Horror has long turned the body into a battlefield, but in 2024, the genre has traded its pulpy hack-and-slash theatrics for something much scarier: uterus control. This year, horror has turned its attention to pregnancy – not as a miracle of life but as a nightmare of control – and offered a sharp commentary on the precarious state of women’s rights. Once satisfied with sending its scantily clad scream queens running into the woods in high heels, terror now chains them to the real terror: the patriarchy, rebranded as “pro-life.” Has gone.
Historically, horror has always been a kind of cultural seismometer, sensitive to jolts of social fear, but rarely has it displayed its metaphors with such blunt-force shock. In view of the reversal of roe vs wade In 2022, Hollywood horror writers have sharpened their knives and confronted them with a harsh truth: that to inhabit a woman’s body is to be in perpetual danger. The films born out of this political shock strip away the soft-centered glow of motherhood and expose forced reproduction and institutionalized misogyny under the guise of moral virtue.
Pregnancy as a genre villain
Pregnancy has always been fertile ground for fear. The body, colonized by another entity, changes in uncontrolled and often horrific ways – a metaphor so powerful that it has given rise to everything rosemary’s baby To win the Palme d’Or titanIndeed, Julia Ducournau, Director titanhas talked about this “violence that is inside women” – a unique anger that is channeled only through horror.
Take NirmalFor example. The story follows a devout young woman who enters a convent and finds herself mysteriously pregnant with a genetically engineered messiah. His reservations, his aspirations, his humanity – none of it matters. He is treated as communal property, his autonomy subsumed under the weight of divine purpose. Her pregnancy is painful: clumps of hair are falling out, teeth are falling out, her womb is a battlefield of divine proportions. It’s a miracle, okay – a miracle that she doesn’t completely lose her mind.
then there is first omenA prequel to the 1976 classic that feels more like a class-action lawsuit against the Vatican than an original story. Before the sinister Damien comes into existence, the origins of the Antichrist are found in a nunnery where women are ‘voluntarily’ groomed into immaculate conceptions for apocalyptic purposes (a less subtle one). maid story In different ways). However, the real terror is not his hellfire; These have troubling parallels with contemporary policies that make women’s bodies feel like property of the state in all but name.
Meanwhile, in Alien: RomulusThe franchise’s long-standing body-horror metaphor for sexual violence has reached horrific new lows. One scene sees the infamous facehugger make its terrifying return, leaving a crew member pleading desperately for his life as an alien fetus tears apart his ribs. What was once a symbol of cosmic terror has now morphed into something uncomfortably terrestrial – a searing indictment of reproductive coercion and systemic indifference to women’s suffering.
What makes this wave of feminist terror so intense is its complete refusal to sugar-coat it. Once steeped in glowing idealism, the idea of ​​pregnancy is now revealed to be pure, pure nightmare fuel, and this year’s offerings go straight for the throat (or rather the cervix). Women’s bodies are invaded, their autonomy taken away, their fear fueled by men who treat them as nothing more than walking wombs borrowed from patriarchy.
Birth itself is presented as a brutal, blood-soaked ordeal that reminds us how society happily swindles women, whether it’s of labor, of life, or of agency. When laws restricting bodily autonomy have reached dystopian levels of cruelty, and decisions about women’s bodies are debated by a toxic (and predominantly male) social media rhetoric, terror is now a very Causing real anger.
Hollywood’s new monsters: women on the brink
For decades, horror has flirted with the taboo of women’s suffering—using it, exploiting it, even reveling in its fetishized glory. But in 2024, a coup takes place to regain control of these territories, and Coralie Farguet’s Cannes-winning Substance This could be the apex of the movement.
The surreal fever dream follows Elizabeth, a washed-up TV star played by Demi Moore, who injects her with a black-market drug that promises to make her “the best version of herself.” What emerges is Margaret Qualley’s Sue, an Instagram-perfect lookalike of Elizabeth, who immediately begins destroying her creator’s life.
The horror here lies less in gore (though it’s as stomach-churning as anything David Cronenberg ever concocted) and more in existential despair. Elizabeth’s real battle here is against the internalized misogyny that has taught her to equate aging with irrelevance.
Fargate’s sharp dissection of Hollywood’s ‘Hagsploitation’ is unmistakably prescient, as the “your body, my choice” rhetoric of provocateurs like Nick Fuentes claws its way into relevance. sleazeball guy inside Substance are disgustingly accurate embodiments of the industry, but the film’s real villain is far more insidious: a system designed to pit women against each other, reducing them to walking wombs or decorative appearances. .
The personal is political – and frightening
Of course, this calculation extends far beyond imagination. Films like these are tearing apart the cultural fabric, exposing the hateful myths that have long been weaponized against women. Elizabeth Sankey’s documentary witchesFor example, it explores society’s age-old terror of “monstrous” women, from witch trials to the stigma surrounding postpartum mental health. It’s no accident that this year’s horror offerings feel like spiritual cousins ​​to Sankey’s work – they’re all trotting out the same tangled mess of fear, control, and simmering rage.
But what’s most shocking is that a genre that has long been accused of exploiting women’s pain has become their fiercest defender. In a year marked by reactionary politics seeking to destroy hard-won rights, the genre has unexpectedly become an important area of ​​resistance. The Last Girls of yesteryear have traded their chainsaws for righteous anger, fighting not just for survival but for agency. By confronting the realities of being a woman, these films are doing more than reflecting these universal concerns — they’re demanding that we reckon with them.
Kurt Vonnegut famously said, “Artists are the canaries in the coal mine.” The monsters of 2024 aren’t hiding under the bed or lurking after dark; They are in the headlines, in the legislature, and, often, in the mirror. And we have several notable canaries that continue to sound the alarm on the possibility that the real horror has only just begun.
published – November 29, 2024 08:30 AM IST
