[COLUMN] This Year, There's Nothing Scarier Than Pregnancy | by Darren Mooney

Note: This piece contains spoilers for Alien: Romulus, Cuckoo, The First Omen and Immaculate.

Earlier this year, the twinned releases of Michael Mohan’s Immaculate and Arkasha Stevenson’s The First Omen suggested that something was stirring in the collective unconscious. After all, two movies about nuns investigating a sinister conspiracy within the church to birth a monstrous creature released within weeks of one another? It recalls the dueling disaster movies of 1997 – Volcano and Dante’s Peak – or the paired asteroid films of 1998 – Deep Impact and Armageddon.

While an outside observer might suggest that these mirrored releases are simply “copying” one another, movies take a long time to get made. More than that, no major studio actively wants to be seen as a copycat or as a thief. As a result, most of these projects originate independently from one another, albeit as products of the same cultural stew. Two different studios might commission two different movies with similar ideas, because they are responding to the same larger trends.

Immaculate and The First Omen would make an interesting pairing on their own, but they are even more interesting in the context of two late-summer films that came out in quick succession: Fede Álvarez’s Alien: Romulus and Tilman Singer’s Cuckoo. Released within weeks of one another, these are both horror movies about alien species propagating themselves through human pregnancy at the behest of a sinister conspiracy. There is clearly something rippling through modern horror.

Immaculate follows a young novice named Sister Cecelia (Sydney Sweeney), who travels to a remote covenant in Italy to take care of older and dying nuns. Despite the fact that she is a virgin, Cecelia soon discovers that she is pregnant. It turns out that Father Sal Tedeschi (Álvaro Morte) is a former geneticist who has used DNA recovered from the nail that bound Christ to the cross to clone the messiah. He has been experimenting on women for years, seeking to birth a new Messiah.

As the title implies, The First Omen is a prequel to the Omen film franchise. Like Immaculate, it is focused on a young nun, Sister Margaret (Nell Tiger Free), who is dispatched to work in an orphanage in Rome. While there, she uncovers a scheme by a rogue faction of the Catholic Church to breed the Antichrist in hopes of driving an increasing secular population back to religion. Again, like Immaculate, women’s bodies are treated like resources to be exploited to this end.

Both Immaculate and The First Omen owe a lot to Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby, the story of a young pregnant woman (Mia Farrow) who finds herself at the center of a Satanic conspiracy. “Rosemary's Baby was definitely one of our biggest inspirations,” explained star and producer Sydney Sweeney of Immaculate. “It was a part of our pitch deck the entire time.” The production team on The First Omen have also acknowledged Rosemary’s Baby as a significant influence.

Incidentally, Natalie Erika James is currently working on Apartment 7A, a prequel to Rosemary's Baby, that is due to release on Paramount+ later this year. The original film was released in 1968, and – in the words of Paul Thomas – is perhaps best understood “against the backdrop of the 1960s cultural revolution and the struggle for reproductive rights.” It was released the same year that Pope Paul VI issued the Humanae Vitae, an encyclical letter arguing that abortion should be “absolutely excluded as lawful means of regulating the number of children.”

The reproductive horrors in Cuckoo and Alien: Romulus are less religious in nature than those presented in Immaculate or The First Omen. In both Cuckoo and Alien: Romulus, the idea of a forced conception and birth is explored through a pseudo-scientific lens, as the grotesque propagation of an endangered species. However, the subtext of these movies undoubtedly resonates with the imagery and themes of both Immaculate and The First Omen.

The Alien franchise has always been an extended metaphor for sexual trauma. In the words of franchise co-creator Dan O’Bannon, the original Alien was built around confronting the male audience with the horrors of sexual violence, boasting, “I am going to put in every image I can think of to make the men in the audience cross their legs. Homosexual oral rape, birth. The thing lays its eggs down your throat, the whole number.”

One of the more interesting aspects of Romulus is that director Fede Álvarez focuses the violence on the female cast members. While male cast members Tyler (Archie Renaux) and Bjorn (Spike Fearn) are trapped in a room with a host of facehuggers, the first member of the cast to be forcibly impregnated by a facehugger is Bjorn’s girlfriend, Navarro (Aileen Wu). Tyler’s pregnant sister, Kay (Isabela Merced), is abducted by the creature and injects herself with goo from Prometheus.

While a pregnant character (Victoria Bidwell) is attacked by a facehugger in Alien vs. Predator: Requiem, this is the first time that – allowing for the Alien Queen in Alien: Resurrection – the mainline Alien franchise has concerned itself so explicitly with traditional pregnancy. Kay’s pregnancy is accelerated by the mysterious compound, and she births a monstrous alien-human-Engineer hybrid (Robert Bobroczkyi) that kills her. She even begins lactating toxic compounds.

Cuckoo focuses on Gretchen (Hunter Schafer), a teenager who moves to a remote Alpine retreat overseen by Herr König (Dan Stevens). She starts noticing women walking around the compound, feeling disoriented and nauseous. It turns out that König has discovered a rare human-like creature that needs to implant its eggs in human women to perpetuate its species, with those women who survive carrying the monster’s offspring to term, completely unknowing.

As such, Immaculate, The First Omen, Cuckoo and Alien: Romulus are all horror movies about pregnancy, in which women are not allowed to assert bodily autonomy. They are quite explicit in their imagery. One of the most evocative shots in The First Omen finds a demonic hand reaching out from a pregnant woman’s vagina, while the fully-grown alien in Romulus emerges from perhaps the most vaginal cocoon in the franchise’s long history, resembling a crowning.

In most cases, these conspiracies are orchestrated by men like König and patriarchal organizations like the Church. Even in Romulus, the compound that Kay injects was manufactured by Weyland-Yutani. In Romulus, the company is represented by Rook (Ian Holm), an synthetic who resembles Ash (also Holm), the android that attempted to murder Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) by shoving a rolled up pornographic magazine down her throat in Alien.

Much like Rosemary’s Baby was a product of the 1960s, these films are all products of their cultural moment. In 2022, the Supreme Court overturned the landmark decision Roe v. Wade from 1973, which had enshrined a national right to abortion. In Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, the Supreme Court overruled decades of American jurisprudence, allowing individual states to enact their own bans on abortion. It was a seismic cultural moment.

The Dobbs decision had a profound effect on American culture and politics. It was a decisive issue in the 2022 midterms and it could be a major factor in the 2024 election. The Supreme Court ruling pushed abortion and reproductive rights back into the national conversation, with polling suggesting that support for abortion has actually increased among the American population in the wake of the decision. It makes sense that this would bleed through into pop culture – particularly horror cinema.

Arkasha Stevenson has acknowledged that Dobbs was on her mind while developing The First Omen. “We were in Texas at the time and we pitched when the six-week ban was passed,” she admits. “Yeah, that was a big motivation.” Sweeney and Mohan have been a bit cagier when asked about the connection to Immaculate, with Mohan stating, “I don't want the film to be perceived as a message movie and then not reach the people who need to hear it.”

The religious subtext of both Immaculate and The First Omen makes sense. After all, much of the anti-abortion movement is tied up in the American Christian Right. However, there is something more specific to this cultural moment in how both Cuckoo and Alien: Romulus approach the theme of forced birth through the lens of eugenics and species propagation. In Romulus, Rook is obsessed with breeding a “perfect organism.” In Cuckoo, König is trying to save a species from extinction.

Much of the modern anti-abortion movement is tied up in racialized fears about shifting demographics, the belief that the fact that white Americans are having fewer children represents an existential threat to American identity. This is one facet of “the great replacement” conspiracy theory, the belief that certain racialized cultural values are norms will be lost if women are not forced to produce children to sustain the population.

This is why Congresswoman Mary Miller described Dodd as a “historic victory for white life” and Senator Steve Erdman argued abortion bans were a remedy for the fact that Nebraska’s “population has not grown except by those foreigners who have moved here or refugees who have been placed here.” Matt Schlapp, head of the Conservative Political Action Conference, laid out the horrific logic:  “If you say there is a population problem in a country, but you’re killing millions of your own people through legalized abortion every year, if that were to be reduced, some of that problem is solved.”

Indeed, even the title of Cuckoo feels charged in this moment. The political right is obsessed with the noun and verb “cuck”, from “cuckolding”, which shares an etymology with the cuckoo. “Cuck” is the perfect storm of these overtly sexual and often sublimated racial anxieties, a fear of a particular form of emasculation in which a man is displaced in his relationship and home by an outsider. It is a psychosexual expression of the political battles being waged over women’s bodies.

Immaculate, The First Omen, Cuckoo and Alien: Romulus are not literally about abortion rights. The word “abortion” is not explicitly stated in any of the four films. (That said, it is broached in The First Omen. Discovering her role in the conspiracy, Margaret states, “If I am pregnant, then I need it out of me – I need it out of me now.”) However, the power of horror lies in its ability to tap into simmering unconscious fears and to give them expression in abstract, unsettling and emotional ways.

In that sense, Immaculate, The First Omen, Cuckoo and Alien: Romulus are very modern American nightmares.