The quiet pro-life narratives of todays horror

It’s atale as old as time, or at least as old as the twee mother-daughter seriesGilmore Girls. Ayoung single woman discovers she is pregnant. The odds are stacked against her but she decides to keep the child anyway. Sometimes abortion is considered fleetingly, but more often than not it’s barely uttered. What follows are many gushy scenes where the woman’s sacrifice pays off. Aflexible career and an overeager support system all fall into place around her main purpose: motherhood. This quietly conservative narrative is as proliferated as the fertile characters at their core. Multiplying from 2007 indie darlingJuno to this year’s Apple TV seriesMargo’s Got Money Troubles, with recent editions including plotlines inAnd Just Like ThatandAmandaland. As if the pro-life plotlines populating comedy-dramas wasn’t enough, anti-abortion rhetoric has now infiltrated horror. The chorus of cooing congratulations has been replaced with nightmares for the pregnant women ofHokum,UndertoneandExit 8.

Moments before entering afreaky maze of subway corridors inExit 8, alost man (Kazunari Ninomiya) receives acall from his girlfriend (Nana Komatsu) who is pregnant and needs his advice. She may only exist as adisembodied voice, but her condition haunts him throughout this puzzling horror, and it’s by helping asmall boy to escape the tunnels alongside him that he commits himself to fatherhood. When finally both man and child find their way out, the lost man bounds out of the station towards his bright future. The decision clearly lies with him. The seeming innocence of the lost man’s realisation about his responsibility demonstrates its conservative underpinnings, as it comes to him as the natural conclusion – apurpose bestowed upon him as he exits his bachelor’s nightmare, which is all the more underhanded when considering thatExit 8 was inspired by avideo game devoid of any narrative atall.

Unlike the lost man’s girlfriend, the expectant mothers inHokum andUndertone – Fiona (Florence Ordesh) and Evy (Nina Kiri) – will be murdered long before carrying their child to term. The disappearance of the plucky bartender Fiona, who charms the crotchedy writer Ohm Bauman (Adam Scott) with her dry wit, is the narrative force behindHokum. Her affair with manager Mal (Peter Coonan), and her pregnancy are discovered consecutively, with the discovery of her corpse following shortly after. It’s at this moment in the abandoned hotel suite where Fiona has been left to rot, that her ex-lover and revealed murderer flees, trapping Ohm in the room with the deceased woman. Given that it has been widelyrecorded across the globe that pregnancy increases the likelihood of intimate partner violence and femicide, this moment should carry the proportionate gravity. However, being the hokey homage movie that it is,Hokum doesn’t dabble in sincerity, which is never more apparent than when Mal scurries from the scene of his crime like acartoon villain.

Hokum has little interest in exploring Fiona’s decision or the realities of femicide. She is merely another dead woman, afootnote in the chapters of every other male in the story. Her pregnancy was simply atragic addition, as not one life is lost but two.Undertone attempts to mine the psyche of Evy, host of aparanormal podcast, currently caring for her dying mother (Michele Duquet). Given that she is dealing with an absentee boyfriend and her sick mother, while playing armchair detective about asupernatural phenomenon and struggling with her sobriety, her choice to keep the child is afurther signifier that she is not in her right mind. Evy also persists with the podcast, leading to her untimely death.

Alongside the fertile dead women ofHokum andUndertone there exists their opposites: undead hags. Both women are terrorised before their death by hags that dwell in the hotel and Evy’s home. Sickingan aged woman who is no longer capable of procreation on the young fertile one is indicative of the director’s mindset. Twice the trappings of patriarchal society play out as ayoung pregnant woman cut down in her prime is atragic loss, and one who has aged out of her childbearing purpose is terrifying to behold.

Why is it that those that will never have to, quite literally, deal with the full weight of this decision, are so flippantly adding to aharmful narrative? It brings to mind aBojack Horseman sketch where apanel of men discuss abortion with one claiming they would put their life on hold to raise achild: ​“and Ican say that with confidence because Iwill never have to make that decision, so I’m unbiased”. These directors may not be consciously reinforcing apro-life approach to reproductive rights, however, they are using pregnancy as ashortcut to afemale character’s internal world. If horror studios have learnt one lesson from the viral success of films such asHereditary andThe Babadook, it’s that women’s psychological narratives sell. But the many young male directors taking up the mantle to depict them seem determined to recreate the tropes of fecund damsels and barren hags without any introspection.

Pregnancy horror once dealt with the unnerving physicality of the experience, most famously withRosemary’s Baby(1968) and more recently inImmaculate(2024), honing in on the outsiders with sinister motives for ensuring the baby is carried to term. Only 9months after Sydney Sweeney’s pregnant nun bashed in the brain of her newborn babe at the end ofImmaculate, Trump – an infamous anti-abortionist, among many other hateful things – won his second presidency. At the time of release, Sweeney and director Michael Mohankept their distance from political interpretations ofImmaculate and the fight for reproductive rights, perhaps sensing the changing of the tide. If anything, films likeHokum,UndertoneandExit 8adding to the litany of media’s pro-life psyops masquerading as narratives, shows just how fickle studios canbe.

These pregnancy stories may seem innocuous, but it is exactly their supposed innocence that makes them insidious: nudging those who are capable of pregnancy towards choosing to keep it, while hinting that abortion is apath laden with guilt. While some cheer on the new cohort of horror directors, Iworry that their collective predisposition towards the media’s misogynistic tropes indicates that they may not be equipped to handle the women’s narratives they are so intent on cashing in on, making horror films that force audiences to relive their reproductive rights nightmares, rather than interrogating them.