Fear of the feminine in David Cronenberg’s The… | Little White Lies

In Praise Of

Fear of the fem­i­nine in David Cronenberg’s The Brood

26 May 2019

Words by Millicent Thomas

A woman in a white robe holds a red rose, set against a wooden background.
A woman in a white robe holds a red rose, set against a wooden background.
In the director’s 1979 body hor­ror, mater­nal func­tions are a source of repul­sion and terror.

When we think of our moth­ers, we may think of love and care, and yet cin­e­ma is obsessed with the exact oppo­site. The hor­ror genre has always been fas­ci­nat­ed with the ter­ri­fy­ing dys­func­tion­al, and from Nor­ma Bates to Mar­garet White, cin­e­ma always comes back to its moth­ers. But it is soci­ety and its fear of the fem­i­nine that cre­ates this mon­strous fig­ure we’ve come to know.

For cen­turies, in both lit­er­a­ture and visu­al media, hor­ror has drawn con­no­ta­tions between fem­i­nin­i­ty and the dev­il; dur­ing renais­sance times the uterus was often drawn with horns. In David Cronenberg’s 1979 body hor­ror The Brood, the womb is exact­ly what the audi­ence fears. In the film, Nola Carveth (Saman­tha Eggar) is iso­lat­ed in cult-like exper­i­men­tal ther­a­py called psy­choplas­mics’ at the remote Somafree Institute.

With the help of acclaimed Doc­tor Hal Raglan (Oliv­er Reed), she is taught to deal with her anger and child­hood demons. Raglan’s meth­ods of psy­chother­a­py result in the patient’s sub­con­scious anx­i­eties man­i­fest­ing on their phys­i­cal bod­ies. For some patients, it shows in sores and boils, for Nola it’s an exter­nal womb which forms on the side of her stom­ach, and unset­tling crea­tures are born from her rage.

As part of her ther­a­py, Raglan for­bids Nola’s hus­band Frank (Art Hin­dle) from vis­it­ing, but insists on week­end vis­its from their five-year-old daugh­ter Can­dy. After Can­dy comes home one week­end cov­ered in bruis­es, Frank sus­pects she is no longer safe with her moth­er and begins to inves­ti­gate the insti­tute in a bid to dis­cred­it them and gain sole cus­tody. It’s when Frank seeks to take Can­dy from Nola that the mur­ders begin.

Cronenberg’s crea­tures are hard to for­get, and the child­like brood’ crea­tures are no excep­tion. In the film, Nola’s anger has been birthing itself from her exo-womb and act­ing on her uncon­scious desires. There is now a whole class of dwarf clones clad in bright­ly coloured ski suits wreak­ing hav­oc and killing any­thing that caus­es her stress. When one sud­den­ly dies, dur­ing autop­sy a doc­tor remarks that the crea­ture seems unformed.’ It has no teeth, gen­i­tals, or most sur­pris­ing to them, a navel. This thing’ was nev­er real­ly born at all.

The inter­est­ing grey area here is that it was, but it was of woman alone. The idea that a woman can per­tain gen­er­a­tive pow­ers with­out a man is what becomes the source of ter­ror. Fem­i­nin­i­ty and moth­er­hood in hor­ror are framed as some­thing to be feared, a dis­ease passed down through gen­er­a­tions, what sem­i­nal gen­der the­o­rist Bar­bara Creed called the dis­ease of being female”. In The Brood, female’ is an abject crea­ture con­trolled com­plete­ly by its emo­tions and repro­duc­tive functions.

Men per­ceive women to be the bear­ers of chil­dren, the source of the mir­a­cle of life’, but they are simul­ta­ne­ous­ly repulsed by the very nature of the fem­i­nine: the blood, the birth and all that comes with mater­nal func­tion. Nola chal­lenges this in the film’s shock­ing final act. When con­front­ed by Frank, who has come to retrieve Can­dy from the brood, she asks if he is ready to love her. Frank needs to keep Nola calm, if she becomes angry or upset the brood will kill Can­dy, so he tells her yes.

She is cau­tious of his answer and decides to test his love; in a mem­o­rable and grue­some scene Nola lifts up her white gown to reveal a ter­ri­fy­ing exo-womb on her stom­ach. Lean­ing for­ward to bite into it, she unveils a small mutant foe­tus and licks it clean of its birthing gore like a wild ani­mal. She sees Frank recoil in revul­sion and her fears are con­firmed – You lie,” she exclaims, I dis­gust you!”

The gen­er­a­tive pow­er of woman has been the source of hor­ror in sto­ries for cen­turies, and film is yet anoth­er chan­nel to express that. The films of Cro­nen­berg, par­tic­u­lar­ly The Brood, are of a genre that exam­ines these fears – ones that are sub­con­scious and unknown until we’re shown them – in glo­ri­ous­ly unsub­tle metaphors that are hard to for­get, even 40 years later.

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