31 DAYS OF HORROR SCENES THAT STICK. DAY 28: THE BROOD

“MOMMIE DEAREST”

The covert and overt fear over motherhood are part of what lies at the core of the horror in David Cronenberg’s “The Brood”. The power (both physically and mentally) inherent in motherhood, and given over by a patriarchal society in which men are conditioned to believe that the job of rearing children is largely that of a woman's - never mind the unconscious fear of a woman who can create children independent of a man - are seated in the foundation of both the biological and psychological horror on display.  That Cronenberg wrote this film while still grappling with still raw emotions over a rough divorce is also germane, and an alternative reading of Cronenberg’s film finds it an “emotionally realistic horror movie about the collateral damage of divorce “ something I wholly agree with, while adding that considering the narrative allegiances he forms with the characters (especially Frank Carveth) and subconscious fears apparent in the writing it is apparent with whom Cronenberg most wants the audience to side with, or at least whose side he’s on. It's in the visual representation of a child almost literally bring clawed at and torn by the children of a Mother’s Rage. And in the recycling of a time honored tradition of men that holds that women often use children as bartering chips to keep a man in their life. As well as the subtle if not overt demonization of a woman (Frank’s wife Nola) who is being held prisoner in a cabin with every form of contact with the outside world regulated,  or restricted by the combined efforts of her husband and the veritable Dr Frankenstein of this wellness center Hal Raglan while he performs a very ethically questionable form of therapy on her.  But this is the terror of the film, the horror in the film again, in my opinion is rooted in Motherhood.

Since the film never seeks to acknowledge in any meaningful way the mothers own connection to her child, the horror she might feel being isolated by this mad therapist, or simply who she is beyond her trauma, and illness then in many ways she becomes not so much different than the Xenomorph queen in James Cameron’s “Aliens”. As a matter of fact she is referred to as the “Queen Bee” by a disgruntled former resident of the institute. Devoid of any real character development she is simply queen of a hive. Walled off from the world not only the fictional setting, but even from us the audience. She is the avatar of a complex combination of the inferiority, abandonment , and impotency linked with motherhood and pregnancy independent of male interference, and translated as horror.

End of The Brood

We are meant to be repulsed as Frank is - and that repulsion stems not only from the physically grotesque nature of the birth, or her almost ravenous licking of the blood off her child, but on a deeper level from this womans asexual ability to reproduce. I do not mean all of this to be a repudiation of the film (The Brood is a classic in my opinion, and not all good horror possesses messages good messaging), but rather to examine what is at the root of my own and (I suspect others) horror in this film, and in this scene which is one of the most memorable in Horror if you have seen it. What Cronenberg accomplishes here can and will be looked at as either subversive, or complaint in upholding horrors tradition of torturing, reducing, and (though maybe not in this case) objectifying its women. For me it is mostly the latter which in some strange way cements the horror of the scene and the film as effectively repulsive in more ways than one.