Monstrous Births

Throughout history, monstrous births have been interpreted as signs of either the sins of parents or of widespread social flaws. One particular theory, maternal impression, specifically linked a mother’s emotions and experiences to her child’s abnormalities. Narratives from the 1960s–1980s call upon all of these symbolic meanings of the monstrous birth to deliver critiques of motherhood, parenthood, and society. The targets of criticism differ from text to text. While works like Rosemary’s Baby , both Ira Levin’s 1967 novel and Roman Polanski’s 1968 film, and Doris Lessing’s The Fifth Child (1988) attack their female protagonists for being too old-fashioned, Larry Cohen’s films It’s Alive! (1974) and It Lives Again! (1978) extend their critiques to include fatherly failings and social problems like pollution, corporate irresponsibility, and the perceived loss of respect for both motherhood and children during the era of sexual revolution and Roe v. Wade . Later narratives, however, rely on more traditional renditions of maternal impression theory, often presenting monstrous children as the fitting offspring of equally monstrous mothers. The female protagonists in the remake of It’s Alive! (2009) and Grace (2009), for example, are so consumed by the role of motherhood that they produce children who literally consume those around them. Their “baby hunger” produces hungry babies.

While maternal impression theory problematically blames mothers for their children’s deformities, it also assigns women a great deal of sway over their progeny. ¹ This central role of the mother seemed to be further confirmed by advancements in reproductive technologies that threatened to reduce the role of fathers to mere sperm donorship—this at a time when second-wave feminism was already challenging the authority of the patriarchy and the traditional roles of men. It is hardly surprising, then, that discoveries in the field of behavioral genetics that seemed to confirm the potency of male genes, such as the “supermale” or “warrior gene,” would generate such cultural interest. Antichrist narratives like Rosemary’s Baby and The Omen (1976) perform comparable ideological work by imagining Satanic DNA as the determining influence on a child, easily conquering any genetic contributions from the mother and the influence of a nurturing home environment. These narratives reinforce the potency of paternity. Another set of narratives about genetically engineered brainchildren, such as novels like Michael Stewart’s Prodigy (1988) and Robin Cook’s Mutation (1989), also return control over the very nature of the child to men via the figure of the mad/male scientist. Because in many of these stories the scientist is also the child’s biological parent, the power of paternity was doubly reinforced.

Societal Sins, Corrupt Couples, and Monstrous Mothers

Monstrous births have long been seen as providential warnings from God, but the intended recipient of those warnings has varied. On the one hand, monstrous births were interpreted as signs of large-scale social evils, a reading that Dudley Wilson explains had biblical precedent. Wilson notes that in John 9, Jesus claims that one man’s blindness occurs “so that the works of God should be made manifest in him” and that this passage “authorises the writer on monsters to suggest that they are due to general rather than particular sinfulness” (1993, 27). When a monstrous birth was interpreted as an expression of God’s displeasure with the community, the details of the disfigurement were treated as clues as to which specific vices were to blame. For example, as Julie Crawford shows in her chapter “Protestant Reform and the Fashion Monster,” some unusual births of both animals and children were interpreted as signs of God’s displeasure with the community’s pride in fashion because the deformities looked like ruffles or frills.

Monstrous births could also symbolize the personal sins of parents, with mothers far more frequently found guilty of straying from virtue. Rebecca Kukla notes, for example, that a mother’s lascivious thoughts while pregnant were believed capable of causing hermaphroditism (2005, 14). Similarly, in her discussion of “The Lamenting Lady,” Margaret of Henneberg, Lindsay Ann Reid explains that Margaret’s sin was her mocking of a “poore widow begging for bread for Gods sake, hauing in eyther arme a child both which she had had at one birth.…[T]he Contesse reiected her with reprochfull words” (2005, 115). Margaret was punished for her lack of charity by giving birth to 365 children. As Kukla explains, maternal impression theory encouraged people to view babies as imprints of their mother’s moral status, “[t]he infant body serv[ing] as a testimony and tribunal of the mother’s wayward wandering and appetites” (2005, 15).

It was believed that not only a mother’s sin might become embodied in her baby, but also simply her experiences or emotions—a process referred to as “maternal impression theory.” The theory proposed that birth “defects” (ranging from things as benign as birthmarks to deformities as debilitating as missing limbs) were a result of particularly poignant incidents in the mother’s life and the feelings arising therefrom. Maternal impression also had biblical precedent. Wilson points to Genesis 30 as “provid[ing] an authoritative demonstration of the…frequently asserted theory that many monsters are produced because of the imagination of the mother in pregnancy” (1993, 27). In the passage, Jacob is decreed all “speckled and spotted animals.” To ensure that he gets sturdy livestock, Jacob strips bark from branches to give them a spotted appearance and then places them in the drinking water of the strongest pregnant cows. The presumption is that those sturdier cows will frequently see these spotted branches, which will in turn cause their offspring to be spotted, and Jacob will thereby end up with the most robust cattle as his property.In more modern times, maternal impression theory led experts to advise pregnant women not to look at pictures of deformities lest their babies be born with similar abnormalities; even craving strawberries might lead to an unsightly birthmark, some warned. Maternal impression theory was also frequently invoked to account for so-called “freaks,” the display of whom became popular in the nineteenth century. In Freak Show , Robert Bogdan notes that maternal impression was behind the claim that one woman had given birth to Siamese twins because “she had become upset during her pregnancy at seeing dogs unable to disconnect while copulating” (1988, 110). Ann E. Leak Thompson was similarly said to have been born armless because her mother saw her father walking home with his coat thrown over his shoulders, appearing armless himself. Sometimes, Bogdan points out, the connection between the mother’s experiences and her child’s deformity was less “photographic.” Tom Thumb, for instance, blamed his small size on his mother’s general grief over the death of the family dog (1988, 151).²

Maternal impression theory also informs Rosemary’s Baby —both Ira Levin’s 1967 novel and the 1968 cinematic adaptation directed by Roman Polanski—and Doris Lessing’s 1988 novel, The Fifth Child . In both, the old-fashioned attitudes of mothers lead to the rebirth of monsters from the past, an ancient evil and a primitive throwback, respectively. However, while both stories criticize their female protagonists for outdated values, both also imply that their husbands are also to blame for these monstrous births, who are therefore the product of both maternal and paternal shortcomings. Although I discuss Rosemary’s Baby first and foremost as an antichrist narrative in the next section of this chapter, the story does act in ways as a traditional maternal impression tale, for Rosemary is punished for certain “sins,” namely her unwillingness to embrace the liberation of women brought about by second-wave feminism, by a monstrous birth.

The plot is likely familiar to most: Rosemary’s husband, Guy Woodhouse, makes a deal with the devil, or at least with the coven eager to bring about the birth of the devil’s son. They will ensure the success of Guy’s acting career; in exchange, he offers up Rosemary to serve as the vessel for Satan’s son. Both the novel and the film are devoted to portraying Rosemary’s physical and psychological sufferings as she slowly figures out the plot against her. For this reason, most critics see Rosemary as a sympathetic portrayal of a woman entrapped in a male-dominated world. ³

However, while Rosemary is certainly sympathetic and even admirable in ways, she does have some notable flaws. Rosemary is not just randomly chosen by the coven; she is in fact an ideal candidate for the role of Satanic mother. The previous woman the coven had selected was a recovering drug-addict and runaway, a fragile and isolated woman that the coven assumed would be easy to control. Rosemary is equally vulnerable due to her desperate need to be a mother, a desire that entirely defines her identity. Sharon Marcus, for example, argues that the cinematic Rosemary’s desire to live in the Bramford, a fictional building based on the Dakota hotel, symbolizes her deliberate rejection of “a modernist aesthetic in favor of a nostalgic and expensive taste for the cozy, antiquated, and somewhat rustic domesticity evoked by her surname” (1993). Moreover, Rosemary has no career aspirations of her own and instead lives vicariously through the successes of her husband. In the film, she mindlessly repeats Guy’s unimpressive acting resume—“He was in ‘Luther’ and ‘Nobody Loves an Albatross’ and a lot of TV plays and commercials”—to anyone who will listen. In fact, Rosemary seems to have no interests of her own other than decorating her new home and becoming a mother. In the novel, when she discovers she is pregnant, she tellingly feels fulfilled for the first time in her life: “Now she was alive; was doing, was being, was at last herself and complete” (1997, 147).

Rosemary stands in clear contrast to her more modern friends, who demonstrate an assertiveness and agency that far surpass anything Rosemary ever shows. When Rosemary invites many of her old friends to a party, she breaks down in tears in front of them due to the pain her pregnancy is causing her. The women promptly shoo Guy from the room, literally closing the door in his face. They then insist that Rosemary take charge of her medical regimen by seeking a doctor who will not treat her suffering as a normal symptom she must simply endure. Their ability to take control of the situation quickly and confidently marks them as very different from Rosemary and far more emblematic of the new women being ushered in by second-wave feminism.

By contrast, Rosemary is punished—or chosen, given your perspective—to bear the devil’s offspring because of her willingness to put motherhood above all else. Rosemary essentially wants to turn the clock back to a time when women had more traditional roles, and her newborn is a symbolic manifestation of her deepest desires, for as one Satanist eagerly exclaims, it is now Year Zero. Rosemary accepts her demonic offspring at the end, even though, as the novel explains, he has golden-yellow eyes with vertical black-slit pupils, a tail, horn buds, and claws. He might be a little demon, but he is her little demon. His birth likely means the end of humankind, but at least Rosemary gets to be a mommy. Rosemary’s focus on motherhood above all else is dangerously outdated and brings into being an ancient evil capable of returning the world to biblical chaos.

The couple at the forefront of Doris Lessing’s The Fifth Child (1988), Harriet and David, are guilty of similar “crimes” as Rosemary. Both are described as old-fashioned and as wanting a more traditional life, with a “kingdom” for a home and a large family. ⁴ Because David and Harriet cannot afford such a lifestyle either financially or emotionally, they depend on assistance from their parents, who have little choice but to help. It takes a village to raise David and Harriet’s brood, and David and Harriet simply assume the village will be honored to help out. Initially, Harriet and David’s plan is a success: they have four happy and healthy children, and their enormous home becomes the central gathering place for family during the holidays. Then Ben—the eponymous fifth child—arrives.

Lessing describes Ben as savage and animalistic. As a fetus, he kicks terribly, making Harriet feel as though he is “trying to tear [his] way out of her stomach” (1989, 38); as an infant, he is a voracious feeder, able to empty a breast “in less than a minute” (51). As a toddler, he is extremely violent, responsible for breaking his brother’s arm and likely for killing both a dog and cat (58, 62). One of the most shocking scenes is when the family finds Ben “squatting on the big table, with an uncooked chicken he had taken from the refrigerator…, its contents spilled all over the floor.…Grunting with satisfaction, he [tears] the raw chicken apart with teeth and hand, pulsing with barbaric strength” (97). Even when he is older, he lacks the basic characteristics of a child and is incapable of understanding the point of games or stories (67–68, 114–115). In many ways, Ben is a quintessential feral, especially as the term conjures up images of primitiveness. As a baby, Harriet notes how his “forehead slope[s] from his eyebrows to his crown” (49), and she sometimes feels that she is looking, “through him, at a race that reached its apex thousands and thousands of years before humanity, whatever that meant, took this stage” (130). Harriet often thinks of Ben as an ancient creature from folklore, a “hostile little troll” (56) or a member of a dwarf-like species: “Ben’s people were at home under the earth, she was sure, deep underground in black caverns lit by torches” (122). Ben is presented as a “throwback” (106), evidence of atavism, the biological mechanism that allows for the sudden re-emergence of genetic traits that had disappeared generations ago.

In her essay “(Not Such) Great Expectations: Unmaking Maternal Ideals in The Fifth Child and We Need to Talk about Kevin ,” Ruth Robbins points out that because Harriet “embraces the conventional domestic role with enthusiasm, [she] remains ‘unfashionable,’ out of her time, just as Lessing implies that Ben is, in a rather different, more fundamental and genetic way” (2009, 97–98). In other words, Harriet, like Rosemary before her, produces a child who bears the imprint of her traditional desires. Ben is an ancient creature, as old-fashioned as it gets in his Neanderthal ways, an extreme but fitting manifestation of Harriet’s abnormal longings.

However, I would expand on Robbins’s argument to add that David is somewhat implicated in Ben’s monstrosity as well. At least until Ben is born, David and Harriet are presented as a single unit with identical desires and values. We are introduced to them at the same time, and both are described as looking for “[s]omeone conservative, old-fashioned, not to say obsolescent” (1989, 3). Their differences from the dominant culture cause them a great deal of anguish individually until they find their values confirmed in each other: “It had been hard preserving their belief in themselves when the spirit of the times, the greedy and selfish sixties, had been so ready to condemn them, to isolate, to diminish their best selves.…[T]hey had been right to insist on guarding that stubborn individuality” (21). Both hold to conservative sexual standards that are entirely at odds with the swinging sixties. Harriet and David are, in fact, even more old-fashioned than David’s parents. His mother clearly defends “a life where domesticity was kept in its place, a background to what was important” (27), and his father directly states, “People are brainwashed into believing family life is the best. But that’s the past” (28). Of course, David’s parents could simply be defending their own lifestyles: both are divorced and remarried, and neither seems to have been an especially devoted parent. However, the fact that Harriet and David come across as more traditional than their parents still makes its point.

It is not so much Harriet and David’s divergent values that are the problem as their smug self-assurance that their way of life is superior. When a relative gives birth to a child with Down syndrome, for instance, Harriet takes pleasure in believing that the child’s condition was caused by problems in the parents’ marriage: “Harriet said to David, privately, that she did not believe it was bad luck: Sarah and William’s unhappiness, their quarrelling, had probably attracted the mongol child” (1989, 22). After being afflicted with her own monstrous child, Harriet applies this logic to herself and sees Ben as a punishment for her and David’s previous pomposity: “We’re being punished, that’s all. For presuming. For thinking we could be happy” (117). David furiously disagrees, unwilling to believe in “[p]unishing Gods, distributing punishment for insubordination,” and insists that Ben is simply the result of a “chance gene” or “bad luck” (118, 117, 118). Harriet then revises and states, “We just wanted to be better than everyone else, that’s all. We thought we were” (118). Harriet and David are punished for their pride by a monstrous birth, and the specific details of Ben’s deformity—his seemingly ancient origins—are a direct reflection of the source of their hubris: their mistaken belief that their old-fashioned lifestyle is best.

Larry Cohen’s 1974 film It’s Alive! and the sequel It Lives Again! are not interested in how problematic attitudes cherished by a mother may manifest in her baby’s monstrous nature. The mothers in these films are largely innocent figures. Instead, Cohen’s films focus on the flaws of fathers as well as the sins of society. It’s Alive! has often been discussed as a monstrous birth film for fathers; in The Revolting Child , Andrew Scahill describes the film as a “paternal gothic” (2015, 84), and Dominic Lennard considers it alongside The Omen as a film about “patriarchy’s errant offspring” (2014, 97). Certainly there is a great deal of evidence to support such a reading. The monster in It’s Alive! is a newborn infant who, upon emerging from his mother’s womb, is already so able-bodied and ferocious that he manages to slaughter the entire staff of physicians and nurses attending his birth. For most of the movie, the baby roams Los Angeles, attacking innocent citizens. Despite his monstrous behavior and appearance—in addition to fangs and claws, the baby has an enormous bulbous and veined head—his mother, Lenore, accepts him almost immediately, believing he attacks only when he feels threatened. The child’s father, Frank, on the other hand, spends most of the film angrily renouncing his son and assisting the police in their pursuit, even shooting the child when he comes home seeking protection and care. It is not until the final scene that Frank recognizes his son’s humanity and realizes that they are both acting out of fear. Unfortunately, Frank’s change of heart comes too late. Though he picks up his wounded son, cradling him tenderly, and attempts to escape, police kill the baby in the last minutes of the film. Moments later, we receive the dramatic announcement that “another one’s been born in Seattle.”

The father’s relationship to the monstrous newborn certainly takes precedence in this narrative. Moreover, it would seem that, according to the logic of monstrous birth narratives, the child is somehow a product of his father’s sins, specifically his readiness to disown the child when it turns out to be abnormal—a trait he shares in common with David in The Fifth Child , who is only too eager to ship Ben off to an institution and forget he exists. While we might excuse Frank for wanting to disown his baby once it starts killing people, Frank’s ambivalence about his child long predates his birth. Although It’s Alive! begins with the couple’s syrupy response to Lenore going into labor, in the hospital before delivery, Lenore asks Frank in a meek and anxious voice, “I’m glad we decided to have the baby, aren’t you, sweetheart?…It’s not going to tie you down, is it, sweetheart?” Even at this late a stage, Lenore is still clearly worried that Frank may feel some uncertainty about having another child, and her concerns are validated by the fact that his paternal feelings are easily eradicated once the child is born while Lenore remains entirely devoted.

The monstrous birth in It’s Alive! is also a symbol of widespread problems in society, as monstrous births frequently were throughout history. The film hints that the literal and metaphorical toxicity of the surrounding culture caused the child’s deformities. While Frank waits with other expectant fathers in the waiting room for his wife to deliver, a conversation breaks out that suggestively revolves around pollutants. One man comments on the “overabundance of lead in all the things we eat nowadays. We’re slowly but surely poisoning ourselves, do you know that?” Another points out the window to the Los Angeles smog. Yet another man, who introduces himself as an exterminator, suggests, “Maybe we’ll learn to adapt to it,” explaining that his company invented a new pesticide but all it ended up doing was “creating a new breed of roaches—bigger, stronger, and harder to kill.” After the child is born, the search for environmental causes continues. Doctors interview Lenore, attempting to find out if she has been exposed to radioactive materials or an excessive number of x-rays, among other things.

Later in the film, Lenore alludes to another potential cause of her baby’s abnormalities: “Maybe it’s all the pills I’ve been taking over the years that brought this on.” ⁵ Soon after, we discover that pharmaceutical manufacturers are worried about this very same thing. Learning from Lenore’s physician that she had taken birth control for thirty-one months before her pregnancy, a higher-up in the company that manufactures the contraceptive surreptitiously requests one of his up-and-comers to ensure that the baby’s body is entirely annihilated once killed. “Nobody knows how this thing happened,” he explains. “If we find out that the cause is the medication that we manufacture and which was administered over a long period of time, well, it would be bad for you and ever worse for us. We’re susceptible, you know, to lawsuits.” While the film never pinpoints the source of the child’s mutation, man-made toxins and inadequately tested pharmaceuticals could be the cause as could be, on a more metaphorical level, the heartless and coldly calculating attitude that characterizes corporate America.

Another societal sin critiqued throughout the film is the callous attitude toward the Davises’ mutated infant and children in general. After the Davis baby slaughters the delivery room staff, officials seek clues as to the causes of the child’s abnormalities. One doctor remarks, “I noticed that you did inquire about abortion eight months ago.” Frank retorts, “Doesn’t everybody inquire about it nowadays? It was just a question of convenience.” Frank tellingly describes abortion as an automatic consideration for even happily married and financially secure couples, as if pregnancy should always prompt some sort of cost-benefit analysis. And it is not only Frank who displays such a cold-hearted attitude to children. When Frank claims that they decided to keep the baby, a detective heartlessly quips, “We all make mistakes.” The attitude that all children are a tiresome burden is expressed later in the film, too, when investigators discover yet another of the child’s victims: “People without children don’t realize how lucky they are,” one says, drawing a comparison between the strain caused by “normal” children and the immense wave of destruction brought about by the Davis baby. Members of the larger society in It’s Alive! care little about actual children and even less about the world they will bestow upon them, and the monstrous newborn punishes them for their sins.

All of these themes are developed in the sequel It Lives Again! released four years later in 1978. The film picks up where the first left off, only now the mutant babies have become a nationwide epidemic. Frank, the unfortunate father from the first film, has become an ardent crusader for the mutant children. He warns one couple, Jody and Eugene Scott, that their unborn baby has been identified as a likely mutant and that a SWAT team is standing by to monitor its delivery and exterminate the child should it emerge deformed. He offers to take them to a secret laboratory where scientists sympathetic to their plight will safely deliver the baby and, if it is indeed born with the mutation, care for and study the child in a way that will still allow the Scotts to function as its parents. The remainder of the film charts the desperate measures taken by the Scotts and their sympathizers to protect their mutated son from the government that wants to kill him.

Like its predecessor, It Lives Again! also focuses on paternal rather than maternal shortcomings in that it displays the father as having a harder time coming to terms with the child he has produced. His name, Eugene, even hints that, like the eugenicists that came before him, he would at least initially be happy to exterminate the child: when Frank tells Eugene and Jody that their child may have the same mutation his son had, Eugene replies that maybe the government should kill their child if it proves to be a “monster.” In response, Frank vehemently defends the children, offering up a plot summary of the first film as evidence. He describes how his child “[c]ame to me, his father, for protection. And I shot him.…But he forgave me. Is that an animal? Is it? Is that a monster, that can forgive?” As a flawed father who has since mended his ways, Frank serves as a role model for Eugene. Although Eugene is somewhat criticized, these children are far more the product of society’s sins. It Lives Again! does not pinpoint the exact cause of the mutation, but it does give support to a hypothesis posed in the first film—namely, that the babies are evolutionary advancements, a new species of human who have adapted so as to be impervious to the toxins that big businesses are dumping into the world. As one scientist puts it, the children are “the beginning of a new race of humanity that will finally eclipse our own. They’re the next step forward in evolution. A way in which the human race can survive the pollutions of this planet.” These monstrous births signal societal more than parental sins.

More notable, though, is how this film engages with an ongoing debate central to second-wave feminism, namely whether women should focus on starting families or on securing successful careers. Pregnancy, we learn, interrupted Jody’s professional aspirations to become a lawyer, a vocation for which she was apparently very well suited. While Jody never expresses any discontent about her decision to give up her career for her baby, others repeatedly question her choice long before the monstrous child is born. The film opens on the Scotts’ baby shower, during which we hear one man ask, “Jody, are you going back to get your degree after the baby?” Jody never responds, but Eugene announces that she would have been “a heck of a lawyer” if she hadn’t “quit” school. Significantly, Eugene claims that Jody “quit” school rather than recognizing that her unexpected pregnancy would have made both the completion of her degree and the pursuit of a legal career quite difficult. At another point, Jody’s mother outright scolds her for her choices: “All I know is that you could have made something of yourself if you had stayed in school in New York.” That Jody gives birth to a monstrous child could suggest that she has chosen poorly and that it would have been wiser for her to choose her livelihood over motherhood. Furthermore, the ending of the film—during which Eugene shoots his son while Jody looks on sadly but approvingly—could be seen as metaphorically supporting abortion. However, Cohen himself considered It Lives Again! “an argument against abortion” (Williams 1997, 319), and the child’s death at the end is presented as a most tragic and unfair outcome. Rather than punishing Jody for choosing a more traditional path, Cohen is attacking society’s denigration of motherhood. He imagines the post-Roe v. Wade era in which the film takes place to be a time when maternity has lost the respect it deserves, and the predominant denigration of maternity is the symbolic cause of the widespread monstrous births, who emblematize society’s monstrous attitudes about children. ⁶

While Cohen is less concerned with maternal impression theory, his disinterest is not a sign that the theory lost popularity or power in general. Indeed, long after being officially discredited, maternal impression theory has continued to maintain a grasp on the cultural imagination. Alison Crockford, for example, has found that the deformities of newborns were attributed to trauma experienced by the mother during pregnancy well into the early twentieth century (2014, 300), and Kelly Oliver gives evidence of the theory being used as late as 1996. ⁷ Late in the twentieth century, at least one Japanese doctor was warning women “that quarrels among spouses were to be avoided because the mother’s ‘hysterical’ voice could make the fetus anemic” and that “‘stressed’ mothers will often give birth to homosexuals” (Picone 1998, 48–49). And several movies during the 1970s blatantly call upon maternal impression theory. Sharon’s Baby (1975) blames the birth of a murderous infant on his mother’s “lascivious” nature, ⁸ while The Brood (1979) imagines a woman whose rage is able to literally engender an entire litter of homicidal offspring.

Although maternal impression theory is still alive and kicking in the popular imagination today, it has undergone changes. For one, the “abnormalities” that supposedly make newborns monstrous are far more frequently components of character rather than appearance. This change has several causes. First, medical advances have reduced the actual number of what would have traditionally constituted “monstrous births”; not since the outbreak of Thalidomide-caused deformities in the 1960s has the world seen a serious epidemic of physical abnormalities, medical technology making it unlikely that they would gestate undetected. In addition, our understanding of “deformity” has itself greatly changed since the Disability Rights movement of the 1970s, such that the “disabled” are far more likely to be rightfully seen as “differently abled.” As a result of our culture’s careful decoupling of difference and aberration, monstrous birth narratives today often focus more on behaviors than appearances.

Furthermore, monstrous birth narratives of the late twentieth century and new millennium have dramatically different ideas about what sorts of maternal “sins” are monstrous. While Rosemary and Harriet held motherhood in too high a regard to suit their creators, Cohen presented devoted mothers as the only admirable figures in a world populated by hard-hearted fathers and businessmen. Today’s monstrous birth narratives have in many ways returned to the values of the earlier texts, in that they are far more concerned about the horrors that might be spawned by women who are overly maternal. Driven by a desperate appetite for maternity or at least a frantic need to defend their children once conceived or born, these women birth diminutive cannibals who literally embody their mothers’ “baby hunger.” ⁹

I’ve written about “Monstrous Newborns and the Mothers That Love Them” in an essay that appeared in Markus P.J. Bohlmann and Sean Moreland’s edited collection Monstrous Children and Childish Monsters , so I won’t belabor the point too much here. In that essay, I specifically examine two movies from 2009: the remake of It’s Alive! and Grace. Grace is by far the more artistic of the two and the more straightforward in its symbolism. From the beginning of the film, its protagonist, Madeline, is shown to be a woman for whom happiness and selfhood are dependent on motherhood. In fact, aside from her strict vegan principles, maternity is Madeline’s defining desire and interest. When her baby dies in utero , Madeline insists on carrying it to term anyway. After appearing stillborn, the child miraculously comes to life, and Madeline names her Grace, believing her to be a miracle of the most religious sort. However, Grace turns out to be more of a curse than a gift, for she needs to feed on blood, and her appetite ends up being greater than Madeline can satisfy. In response, Madeline immediately drops her vegan principles and buys up pounds of meat, from which she hopes she can wring enough blood for Grace to drink, but the concoction proves poisonous to the baby; it is human blood she needs. When she accidentally kills a doctor who comes to investigate, Madeline expresses no remorse and instead treats the event as a prime opportunity to procure some food for Grace. She slices into the man’s veins and fills a baby bottle with the blood that pours out—a trick she learned, ironically, from an animal rights video. Not only does Madeline’s hunger for offspring spawn a vampiric child, but her motherly devotion also brings death to many around her. Grace is a fitting product of her mother’s monstrosity.

Other narratives also feature newborns who are physical manifestations of their mother’s monstrous natures. In Baby Blood (1990), a pregnant woman murders in order to feed her fetus, which has become infected by a parasite. In The Unborn 2 (1994), a mother hides and protects her newborn for a long time, even though she knows he is capable of killing and even after he demonstrates that ability; a very similar plot structures the 2009 remake of It’s Alive! Sarah’s Child (1994) focuses on the titular Sarah, who was raised to believe that a woman’s identity is entirely determined by motherhood. When Sarah discovers that she is infertile, she manages to create a child with her mind; named Melissa, the little girl is observable to everyone and capable of committing terrible crimes, such as drowning the couple’s new puppy and causing their landlady to fatally fall down the stairs. ¹⁰ And though ultimately a mad scientist story, the novel Breed (2012) describes a couple infected by “baby hunger”; their desperate desire for children leads them to try out a fertility medicine that turns them both into cannibals with a particular appetite for their own offspring. The children become animalistic as well but only when they near puberty. Monstrous birth narratives today are far more concerned with the problems created by an obsessive need to procreate.

The murderous mother became a source of terror at the end of the twentieth century due to several high-profile cases of women killing their children, such as Susan Smith in 1994 and Andrea Yates in 2001. However, in contemporary monstrous birth films, it is motherly devotion that becomes a source of horror because such mothers will defend their murderous offspring even if doing so may bring injury or death to others. As a result, in these stories, the mother’s murder of her monstrous baby is often presented as an act of mercy, both for the child and for humankind. ¹¹

The Power of Paternity: Antichrists and the Monstrous Brainchildren of the Mad/Male Scientist

The story of a woman giving birth to a demon is prevalent enough that folklorists have given it its own motif number, T556. In most folktales that contain this motif, blame falls upon the mother; the demonic baby is an emblem of her sin. ¹² With the birth of Rosemary’s baby and a Satanic sibling named Damien not quite a decade later, a figure appeared who could reassert the awful power of paternal genetics. In stories about child antichrists, Daddy DNA rules supreme, conquering all other potential influences on the child in one fell swoop. Until Rosemary’s Baby and The Omen , the antichrist had not been imagined as an actual child who would be born. In fact, as Richard Fuller states in Naming the Antichrist: The History of an American Obsession , “[t]he term Antichrist barely appears in scripture. Only two minor epistles…actually use the term, and its meaning even there is fairly obscure” (1995, 3). During the 1960s, increased attention was given to Satanism as a practice, with the founding of the Church of Satan in 1966. Since Satanic rituals have been long imagined as inversions of Christian practices, the stage was set for an inverted nativity as well.

In addition, the burgeoning field of behavioral genetics also drew attention to the predictive qualities of heredity. As Aaron Panofsky’s Misbehaving Science (2014) makes clear, the field became official in 1970 with the establishment of the Behavior Genetics Association and the inception of the association’s journal, Behavior Genetics, the following year. Both events were capstones of a decade of increased interest in the field, including the publication of the first textbook on the subject in 1960. A particular discovery in the mid-1960s focused attention specifically on male genetics: the so-called supermale. Jeremy Green explains that scientists in 1965 discovered “a significant statistical excess of XYY males among the inmates in a maximum security institution” for developmentally disabled offenders and published their findings in Nature on Christmas that year; in April 1968, XYY syndrome was introduced to mainstream society in a front-page story in The New York Times (1985, 141). When mass murderer Richard Speck announced that he would be appealing his sentence based on being an XYY male and therefore not criminally responsible, the genetic condition received even more attention.

Although it was later revealed that Speck was not in fact XYY, the idea of the superviolent supermale had already become embedded in the public consciousness. Men with XYY syndrome were imagined to be especially violent because of the extra “maleness” of their genetic make-up: “The excessive aggressiveness of the XYY male, it was suggested, might derive from his ‘double maleness’; just as men, with one Y chromosome, were more aggressive than women, who had no Y chromosome, so XYY males, with an extra Y, could be expected to have more of male traits—like aggression” (Green 1985, 144). Though these claims were inaccurate, ¹³ the image of the aggressive supermale has persisted, appearing in the film Alien 3 (1993) and in episodes of Law and Order and CSI: Miami in 1993 and 2007, respectively.

It might seem that the confusion over the supermale demonstrated a desire to indict the very essence of maleness—the Y chromosome—as the seat of mayhem and violence. However, the figure of the supermale also affirmed the influence that men have over their offspring, which might have been particularly desirable to some at a time when advances in technologies were threatening to reduce or supplant men’s role in reproduction. Parley Ann Boswell argues that the birth control pill, first made available for contraceptive use in 1960, conjured up “an entirely new set of fearful projections about the future of women’s sexuality, sex roles between men and women, and basic reproductive facts.…That women might have some power over how and when they reproduced seemed to encourage horror narratives in which men needed to assure themselves that they were still kings at home” (2014, 116). Furthermore, while the idea of so-called test-tube babies had long been a fixture in the imagination, a prominent part, for example, of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), genuine scientific progress toward its actualization increased concerns that in the future the paternal role could be reduced to the mere anonymous donation of sperm. ¹⁴

On the other hand, the creation of institutions like the Repository for Germinal Choice, also known as the Nobel Prize sperm bank, in 1980 suggested that even the most absent of fathers had a determining influence over their offspring. Antichrist narratives do something very similar. In these stories, Satanic DNA trumps all other factors, including the genetic contributions of the mother or the influence of a loving family who has at their disposal all the advantages wealth can provide. In Rosemary’s Baby , for example, the demonic child is half Rosemary’s, but whatever DNA she bequeaths seems to be of little import. In The Omen , neither devoted parents nor a life of privilege can alter Damien’s evil trajectory. The film begins with Robert Thorn rushing to the hospital because his wife, Katherine, has gone into labor. He arrives to find that his child has died, unbeknownst to Katherine. Because the couple has already lost several children to miscarriage, Robert fears that the death of this baby will push Katherine over the edge. The doctor reveals that another child is available for adoption; Robert could simply substitute this child for his own, and his wife need never know. Robert agrees to the plan. The rest of the film charts Robert’s slow realization that he has adopted the antichrist. By the end of the film, Katherine, Robert, and several others are dead, and Damien is poised to inherit the Thorn estate. Moreover, Damien now has access to people of considerable power due to Robert’s former position as the US ambassador to Great Britain. In the final scene of the film, in fact, Damien is holding the hand of the president, who was Robert’s college roommate.

Not only does The Omen affirm the supreme power of Satanic DNA, but all major decisions regarding the child’s outcome are made by men. Katherine is never even made aware that the child she cares for is not her own and that her misgivings about him have grounding. Robert holds incredible amounts of power over the family, and Lennard suggests that the film delights in the scenario: “Traditional conceptualizations of paternity seek to override maternal closeness, interposing powerful counterimaginings that reinscribe men as the primary authors of their offspring” (2014, 97). William Paul similarly argues, “[I]t is the father who effectively gives birth to the child by arranging the secret adoption of another newborn” (1994, 326). The Omen enacts a fantasy in which men have complete jurisdiction over the family.

The Omen posits a genetic argument for evil children, one that seems to excuse the well-to-do Thorns from blame and, to some scholars, therefore reads as a conservative affirmation of white, wealthy families. ¹⁵ After all, the Thorns can only be accused of unwittingly hosting the antichrist; they did not create him. However, I would argue that The Omen , and the antichrist genre as a whole, does typically indict the wealthy. The antichrist must be placed in a family that will aid rather than challenge his advancement. Not only do the Thorns have the wealth and position to enable Damien to put his end-of-the-world plans into action, but they also give him ample opportunity to do so. In many ways, the Thorns seem to want a child simply to keep up appearances. Rather than care for Damien themselves, they employ a nanny, even though Katherine, who was supposedly so desperate for children, is essentially a stay-at-home mother. During Damien’s birthday party, Katherine practically snatches the child from his governess when photographers show up, emphasizing the extent to which her idea of mothering is more show than substance. The next nanny they hire is a Satanic minion who not only protects the child but also enables his rise to power; her influence over Damien is possible because his parents are hardly present. ¹⁶ As Paul notes, “the governess immediately becomes closer to Damien than either of his parents precisely because neither parent wishes to be especially close to him” (1994, 326). If anything, it is the Thorns who are guilty of the white, upper-class worship of which critics have accused the film: at one point, Katherine asks, “What could be wrong with our child, Robert? We’re beautiful people.” The Thorns’ lack of real involvement in Damien’s life, a product of their wealthy lifestyle, and their faith in their own superiority allow the antichrist to thrive.

After a sequel to The Omen, Damien: Omen II , appeared in 1978, the child antichrist genre was primarily populated with low-budget and lesser-known works, including James Patterson’s Virgin (1980) and its made-for-television adaptation, Child of Darkness, Child of Light (1991), Fear No Evil (1981), Dean Koontz’s novel The Servants of Twilight (originally published as Twilight under the pseudonym Leigh Nichols in 1984) and its 1991 cinematic adaptation, and Omen IV: The Awakening (1991). However, the antichrist has enjoyed many rebirths in the new millennium. Movies include The Calling (2000), Bless the Child (2000), Blessed (2004), The Reaping (2007), Born (2007), a parody entitled Hell Baby (2014), The Devil’s Due (2014), and A Second Son (2015). The young antichrist has also appeared in an Adult Swim television series entitled Lucy, the Daughter of the Devil (2005), a 2012 videogame named Lucius, and a comedic short The Divine Rom-Comedy (2012). And, of course, both The Omen and Rosemary’s Baby have been remade, as a 2006 feature film and a two-part 2014 miniseries, respectively. This renaissance is partly due to the portentous turn of the century and millennium and the twelve unusual dates that resulted, the most relevant being June 6, 2006, the date strategically selected for the release of an Omen remake and a lesser-known mockbuster, 666: The Child . Lower-budget antichrist films—such as 11/11/11, 12/12/12, and even 13/13/13 —have continued to capitalize on such seemingly prophetic calendrical events.

The return of the antichrist may have also been influenced by recent genetic explanations for crime that again associate male chromosomes with aggression, such as the so-called “warrior gene,” a name for a variation in the X-chromosome gene that produces monoamine oxidase A (MAOA). First identified in 1993, the gene took on its more compelling moniker in the early 2000s, and, as with supposed supermales, its relationship to violence has been largely overstated. ¹⁷ Even after almost fifty years, the role of the antichrist remains reserved for boys, suggesting the extent to which the figure is linked to male genetics. The Omen IV (1991), for example, tells the story of Damien’s daughter, Delia, but rather than allow Delia to play the part of antichrist, the film relies on an incredibly complicated plot to ensure that role instead goes to her twin brother, whom Delia had absorbed while in the womb. In both Bless the Child (2000) and The Reaping (2007), girls seem like they might be antichrists…only they’re not, and the female antichrist in Lucy, the Daughter of the Devil is interested in other things than world domination. In fact, the only text I’ve found that depicts a little girl antichrist (or actually two) is Blessed (2004), and even then the evidence is questionable. ¹⁸

Antichrist narratives still tend to focus on the rich. In some texts, the antichrist is an orphan who joins a family wealthy enough to afford adoption. In 666: The Child as in The Omen , of which it is so obviously a knock-off, a married couple adopts the antichrist and hires a nanny to care for him; she proves to be evil and schools the child in delinquent behavior. However, in today’s day and age, the nanny is a harder plot device to pull off, a fact that was made evident in The Omen remake when Robert proposes that perhaps they don’t need a nanny. “You’re not working,” he rather dismissively points out to Katherine. Some form of rape or unwanted or inexplicable pregnancy is far more commonly employed as the explanation of the antichrist’s origins, suggesting that the Rosemary plot, in which maternal DNA proves insubstantial, has remained more compelling. ¹⁹ Some antichrist narratives have opted for a technological update involving a genetically engineered antichrist and a sort of medical rape, a plot that better suits our post-genomic age. In these stories, the woman is implanted with a designer baby Satan during an assisted reproductive process. A woman’s visit to a fertility clinic in Blessed , for example, allows doctors to mix her husband’s sperm with Satan’s blood. The narrative then proceeds in Rosemary- fashion, with the mother not knowing what to believe about the nature of her unborn twins. I’m Not Jesus, Mommy (2010) adds even more of a twist on this story by making the mother a fertility specialist. Finding that she, too, is infertile, she impregnates herself in her own laboratory, not realizing that the embryo she has implanted is actually a clone of Jesus made from genetic material taken from the Shroud of Turin. However, because the cloned Jesus is born without a soul, he ends up becoming the antichrist rather than Christ and brings on an apocalypse of the most religious sort, complete with an end-of-times societal devolution and bodies that disappear rapture-style. ²⁰

This new method of accounting for the origins of the antichrist through reproductive technologies is not simply a hip update designed to play on more contemporary anxieties. The inclusion of these technologies also performs important ideological work. Similar to the function of the nanny in The Omen , these technologies link the antichrist to families wealthy enough to afford such procedures. It is because these couples have such a deep need to produce their own biological children and will stop at nothing to bring that desire to fruition that the mother can be implanted with demon seed; the stories thus deal with the ways that “baby hunger” manifests specifically among the upper classes. The subtle accusation these texts make is that indulging in such expensive measures to produce a biological child might suggest that the process is more self-serving than it is about the child.

There’s no doubt, however, that the new inclusion of reproductive technologies in the antichrist narratives is also due to the fears and suspicions that still shroud those procedures. ²¹ Such stories clearly fit into the “If you don’t make a kid the normal way it’ll kill you’ sub-genre” (2012), as Brian Collins asserted in his blog post on The Unborn on Horror Movie a Day . These anxieties are the catalyst behind the last type of monstrous birth I examine in this chapter: the monstrous brainchild of the mad scientist. In Frankenstein’s Footsteps , Jon Turney describes a cartoon that appeared in The Guardian in 1969:

In the first frame, a white-coated scientist appears, having just produced a tiny baby…which sits inside a small test-tube.…In succeeding frames, the baby grows, emerges from his glass prison, and develops into a huge and overpowering grotesque. In the final frame…[t]he scientist is now helplessly corked inside the tube, looking up at his creation, pleading: “Son! Let me out son, listen to me son! SON!” (1998, 168)

The general trajectory of the cartoon—the scientifically created child eventually turning on his creator—would become the standard plotline of many scientific monstrous birth stories. The stories play upon a common ideology that DNA is, as Dorothy Nelkin and M. Susan Lindee write in The DNA Mystique , “a sacred territory, a taboo arena, that by virtue of its spiritual importance should never be manipulated” (2004, 54). It is for this reason that scientists, especially those guilty of medically meddling with the building blocks of life, are portrayed so negatively in popular culture. ²²

As the title of Turney’s book suggests, Turney believes that these sorts of fears can be traced back to the story of Frankenstein . Reading Frankenstein as a “birth myth” became commonplace after the publication of Ellen Moers’s famous essay on the topic, “Female Gothic,” in 1976. Significantly, Moers’s essay itself appeared just two years before the birth of the first so-called “test-tube baby,” Louise Brown, and during a time when the terrifying possibilities of reproductive technologies began to seize the cultural imagination. In The Boys from Brazil , a novel written by Ira Levin the same year as Moers’s essay and made into a movie in 1978, Dr. Josef Mengele creates Hitler clones and then tries to duplicate a Hitler-like upbringing for them by ensuring that they have doting mothers and cold and abusive fathers. ²³ Other films in this vein include The Kindred (1987), The Unborn (1991), and a 1993 episode of The X-Files, “Eve.” Ellen Pifer also draws connections between Lessing’s The Fifth Child and Frankenstein : “As different as Lessing’s complacent young couple are from Shelley’s obsessed scientist, they initially share his naive belief that any creature they bring into the world will be beautiful” (2000, 130).

In many of these stories, the scientist is also directly related in some way to the child, which further solidifies the connection between the mad scientist and his monstrous births. Such is the case in the novels Prodigy (1988) by Michael Stewart and Mutation (1989) by Robin Cook. While the two are often discussed interchangeably as stories about mad geneticists, they actually differ quite considerably and in suggestive ways. In Prodigy , father Jake uses his scientific work on a supposed intelligence gene to genetically manipulate his daughter, Sophie, in order to ensure that she is not born with Down syndrome, like his first child. When he discovers that the rats on which he first experimented have degraded into “savage, primitive stock” (1991, 30), he—and the reader—begin to look for signs that Sophie will turn vicious as well. Surprisingly, however, Sophie remains a generally kind and well-meaning girl. Even when she discovers her genetic origins, she suffers only a slight identity crisis, telling her father, “I’m…more you than me” (249) and thereby further validating the male scientist’s ability to control the nature of his offspring. ²⁴ Violence in the story arises because Sophie’s overdeveloped mind is capable of making what the book calls a tulku , a being created by “an idea so powerful it materialized into flesh” (313). It is Sophie’s male tulku that is responsible for all the violence that occurs.

The connection between Frankenstein and Cook’s Mutation is heavy-handedly announced; after all, the villain’s name is Victor Frank. Victor genetically alters his son, Victor Junior, or VJ, to be a genius, but the child’s superior intelligence leads to a deficit of emotion and morality as well, a common stereotype of gifted children. His psychiatrist mother, Marsha, is aware of VJ’s emotional lack. At one point, she wonders, for example, if “being conceived in a petri dish had somewhat frozen his emotions” (1989, 29). She also realizes that VJ has many of the same characteristics as a boy she is treating, Jasper, who has conduct disorder, the juvenile precursor to antisocial personality disorder: neither of the boys is able to “experience affection or show emotion ,” and both “choose solitary activities, do[] not desire close relationships, ha[ve] no close friends ” (italics in original, 66). For most of the book, Marsha assumes that the fault is hers, that as a working mother, her absence has caused VJ’s problems. Jasper, for example, was “essentially reared by an aunt, since his mother worked two jobs to support the family ” (italics in original, 67). Marsha recognizes that “her busy practice had forced her to start Mark at day care when he was only a year old” (42) and concludes that VJ “acts strange because I left him with Janice [his nanny] so much when he was a baby.…I was never home enough. I should have taken a leave from the office” (45). She finds articles that confirm her fears by pointing to “the possible effects of parental deprivation on children being reared by nannies and or spending inordinate amounts of time in day care” (79). Marsha’s discovery of the genetic causes of VJ’s giftedness eases her conscience, for she concludes that “her absences from home in VJ’s early years were not to blame” for his sociopathic tendencies (104).

In many ways, Cook’s novel seems progressive in that it demonstrates that mothers are not entirely responsible for the outcome of their offspring. However, at the same time, the novel reduces the impact that the mother has on her child. The scientist—and father—becomes the only influence that matters, so much so that Victor at the end can ask himself, “[I]f VJ was half prodigy, half monster, what did it say of him, his creator?” (1989, 295). By the end, VJ has even fashioned himself into a budding Dr. Frankenstein and is essentially walking in his father’s vocational footsteps; he is growing fetuses, biologically his siblings, in artificial wombs but has altered the babies to make them mentally handicapped, so they won’t be more intelligent than him. ²⁵

The scientist who wishes to appropriate the creative powers of motherhood appears in Milo (1998) as well. In this film, an abortionist, Dr. Jeeder, manages to bring a stillborn child back to life. He adopts the child, who for no clear reason remains the size of an adolescent and becomes a crazed murderer. Significantly, when the details of his experiment are revealed, Jeeder speaks as if in competition with the child’s mother: “I wouldn’t give her too much credit. All she could produce was stillborn,” he says, then grandiously adds, “I delivered a birth.” Similarly, in Godsend (2004), a scientist offers a couple the chance to recreate their dead son, Adam, through cloning. Unbeknownst to them, however, he also mixes their genes with his own dead son’s. Because his son was a sociopath, their new Adam also has a murderous streak. In Splice (2009), both “parents,” Elsa and Clive, are scientists, and the creature they create is a female human-animal hybrid named Dren. Because their pride in their invention generally supersedes parental responsibilities and affection toward the life they have created, the suggestion is that Dren is seen as a successful experiment rather than a child. In all of these films, the scientist controls the very nature of the child. That a female scientist, Elsa, is the primary figure behind the creation of Dren raises interesting questions about women’s roles in the traditionally male-dominated sciences. Elsa is impregnated when Dren spontaneously turns male, kills Clive, and rapes Elsa, acting out an Oedipal fantasy. However, the end of the film shows Elsa willingly donating her unborn child to science, implying she has learned little from her experiences. As April D. Miller argues, the film’s conclusion “suggests that such reproductive experimentation—or more specifically, women’s desire to circumvent the natural procreative process—cannot be tolerated while also exposing a fear of gender equality or neutrality—women’s desire to break down both professional and domestic boundaries” (2014, 337). For better or worse, mad scientist narratives, like antichrist stories, ultimately return the power of influence over offspring to the father, who is often also the scientist. Even if the scientist is female, she is often masculinized by her participation in the male-dominated field of science.

Conclusion

In a 1979 essay in Western Folklore , folklorist Alan Dundes examined the dead baby jokes that had been circulating since the late 1960s. Dundes claimed that these jokes arose from a place of deep ambivalence about children. On the one hand, they signaled “a protest against babies in general” (154), a sentiment Dundes felt was symbolized by the wide use of the pill and the legalization of abortion; on the other hand, dead baby jokes also expressed societal guilt about how these developments “prevent[ed] the creation of or destroy[ed] a potential human being” (154). Narratives about monstrous births reflect a similar ambivalence. Although clearly not responsible for its own deformities and frequently an object of sympathy, in most cases the monstrous birth is still terminated by the end of the story. Because these texts send a mixed message, I tend to agree with David Skal’s claim—calling upon Dundes’s work—that “[t]he demonization of fetal images does not lend itself to a simplistic ideological interpretation—monster children are not exactly pro-life or pro-choice, but, like the sick joke, articulate unspoken aspects on both sides” (1993, 302). Dundes also believed that the dead baby joke cycle “provide[d] a means for adolescents and young teenagers to try to relieve their anxiety about impending parenthood” (157). Narratives of monstrous births may be doing something similar today for millennials, who are postponing parenthood until later in life and are choosing to have fewer children. ²⁶

While monstrous births are typically more focused on the mother’s connection to her baby, stories about antichrists and the monstrous creations of mad scientists affirm that men still have an overwhelming impact on their offspring, biologically determining their children’s future behavior, controlling the institutions that shape them, and sometimes both. Although it might seem that antichrist narratives and stories about the monstrous brainchildren of mad scientists merely demonize these male arenas of influence, men are presented as powerful nonetheless. Furthermore, if any pleasure is taken in the triumph of these hellions over the families that raise them, as Robin Wood claimed was the case in The Omen , then these figures offer further gratifying evidence of the virility of manhood; these little boys are antiheroes in the making, in the vein of Walter White or Hannibal or Dexter, terrifying but also terrifyingly impressive. ²⁷ Likewise, while both the end and the means of the mad scientist’s experiment may be horrific, at the heart of his experiment is a germ of genius and scientific savvy, both of which are admirable on some level.

Notes

1.

As Alan Bewell notes, “Traditional obstetric theory may have often allotted women a secondary or subordinate role in biological reproduction, their purpose frequently being that of a tabula rasa for the male seed.…But a contrary, more feminist position, also developed, that reasserted the importance of the mother by admitting that the mother’s imagination, if not fully satisfied with this rearrangement, might intervene in this process, when not carefully regulated, to mar or deface the form provided by the father” (1988, 111).
2.

See also Jan Bondeson’s chapter on “Maternal Impressions” in A Cabinet of Medical Curiosities (1997).
3.

Rhoda Berenstein, for example, sees the story as reflecting “the horrifying status of motherhood in American patriarchal culture” while Lucy Fischer deems it an “utterance of women’s private experience of pregnancy” (1990, 415). Gary Hoppenstand writes, “Levin’s novel details the anxiety experienced by many pregnant women” (1994, 40). Lucy Fife believes the supernatural elements of the narrative create “an exaggerated situation in order to scrutinise and dramatise the dynamic of the marriage and its breakdown, as well as a woman’s experience of pregnancy” (2008, 46). And Karyn Valerius argues that the narrative “might be read as an indictment of the more routine ways sexist social relations expropriate women’s reproductive labor” (2005, 120).
4.

The word kingdom is used at least four times in reference to the large house they buy (9, 12, 22, 61).
5.

Citing Barbara Creed and W. Scott Poole, Brooke Edge points out that “the novelization of the film makes fertility drug usage, and its direct causality for a mutant killer baby, explicit. The mother popped birth control pills for years, then fertility pills after she could not conceive when she wanted—a ‘quick fix’ to cheat nature” (2015, 54).
6.

If this was Cohen’s perception of the era, he was not alone. In an essay entitled “Historical and Social Changes in the Perception of the Role of the Father,” which appeared in the 1976 collection The Role of the Father in Child Development , John Nash writes, “Women’s liberation is frequently accused of being against motherhood, on the grounds that motherhood interferes with the pursuit of a career.…I personally agree…that women’s liberation has been an antimotherhood movement” (81).
7.

Oliver quotes one author as writing, “The emotions of the mother are experienced directly by the fetus, and indirectly by the infant after it is born” (2012, 116).
8.

The 1975 film I Don’t Want to Be Born , also known as Sharon’s Child , depicts a murderous child, the product of a curse laid upon the mother by a dwarf with whom she worked while a stripper. The mother, played by a young Joan Collins, is punished for her sexuality: not only was she a stripper, but she had an illicit affair with her manager, who might even be the child’s father since she slept with him the night before her wedding.
9.

Oliver attributes the expression to Sylvia Ann Hewlett’s 2002 book Baby Hunger: The New Battle for Motherhood .
10.

A similar figure appears in Michael Stewart’s Prodigy , a text I discuss in more detail in the last section of this chapter.
11.

The made-for-television movie Hush Little Baby (2007) and the films First Born (2007) and Delivery: The Beast Within (2013) all symbolically play upon these fears of the murderous mother but interestingly offer up a supernatural explanation that validates the women’s suspicions of their children.
12.

Jane Garry and Hasan M. El-Shamy argue that one of the first cases in which the father is blamed was circulated at Hull House, the Chicago immigrant settlement house founded by Jane Addams. Addams describes the folktales in The Long Road of Women’s Memory (2005, 428).
13.

Although taller than average, XYY men do not test higher for aggression. While scientists have blamed the media for the misinformation that followed, Green’s chapter demonstrates that the scientific community was also guilty.
14.

In his chapter “A Spinster and a Syringe” in Reproduction by Design , Angus McLaren notes that opponents of artificial insemination believed it “threatened to split social and biological fatherhood.…Moreover, gender roles were reversed with the husband being passive and the wife active” (2012, 129).
15.

Williams claims that Rosemary’s Baby, The Omen, and The Exorcist “disavow relevant social factors by ascribing traumatic family circumstances to the aggressive return of an old native lying dormant since the Puritan witch trials. Satan, not problem families, was really responsible.…[Audiences] witnessed families in disintegration, but they were ideologically reassured that the cause was supernatural, not social” (1996, 99). Likewise, Robin Wood describes The Omen as “old-fashioned, traditional, reactionary: the goodness of the family unit isn’t questioned; horror is disowned by having the devil-child, a product of the Old World, unwittingly adopted into the American family” (1986, 88).
16.

In The Omen remake, the nanny is played by Mia Farrow. What better mother for Damien than Rosemary herself?
17.

See Wensley and King’s 2008 article. In October 2014, an article published in Molecular Psychiatry explained that researchers in Finland had found variants of two other genes that were linked to “extremely violent behavior” (Tilhonen et al. 2015). It will be interesting to see if this discovery is also exaggerated in terms of its predictive ability.
18.

At the end of the film, the twin girls, beautiful blond toddlers, seem to cause the death and desiccation of a boy who was bothering them (and everyone else) at their birthday party. Significantly, the boy is dressed like a devil and the little girls like angels, which is either ironic or possibly suggestive that they are instead the second coming bound to punish all evildoers. Hard to say—they’re on screen for about five minutes.
19.

This sort of plot appears in The Calling (2000), Born (2007), The Reaping (2007), The Devil’s Due (2014), and A Second Son (2015).
20.

The film plays on what Turney believes is a common fear, namely “that a child produced by unnatural means would be marked somehow by the procedure, be misshapen, soulless or monstrous” (1998, 186). As Robin Marantz Henig reveals in Pandora’s Baby: How the First Test Tube Babies Sparked the Reproductive Revolution , an anonymous picture of Louise Brown was sent to an American clinic attempting to successfully produce its own test-tube baby with the message, “She has no soul” (2004, 214).
21.

In They Know Us Better Than We Know Ourselves: The History and Politics of Alien Abduction , Bridget Brown argues that alien abduction stories also chart these anxieties.
22.

In his article “Of Power Maniacs and Unethical Geniuses: Science and Scientists in Fiction Film,” Peter Weingart et al. found that in fictional films, scientists in the field of medical research are “regarded with the greatest skepticism and get most easily into conflict with the ethical boundaries drawn around them” (2003, 283).
23.

José Van Dijck makes clear that the film expresses anxiety about the terrifying potential of scientific advancements in genetics: “Nazism, inspired by eugenic ideals, caused the Holocaust; the new genetics, if in the hands of the Nazis, will result in a similar disaster” (1998, 58).
24.

Prodigy also plays on the idea that toying with DNA is sacrilegious. In one scene, a man claims that a scientist who creates “‘new species, new organisms…is playing God.’ The scientist [then gives] a slow smile. ‘Today, man is God,’ he said quietly” (1991, 283).
25.

VJ’s ghoulish experiment hardly measures up to a real project reported in 1973, in which scientists “took eight fetuses that had been aborted…, kept them alive just long enough to keep the blood flowing to their brains, decapitated them, and attached the severed fetal heads to an apparatus that provided sufficient oxygen and nutrients to keep the brains functioning” (Henig 2004, 87–88).
26.

Catherine Rampell, for example, reports that “millennial women are reproducing at the slowest pace of any generation in U.S. history,” a trend that Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett links to the economic recession. As Olga Khazan points out, however, the reasons for declining birth rates differ by race; while decreases in pregnancies among unmarried black women and Latinas explain their falling number of children, white women are simply choosing not to marry and are therefore having fewer children as a result.
27.

That Damien now has a television show devoted to him suggests this might be the case.

2. Monstrous Births

Societal Sins, Corrupt Couples, and Monstrous Mothers

The Power of Paternity: Antichrists and the Monstrous Brainchildren of the Mad/Male Scientist

Conclusion

Notes