film is also reiterated in Rosemary's panicky prompt, “What have you done to his eyes?” It is hardly difficult to see this statement as a self-reflexive move on Polanski's part. To the degree that the film is concerned with the difference between the empirical veracity of events as distinct from their subjective perception and interpretation—a difference which translates into the paranoid plot that asks the audience to decide whether Rosemary really is the target of a satanic conspiracy or whether her imagination is getting the better of her—it asks its viewers to examine the visual evidence placed before them. As we test the boundaries of our own credulity, Polanski asks us to indulge, to one degree or another, in the same hysterical hyper-interpretive mode as Rosemary herself.
This explanation, grounded pragmatically in the narrative and thematic logic of the film, fits in with considerations of Polanski as auteurist filmmaker. To the degree that Rosemary's Baby is ultimately the story of an isolated single protagonist sequestered in an apartment in which she quietly yet inexorably goes insane, the film reiterates a thematic constant Polanski has been pursuing in other films, most notably Repulsion (1965) and The Tenant (1976). Both films explore just this central thematic conceit—the individual isolated within the larger community of the apartment building and the city surrounding it—suggesting that the domestic space is especially confining and debilitating to women. 10 In the context of these overarching concerns in Polanski's work, it would appear that the film's psychologizing of Rosemary's troubled marriage to her husband Guy, as well as her ambivalence toward her pregnancy, transfers the child's demonic nature and monstrous appearance from empirical truth to neurotic/hysterical symptom. The very fact that we never see the monstrous infant allows us to determine, as observers outside the grasp of Rosemary's distorting hysteria, the state of her troubled mind, by way of recognizing the cause of her rejection of the infant in the sexual trauma that occurs during the act of conception.
But then again, as idiosyncratic as Polanski's reasons as an auteurist filmmaker might be in withholding the sight of Rosemary's baby from the viewer, they are also perfectly attuned to the conventions of the horror film. This applies not only to the baby only making an appearance within the final few minutes of the narrative, the lion's share of which is devoted to the pregnancy and the period preceding it during which Guy and Rosemary are trying to conceive. It also applies to the broader use of visual strategies that withhold the monster from the audience's view. Rosemary's Baby is a perfect example of what Noël Carroll has called the “complex discovery plot” underlying many horror films—a narrative model in which a lengthy period of intense paranoia (driven by, on the one hand, the cognitive uncertainty whether a threat exists or not and, on the other hand, the delayed collective social confirmation of the lone protagonist's suspicion that, yes, the threat does exist) leads up to a crucial scene in which, in a moment of open confrontation with the monster, its very existence is finally and undeniably confirmed. 11 Bluntly put, horror films tend to make us wait for the monster, just as they tend to grow less and less coy about displaying the monster. Even though the monster in Rosemary's Baby is Rosemary's baby, Polanski's film abides by the rules of its chosen genre, treating the infant in the same manner James Whale treats Boris Karloff in Frankenstein and Elsa Lancaster in The Bride of Frankenstein , Ishiro Honda treats Godzilla, Steven Spielberg treats the shark in Jaws , or Jan DeBont treats CGI tornadoes in Twister (a monster if there ever was one).
For further discussion, it is important to note here that the horror film's idiosyncrasy of making the audience wait for the monster stems from a dialectic of practical expediency and deliberate ideology. For example, as the Universal horror films from the 1930s demonstrate, the classic Hollywood style demands full visibility, fetishizing the monster within the overarching discourse of stardom, the product of both actors like Karloff, Lugosi, or Chaney and make-up designers like Jack Pierce. Overdetermined by this discourse, the monster's entry into the film became a matter of strategic delay early on. Aside from the monster's “star entrance,” however, visual reticence—a term that will figure prominently in the discussion to come—is also grounded in the practical inability to showcase a monster convincing enough to match audience expectations inflated by prolonged periods of anticipation. The best example here might be Val Lewton's series of classic horror films produced for RKO in the 1940s, which are frequently cited as having made a stylistic virtue of their minuscule budgets by keeping the monsters they had no money to manufacture almost entirely invisible. Cognitive uncertainty can be but does not have to be a thematic corollary of this strategy. Visual reticence as it appears within the dynamics of post-classical horror films, like the ones discussed here, must be understood as the complex product of expedience, ideology, and tradition.
Nonetheless, common wisdom about horror films has it that films which refuse to show the monster tend to terrorize their audiences more effectively than films that do. Our imaginations, so the story goes, conjure up monsters far more frightening us than any creature that writers, directors, and special effects wizards could possibly create. What have they done to the child's eyes, we are asked to wonder; what could one do to a child's eyes so that its mother would be this horrified? Affectively speaking, then, Polanski's refusal to grant us full view of the monstrous child increases the (self-induced) horror of the scene (and keeps the film on the safe side of an R-rating at the same time).
Obviously, there is an element of playful but masterly audience manipulation in Polanski's handling of the scene. But then the same considerations for the effectiveness of the film's affective aesthetic—that is, the ones that motivate the decision never to point the camera into the black crib in the closing scene (and to substitute a far more ambiguous image instead of the conventional “money shot” of horror cinema)—may also be at work when Polanski decides to place the scene at the very end of the film. Thematically speaking, the scene articulates the social horrors about motherhood and pregnancy that the film has been exploring all along—loss of individual agency and self-determination. In facing and accepting her baby, one might say that Rosemary completes the transformation from being Rosemary into being “Rosemary's baby's mother,” a social entity re-defined by its relationship to its progeny. The horror of the film lies not in the sight of a grotesquely anomalous infant body. It lies in this reversal—from having the infant be the adjunct to her own body as its grounding biological and ideological reality, to becoming an adjunct to the infant as her grounding reality, turning her from an autonomous person into “the baby's mother.”
While Rosemary's Baby may come across, in turn, as a fairly conventional horror film and an original, deliberately overdetermined, and highly ambiguous piece of auteurist filmmaking, its significance as a film about a monstrous infant becomes visible only in comparison to other films in the same genre. In order to situate the film within that cycle, let me retrace some of my earlier arguments in the light of Larry Cohen's It's Alive (1974), a film with marked differences to Polanski's. Most notably, Cohen has the birth of the monstrous infant occur within the first third of the narrative, which is then followed by a lengthy sequence in which the child's father—not the mother—must come to terms with the fact that it is his very own offspring which is, police in pursuit, prowling the streets of Los Angeles, claiming one bloody victim after another. As much as the shift from female paranoia in Polanski's film to the male experience of early parenthood marks a move away from what one might call the feminist agenda of Rosemary's Baby , it is the adjustment of the narrative trajectory—from the birth as the culmination of the plot to the birth as the point of departure of the plot—that makes all the difference. The earlier in the story the birth occurs, the more opportunities the film has to grant its audience a glimpse of the monstrous infant—opportunities which, as their number increases, start amounting to an imperative to pay up or shut up, so to speak. Polanski's maneuvering to keep the monster out of sight would be exceedingly difficult for Cohen to emulate, given the structure of his film's plot.
Surprisingly enough, Cohen pursues the same strategy of visual reticence as Polanski. Scattered throughout the film are scenes in which the monstrous infant, lurking in the bushes or the undergrowth, watches adults going about their daily business. Throughout, Cohen is exceedingly fond of the shaky and imperfect fluidity of movement accomplished by the subjective camera, commonly associated with the 1970s slasher films, beginning with Bob Clark's Black Christmas , released the same year as It's Alive , and later popularized by John Carpenter's Halloween (1978). Cohen often substitutes the movement of plant life or inanimate objects as physical markers of the baby's presence. The strategy also extends to the scenes in which the baby goes on the attack: carefully staged stalk-and-slash set pieces, first of animals and pets, then of random passers-by, eventually menacing members of its own family and immediate social circle. Together with the conspicuous absence of that same reverse-angle shot anticipated yet omitted from Rosemary's Baby , fast editing and subjective camera angles help to create an infant monster more agile and aggressive than Rosemary's baby, though no less invisible.
Cohen abandons the visual reticence prized by Polanski because his thematic interests are different. Just as he shifts the point of view from that of the mother to that of the father, he also moves away from those deliberations about individual psychology so important to Polanski—whether Rosemary is sane or not, and, hence, whether the infant really is monstrous or not—so that it can function as a sociological meditation on parental responsibility, the ambiguous allegiances between family and community, and the hardships that occur when children alienate parents from the larger community rather than entrenching them more deeply within it. Moving the story from psychological interiority further out into the world of social, economic, and political relations, Cohen also inserts into the dialogue references to the role of environmental pollution and pharmaceutical experimentation as possible, albeit unconfirmed, explanations for the infant's monstrosity. Cohen's decision to link these social issues with a masculine point of view moves the film further away from Polanski's feminist agenda than does his choice to write the mother out of the narrative after she has given birth. 12 In order to carry this thematic burden, there can be no doubt, no cognitive ambivalence, about whether the infant is an empirical reality. Consequently, Cohen makes relatively little of the conventional uncertainty, listed by Carroll's “complex discovery plot” under the rubric of “onset,” which tends to accompany the first subtle manifestations of the threat in horror films. From the moment the infant enters the world—during a gory scene in the delivery room that leaves all medical staff in attendance of the birth in a pool of their own blood—its existence is not in question.
Given the narrative pressures that result from the monster's early entry into the narrative, as well as the thematic conceptualization of the infant as an empirical reality, it is hardly surprising that most viewers will remember It's Alive less for Cohen's indulgence in visual reticence than for showing them what Polanski wouldn't. Over a sequence of scenes designed incrementally to increase the visibility of the infant, Cohen reveals a creature produced largely by special effects. For a series of extreme close-ups, he uses an adult mouth, made up and equipped with a pair of prosthetic fangs. In medium shots, he alternates between what looks like a dummy, which allows him to handle the body roughly and put on display the infant's veined, disproportionately enlarged head, and a genuine human infant, which allows him to generate a certain degree of visual verisimilitude as long as the shot is not sustained for too long.
Cohen's move toward the visualization of the monstrous infant does not contradict my earlier assertion that It's Alive functions basically within the same regime of visual restraint as Rosemary's Baby . As both representational strategies align themselves with each other throughout the film, an intermediate strategy emerges that stands in sharp contrast to the full visualization of the monster in horror films as a moment of visual spectacle. Though Cohen gradually reveals the monstrous infant, there is no single climactic moment in the film comparable to, for example, the revelation of the monster's bride in James Whale's The Bride of Frankenstein or the revelation of Nola Carveth's monstrous external womb in David Cronenberg's The Brood . Even at the very end of It's Alive , which culminates with a long sequence in which the LAPD chases the baby through the storm drains and sewer tunnels underneath the city, Cohen has the infant covered in a blanket when its father discovers it, tries to carry it to safety, and is cornered by the police who unload a barrage of gunfire into the barely animated bundle of blankets. By and large, long and medium shots of this bundle prevail throughout the scene.
Given Cohen's willingness to show the infant throughout the film, this final scene is puzzling but points to yet another reason why both Polanski and Cohen might have resorted to visual reticence: the state of special effects at the time both films were shot. Like Polanski, Cohen must have wondered how exactly to translate the concept of the monstrous infant into a concrete visual signifier, even if he had at his disposal the then yet unknown special effects wizard Rick Baker, who, in the course of a long and distinguished career (with groundbreaking work on such horror film classics as John Landis's An American Werewolf in London [1981] and David Cronenberg's Videodrome [1983]), was to become a star comparable to Frank Pierce—a detail that, more than anything else about It's Alive , might draw horror fans to Cohen's film. Respectively, in 1968 and in 1974, body effects consisted primarily of make-up altering skin tone and surface morphology of the body, of prosthetics altering the size of the actor's body and the proportionality of its parts in relation to each other and their environment. Camera work and editing supplemented these physical transformations. By the late 1960s, molded latex casts also became increasingly available, which combined effects of both body surface and proportion. Aside from the actor's own body movements, this prosthetic assemblage had to remain largely static, oriented primarily toward the camera rather than its direct physical environment or, at best, discouraged sudden or expansive movement, lest they betray their presence to the camera. Digital effects—so-called CGI—were not, needless to say, anywhere on the horizon quite yet.
Since Polanski forgoes body effects almost completely and Cohen indulges in them only to a limited extent, the earlier question about the effectiveness of either showing or not showing the monster resurfaces in this context. Instead of comparing the affective impact of confronting viewers with the sight of the monster to letting viewers fill in the visual ellipsis, it is more helpful to consider each approach as based upon a fundamentally different aesthetic model, each eliciting a different set of viewer emotions, interpellating viewers into a radically different interactive and interpretive relationship with the image in front of them. The common wisdom that conceives that the elliptical approach is more effective—and, conversely, that opting for full visibility is less aesthetically refined, more bluntly direct, and less sophisticated—translates, at best, into a reflection of class prejudice; in other words, sophisticated auteurist psychological drama leaves its audience to imagine the monster—lowbrow splatter films leave little or less to their audience's atrophied imagination. 13
While Rosemary's Baby occupies a far more exalted position within the cinematic canon than Cohen's It's Alive , I would like to argue that the difference in both films' respective treatment of the problem of visualization is a representational strategy consistent with the theme of each film. While Polanski is interested in a cognitive uncertainty and diegetic ambiguity arising from the monstrous infant as a potential manifestation of Rosemary's mental state, Cohen focuses on the social consequences that come with being the parent of a monstrous infant; consequently, little of the narrative dwells upon Carroll's “onset” stage, in which cognitive uncertainty triggers paranoia in a protagonist isolated from the community by being the only one aware of the rising threat. Most of It's Alive is devoted to the public panic over the rampaging monstrous infant and the authorities' ensuing “man hunt” for it, as well as to the devastating social consequences for the father who first cannot deny that the baby is his but who later embraces his role as parent. For these issues to gain credibility, there must be no doubt that the infant is real.
Both films, one could argue, are interested in the infant as the reification of a larger issue; that is to say, like all well-made monsters that have made a lasting impact on the popular imagination, Polanski's and Cohen's monstrous infants are, first and foremost, metaphors. Given the weight that these metaphors must carry, it is important that the concrete reification of the metaphor, the material signifier of the abstract signified, is both empirically convincing and poetically fertile enough to carry this weight. The cinematic monster's prosthetically enhanced body, as a material signifier of the abstract ideas it represents, tends to elicit an evaluative response from the audience geared primarily toward its empirical, and not its poetic, persuasiveness; in other words, the more a film foregrounds the concrete materiality of the signifier, the more it predisposes the audience toward an evaluation of what the monster looks like or how it moves than of what it represents. Though the relationship between the actor's concrete material body, prosthetically enhanced, and the themes it symbolizes is essentially no different than the relationship between the monster conjured up in the viewer's imagination and the abstract idea it represents, bad special effects are more likely to sever this relationship than a limited imagination. They reduce audiences to laughter even, or especially, when they try for pathos; they make willing suspension of disbelief impossible; with devastating effect, they—to quote the Russian formalists—“bare the device.”
The anxiety that the affective and ideological structure of a horror film might collapse because of the insufficiency of its representational apparatus seems all the more urgent when it comes to monstrous infants in horror films: while incredulity, as Carroll argues, is a necessary condition of the traditional horror film plot, its complete and utter refutation is, too. Both contravening, complementary movements within the text must at the time of their occurrence be so convincing as to override the audience's awareness that the premise of the text is fundamentally preposterous. While the audacity of the horror film premise might be relatively easy to overlook when the creature is of overpowering size, speed, and strength, it moves right to the forefront when the opposite is true—as in the case of the monstrous infant, which is one of the most preposterous monsters in horror film.
Polanski never needs to confront this problem fully because of his focus on subjective experience and cognitive uncertainty: of course, the very idea of Rosemary giving birth to a satanic spawn is preposterous—this is exactly why nobody would want to believe her in the first place. Hence, with the sight of the monstrous infant meticulously withheld, there is little the film has to be apologetic about. Cohen, however, has a fairly unconvincing special effects creature to account for, not to mention the far-fetched visualizations of this infant attacking and brutalizing anything from the family cat to the obstetrician and his crew who aid the mother in the birth. Cohen is no less aware than Polanski that his mutant baby, cobbled together from diverse special effects, is, in the final instance, an untenable cinematic construction. Cohen inserts a few key scenes in which the film pre-emptively signals its awareness of how preposterous its own premise really is. In one scene, a heavily armed police unit surrounds a suburban home and then, with ruthlessly efficient paramilitary moves, storms the building's back yard—only to discover a normal toddler playing on a blanket staring at the intruders with big, uncomprehending eyes. From those eyes, Cohen cuts to a reverse-angle shot straight into the barrels of a dozen or so guns pointed at the hapless infant, visually exploiting the discrepancy between threat and response for all its comical potential as a moment of camp. 14
What makes the issue of camp so difficult to decide, however, is that in the final instance, It's Alive is at the core a deeply serious film, and its visualization of the monstrous infant matches its ambitions. To the same degree that psychology demands an immaterial, invisible, internal manner of representation, the sociological dimension of monstrosity Cohen takes measure of calls for a monster that represents, in its essential nature, the materiality of the social world. Cobbled together in a collaborative effort by designer Rick Baker, with the help of cinematographer Fenton Hamilton and editor Peter Honess, the monster represents exactly that materiality which tends to undermine the mimetic seamlessness of the film—very much in the same manner in which the monstrous infant within the diegesis has the uncanny power to tear open the seemingly seamless social fabric of upper-middle-class suburban Los Angeles. In other words, the materiality of the monster is its very point.
The further development of this subgenre will undoubtedly be influenced by the revolutionary changes that computer-generated imagery has brought to creature effects in horror film. Because budget no longer determines the deployment of this technology—its application occurs in post-production and thus does not affect the costliest aspects of production—even small independent films have the ability to render a wider variety of effects with the highest degree of mimetic verisimilitude. 15 The two films I would like to introduce briefly are examples of how new technology might affect the representational strategies of horror films about monstrous infants.
First, there is the 2008 remake of It's Alive . Director Josef Rusnak shifts the narrative back from the male point of view to the female; the film's protagonist is the monstrous infant's mother. The film tracks her development from accepting the child and covering up the havoc that it wreaks, to her final insight that she and her child, in the famous words of Karloff in The Bride of Frankenstein , “belong dead.” Accordingly, she and the infant exit the film in the fire that destroys her house in the film's closing scene. That this house happens to be located on at the edge of the woods, far removed from the nearest small town, forecloses the social dimension in which the original film was so interested and returns it instead to the intense psychological interiority of Rosemary's Baby , albeit an interiority lacking, as Cohen's original would have it, the paranoia pervading Polanski's film.
Given the wide availability of digital effects, Rusnak's refusal to make use of them except in one particular scene—a digitally modulated infant hand creeping up over her mother's shoulder as she hugs the child—is clearly a deliberate strategy. Assuming that it was the camp status of It's Alive that attracted investors to the idea of producing a remake, it is not very likely that Rusnak decided to rely more heavily on the visual concealment of the monstrous infant out of respect for Cohen's original film; the radical change of location, from urban California to rural New Mexico (doubled unconvincingly by Rumania), and of social milieu from (middle-aged) upper-middle class to (late teenage) lower-middle class, bordering on working class, also point in that direction. Instead, it seems like Rusnak is acting out of the unexamined conviction that he can elevate the film by using the elliptical approach, make it “classier” somehow than its campy original. However, because all the changes to the original script eliminate the opportunity for retaining social relevance, the stylistic choice remains just that—a matter of style over substance. As a result, the film thematically never comes into focus, displaying exactly that uncertainty Cohen knew to avoid.
In the final instance, one might argue that, despite having the means for visualizing the monstrous infant at his disposal, Rusnak decides to eschew such visualization because he is ultimately more interested in his female protagonist's inner life than the social consequences of the monstrous infant. To the degree that Rusnak actually moves the remake in its ideological concerns further away from Cohen's original and more closely toward those embraced by Rosemary's Baby , one might conclude that the film's intends to refocus upon Polanski's gender politics (even if the element of cognitive ambiguity, which is so crucial to Rosemary's Baby , is entirely absent from the remake of It's Alive ). With the female perspective replacing the male one, Rusnak's film arrives at exactly the same final plot twist as Polanski's, which may be the expression of a specifically male horror in the face of maternity—that the mother of the monstrous infant will embrace her hideous progeny despite its monstrous nature and heinous acts (an act more horrifying than that of Rosemary's husband Guy, who chooses to become an accomplice in the demonic conspiracy against his own wife because it furthers his professional advancement; maternal love lacks such immediately pragmatic motivation). The difference between how both films end—Polanski's ends with a shot that shows Rosemary and her child disappearing into the anonymity of the modern metropolis, while Rusnak's concludes with the willing self-destruction of the mother who, in accepting the monstrous nature of her child, accepts that she, like it, must not be allowed to live—marks the difference between Polanski's ironic deconstruction of maternity as an essentially immoral force and Rusnak's serious imposition of a tragic morality which confirms, albeit without James Whale's sarcastic overstatement, that all monsters “belong dead.”
The long shadow of James Whale also falls over the second recent horror film about a monstrous infant, Vincenzo Natali's Splice (2009). Like It's Alive , which, after all, takes its title from Colin Clive's hysterically elated line in Whale's film, Splice also makes reference to Frankenstein and The Bride of Frankenstein , featuring a couple of scientists named, tongue-in-cheek, Clive (as in Colin Clive) and Elsa (as in Elsa Lancaster). Both create a human infant whose DNA has been interspliced with that of a variety of other species, producing a creature, nicknamed Dren, who undergoes infancy, childhood, adolescence, and maturity within a matter of weeks, revealing along the way unsuspected bodily traits which are, in turn, sublime and horrific.
Unlike Rusnak's remake of It's Alive , Natali decides to go all out on digital body effects. Though the creature in its older incarnations is played by an actress—Delphine Chaneac, her body worked over in post-production with digital enhancements—its early infant self is entirely a product of computer-generated imagery, combining avian, mammalian, and human traits in an unsettling manner. The result is a creature that looks like a rabbit combined with a plucked uncooked chicken, whose agility, mobility, and three-dimensional plasticity are excessively on display. As with some recent productions that rely heavily on CGI, there is a vague sense that the technology itself is on display, celebrated or even fetishized. However, the risk of this re-directing of the film's visual attention into self-referentiality, which is then often dismissed as a form of authorial or industrial self-indulgence, hardly applies to a film of such modest dimensions. Unlike the excesses of, for example, a James Cameron production, Natali has other intentions. As Clive and, especially, Elsa encounter the monstrous infant, the film is firmly rooted in their perspective, alternating between interactions between Dren and Elsa in the role of its mother (as observed by Clive), and vice versa—a dynamic that illuminates both human characters and their relationship to each other through the catalyst of their collaborative project. Against this interpersonal dynamic, and more in keeping with Mary Shelley's original novel, the film follows the arc of a Bildungsroman, if seen from the monster's point of view. From Clive's and Elsa's point of view, however, it offers a surface onto which both can project their own complex and conflicted parental experiences, which, especially in Elsa's case, suggest that Splice is a film in which parenthood and family are not the solution but the problem. The darkest enactments of Freudian family romance are played out when Elsa repeats physical and psychological abuse upon Dren that used to be inflicted upon her by her own mother, while Clive increasingly drifts toward incestuous scenarios as Dren moves from early infancy toward sexual maturity in leaps and bounds. What matters to Natali's film, however, is that the surface upon which both characters project their psychodrama is not an inert, passive object lacking in agency but, as a concrete material body, the engine that drives the film's tragic vision. To have the audience see the infant act upon its parents and its environment, while being acted upon by the social forces of family and the apparatus of technoscience, is the most compelling aspect of Natali's film.
That neither Rusnak's nor Natali's film manage to extricate themselves entirely from the aesthetics of visibility and/or visual reticence which dominated their predecessors suggests that horror films about monstrous infants have not been substantially affected by the availability of new and improved technologies for visualizing these monstrous creatures. Whatever the representative tricks up the filmmaker's sleeve, it seems as if nothing will dispel the suspicion that films about monstrous infants are, at their very core, preposterous. And yet, technological progress does not seem to alter the basic fact that monsters in horror films are, essentially, metaphors requiring from their audiences the conceptual leap from the image to what it signifies. As with technologies predating the arrival of CGI, that leap can be made easier or harder by how visually arresting, compelling, or persuasive the material representation of that metaphor happens to be. In other words, CGI itself will not decide which horror films get away with the premise of the monstrous infant, but the difference between good and bad CGI surely will—as will the weight that each film's metaphor carries.
What remains, thus, as a measure of each film's sense of relevance or even urgency is the historical context that gives weight to the metaphor of the monstrous infant. Polanski's Rosemary's Baby and Cohen's It's Alive were released on the heels of events that focused public attention upon matters of reproductive technology and its social consequences: the birth control pill became available in the United States during the early 1960s; the sedative Thalidomide was withdrawn from the market around the same time after it was revealed to cause severe birth defects; and the Supreme Court ruling on Roe vs. Wade in January of 1973 increased women's control over their own bodies in matters of reproduction. That these events took place within the larger context of the women's movement added that undercurrent of male paranoia that runs so strongly through Rosemary's Baby and It's Alive . Even a horror film with the most preposterous premise could claim a certain sense of urgency against this historical background.
While feminist discourse may not be preoccupied with exactly the same issues in 2008 and 2009, Rusnak's and Natali's films suggest that matters of reproductive technology have lost none of their urgency. Fears of monstrous offspring induced by a drug like Thalidomide and anxieties about procreative processes detached from the traditional social contexts of parenthood and family have realigned themselves with the ongoing debate about human cloning and, more specifically, the controversy regarding human stem cell research played out to great media effect by the Bush administration during its second term. More broadly speaking, economic anxieties triggered by the most recent cycle of boom and bust comport themselves readily with horror film scenarios in which procreation is not a source of social stability but its opposite. Under these conditions, cinematic technologies might advance, just as genre conventions might change, but monstrous infants will most certainly continue to show up in horror films to come.
1. Though not a remake, the 2009 film by David Goyer under the same title also happens to feature a demonic infant.
2. In his discussion of The Exorcist , Kendall Phillips determines that the common theme in all of these films is “a fear of children themselves,” which he attributes, somewhat too broadly, to “the rebellious nature of the children of the sixties and an underlying concern that the next generation might wreak even more cultural destruction” (109–10).
3. The mid-1980s saw the most recent upsurge of this phenomenon, in the tidal wave of “recovered memory” cases, which invariably featured early childhood abuse, often with themes borrowed directly from the generic inventory of horror film: satanic worship, ritual human sacrifice, and so on. Discourse surrounding recovered memories frequently condensed concepts of early infancy as both a site of innocence, vulnerability, and victimhood, and a site of danger, contamination, and corruption. For further information, see Jon Trott, “Interview with Sherill Mulhern,” and Hollida Wakefield and Ralph Underwager, “Recovered memories of alleged sexual abuse: Lawsuits against parents.”
4. An argument made persuasively by Freud in his essay on “The Uncanny.”
5. The reference is reinforced by a cameo of Hitchcock himself, walking two lapdogs, glimpsed briefly when Homer steps outside the daycare center with Maggie on his arm. A similar intertextual nod to The Birds also appears in James Cameron's Aliens , when the film's heroine discovers that she has unwittingly stumbled into the monster's nursery, demonic offspring being the connecting theme of each reference.
6. At their most effective, these moments of desublimation fail to shock and startle and instead flatten out affect as only a “bad” or “lame” joke can because Family Guy suggests that repression and/or decorum do not conceal the illicit but, in fact, produce it.
7. To focus, as I will in the course of my discussion, on canonical horror films only—that is, on films well-known and associated most strongly with the theme of the demonic child—may not be particularly original; neither may it take properly into account the critical, subversive, or revisionist responses issued by lesser known films in response to the canonical power of these “classics.” But then this discussion is concerned with a basic typology, an organizing principle behind the visual conventions within the genre, and in this regard, it is, without doubt, the canonical films that have helped to establish and entrench these conventions.
8. Or, doubting the veracity of her perceptions, she is seeing her husband, as a sexually repressed Catholic girl would, transformed by lust into a demonic creature availing himself with impunity of her body for the fathering of his child. This reading is supported by the fact that, in the same scene, she also envisions herself on a yacht where John F. Kennedy may or may not be the seducer.
9. It is important to note, though, that the reference in the scene to the (invisible) infant's eyes, hands, and feet still point to the body as the site where monstrosity manifests itself—a fact embraced and even celebrated, for example, by Cohen's It's Alive . Monstrosity, as I have argued elsewhere, “never really leaves the body as its preferred site of manifestation, though it may become detached from any particular bodily characteristic” (35). In the absence of such bodily markers of monstrosity, most narratives resort to action as an index of monstrosity, a category that remains useless in the case of infants without significant bodily agency. As a last resort, horror films construe the very absence of all markers of overt monstrosity, bodily and behavioral, as pathological. While horror films like The Omen or The Bad Seed resort to this strategy, scrutinizing their child protagonists incessantly and suspiciously for a slipping of the mask, I have not been able to discover a single horror film about a monstrous infant which pursues this option: all films about monstrous infant, in other words, sooner or later refer back to the baby's body as a site of abjection. For a full discussion of these representational patterns, see Steffen Hantke, “Monstrosity without a Body.”
10. Though the central character in The Tenant is male—played, incidentally, by Polanski himself—his descent into insanity leads him to assume, by way of clothing and wig, the identity of the previous tenant of his apartment, a woman who had tried to commit suicide by jumping out her window. Like Repulsion, The Tenant features scenes that exquisitely render the character's mental state as distortions of the material world around him.
11. For the full discussion, see Carroll, The Philosophy of Horror , pp. 97–128.
12. It is important to note here that the film does not treat the mother's erasure from the narrative as the result of social formations, which would thematize her exclusion as a social phenomenon, but simply asserts the father's dominance over the narrative by authorial fiat.
13. One category that must be mentioned here—because it is strongly connected to taste as an expression of social class and because it has the ability to transcend the absolute claim verisimilitude tends to exercise upon these films and their affective impact—is that of camp. As a specific viewer attitude, camp would redeem, so to speak, Cohen's badly, bluntly, inelegantly visualized infant monster from being dismissed as B-movie fodder. To the extent that Cohen seems to have intended his film to be camp—that is, to the extent that viewers would not freely chose to perceive it as camp but be lead toward that conclusion by the film itself—issues of social class recur not only on the side of the audience but also as deliberate choices on the part of the filmmaker in terms of how the film is positioned.
15. Though their price has decreased considerably over the past twenty years, CGI are still more expensive than conventional prosthetic effects. This is especially true for effects designed to be highly visible, to be visible for prolonged on-screen visibility, and/or to be visible in highly complex interactions with other elements of the mise en scene ; examples of how low-quality CGI lends itself to newly adapted forms of camp would be Global Asylum's 2010 Mega Piranha , which, in all its glorious awfulness, provides a tongue-in-cheek commentary upon Alexandre Aja's glossy, CGI-heavy remake of Piranha from the same year.
Carroll, Noël. The Philosophy of Horror, or, Paradoxes of the Heart . New York: Routledge, 1990. Print.
Hantke, Steffen. “Monstrosity without a body: Representational strategies in the popular serial killer film.” PostScript 22.2 (2003): 34–54. Print.
It's Alive . Dir. Larry Cohen. Perf. John P. Ryan and Sharon Farrell. Warner Bros., 1974. Film.
It's Alive . Dir. Josef Rusnak. Perf. Bijou Philips and James Murray. Alive/Amicus, 2008. Film.
Phillips, Kendall R. Projected Fears: Horror Films and American Culture . Westport, CT: Praeger, 2005. Print.
Rosemary's Baby . Dir. Roman Polanski. Perf. Mia Farrow, John Cassavetes, and Ruth Gordon. Paramount, 1968. Film.
Shaffer, David R. Social and Personality Development . 2005. Sixth Ed. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2009. Print.
“A Streetcar Named Marge.” The Simpsons . Fox. 1 Oct. 1992. Television.
Splice . Dir. Vincenzo Natali. Perf. Adian Brody and Sarah Polley. Gaumont/Dark Castle, 2009. Film.
Trott, John. “Interview with Sherill Mulhern.” Cornerstone 20.96 (1991): 8, 20, 26. Print.
Wakefield, Hollida, and Ralph Underwager. “Recovered memories of alleged sexual abuse: Awsuits against parents.” Behavioral Sciences & the Law 10.4 (Fall 1992): 483–507. Print.