Nights of Horror: birth/rebirth (2023)

Early this morning while driving a funeral coach through a torrential downpour, I asked my work superior if she had any deep fears. She said she was afraid of death, and when I asked her to elaborate, she said it was mostly fear of missing out on the lives of the people she loves. She didn’t want to miss milestones, and more importantly, she didn’t want her kids to need her and then not be there.

I had been thinking about the things that really fuck with me, in the horror genre. I read a lot of books, listen to a lot of anthology podcasts, all in the quest to make my skin crawl. One of the things that hits me the quickest is a shattered illusion of safety. For example, in the scene when Dr. Sattler is trying to escape a velociraptor after restoring power to Jurassic Park, she backs into Mr. Arnold’s big strong arm that drops onto her, draping over her shoulders as she melts with relief. That relief turns to terror when that arm drops to the ground, bereft of a body, and she realizes she is not saved, and is still being pursued by a bloodthirsty and clever murder lizard.

I’m also haunted by that scene in The Gate where the kids open the door thinking it’s the one kid’s parents, only for the parents’ faces to melt into horrifying demons. I love the fake out of “you’re safe! NOT!”

I’ve been wanting to explore the fears rooted in places and people that are supposed to provide safety and security, and the first titles that jumped out at me were all set in and around the healthcare field. Whether these stories are set in hospitals or center on those in the medical profession, I think they all contribute to The Discourse™  on bodily autonomy, identity, personal agency, illness, experimentation, and gaslighting.

First up this week I am covering “birth/rebirth.” I watched this movie in the theatre the day after it premiered, in a weird moment of serendipity. I’d read a tiny blurb about it in Rue Morgue, forgotten the title, and when I had a moment to myself and desperately needed to have some popcorn (I don’t have a microwave, so popcorn is my special treat I only have at the cinema. It’s a lifehack.) so I looked up the small theatre near my new place and they had a bunch of bullshit…. and this. It literally happened because I saw the poster art and said “Oh that looks like horror.”

I was alone in the audience save for a single dude that sat directly behind me. On one hand, I could apologize for taking notes during the movie, on the other hand, maybe don’t sit directly behind a woman in an empty theatre. We did not speak. Not even when it was over.

The opening scene is a chilling one, putting us in the position of an unseen woman struggling to breathe during an emergency c-section. The surgeons are cutting, and the nurse is saying “The baby’s going to be fine.” The woman asks in terror, “What about me?” The nurse asks her to repeat herself, and she does, but receives no answer, as her baby is removed from her body and she dies on the table.

This movie is, at its core, about motherhood, and the sacrifices mothers make for their children. From their own bodies to their ambitions, from their every waking moments to their very rights to life, the sacrificial mother is on full display in this modern reimagining of Frankenstein.

Rose is a pathologist at a hospital who routinely brings a very large suitcase to and from her lab, jacks off strangers in public restrooms to harvest their semen, and artificially inseminates herself in order to become pregnant, induce miscarriages, and use the stem cells from her embryos in her research. She’s working on something.

Celie is a labor and delivery nurse whose life outside the hospital revolves around her young daughter Lila, herself a product of in vitro fertilization. She is a single mom who relies on the community of women around her to help mother her child as she helps and comforts the new mothers in her workplace. The guilt she feels when she’s too worn out to give her own kid attention is palpable, and the relief she experiences one day when her phone doesn’t ring all day… I just gotta say it’s relatable. I don’t know anyone who hasn’t felt that relief pull a jarring 180 when they realize their phone has been dead for several hours.

But when Celie realizes this, and finds several voicemails and texts from the neighbor who was babysitting Lila, trying to get ahold of her all day as Lila started out mildly ill, then needed to go to the hospital, then died suddenly of bacterial meningitis in the very hospital where Celie was working, delivering babies all day.  

Celie’s immeasurable grief turns to panic when the paperwork is botched and she can’t locate the body of her daughter, which was transferred to pathology. And then sent to the medical examiner. But the body allegedly never made it to the medical examiner.

“Tell her bodies go missing all the time,” the highly autistic-coded Rose snaps at a colleague before slipping out a side door. (As someone in the business…. They don’t. When they do, it’s national news.)

Eventually Celie tracks the pathologist down and discovers not only did Rose steal Lila’s corpse, but that Lila is alive, reanimated, and resting in Rose’s apartment, which includes a pig called Muriel. Muriel the pig was the first successful reanimation, and regularly receives special injections of a stem cell concoction derived from the amniotic fluid surrounding fetal pigs still in their sacs.

Celie is surprisingly cool about all this. She immediately drops her life and moves into Rose’s place to trade off giving around the clock care to Lila, who isn’t awake or speaking yet, but is definitely alive, and being kept alive by Rose’s personal harvests. Though Lila was born of Celie, it’s Rose’s prenatal blood keeping her alive. She’s a zombie with two mommies, who have wildly different bedside manners.

They settle into this odd couple existence, even becoming friends. Rose smiles for the first time in the movie when Celie texts her a picture of starfish Lila had drawn back when she was alive, harkening back to a story Rose had told about dissecting starfish as a kid. It’s a great parallel to another scene from earlier, where Rose had scoffed at a colleague dropping everything to go to help his kid after he gets an emergency text. Her heart is warmed by the kid she helped make, how bout that.

Unfortunately, you can only induce so many miscarriages before you collapse and wake up in the ICU after an emergency hysterectomy that you didn’t and couldn’t consent to. So we need to find a new source of cells, both women agree, anything for Lila, who admittedly IS improving. She’s… different… but she’s awake. And she likes watching her lil show. It looks like she likes it. Did she say something? No? We only have so much serum left.

Enter Emily, a pregnant woman in her 40s who has had trouble conceiving and carrying. She also happens to be a match for Lila’s blood type. A perfect candidate for Celie to take extra special care and perform frequent amniocentesis procedures, just to make sure everything is tiptop, except it isn’t tiptop, the tests were inconclusive and we need another sample.

This arrangement isn’t ideal, or nearly what it needs to be, but it just barely keeps Lila alive throughout Emily’s pregnancy. But that due date is coming fast.

This reinvention of Frankenstein is especially interesting, since the original was borne (heh) of Mary Shelley’s traumatic miscarriages and infant loss informing her storytelling. Victor Frankenstein was consumed by the idea of creating life, when theoretically most women can do that anytime, naturally. Sometimes (often) by accident! Rose, our stand-in for Victor, routinely creates life in her own body (living cells aren’t necessarily a baby and I’ll stand on that hill) and uses it to reanimate the dead. (Imagine if this woman had funding. She’d be unstoppable.)

Through Celie’s settling into Rose’s life, we learn that Rose once had a brilliant mother who tragically succumbed to Parkinson’s after not responding to years of experimental treatment. The attempted reanimation of her corpse (in the very bed upon which Lila lies) was not successful. Obviously. (Sidebar, the pig is named Muriel after Rose’s mother.) This loss is what drives Rose’s obsession, though she’s grown increasingly attached to Celie and Lila the more time they spend as a family unit.

The shifting of personalities between these two mothers becomes apparent when they begin to depend on Emily’s amniotic fluid, doing whatever it takes to get it. As much as Rose has been willing to go through herself for the sake of this scientific breakthrough, what Celie is willing to do to another person is nothing short of monstrous.

I listened to an interview with the director, Laura Moss, who co-wrote the movie with their ex-spouse Brendan J. O’Brien. This was their first full-length feature, and it came about through several try-outs to get into a mentorship program with the Sundance festival. That interview was on the No Film School Podcast and it was nothing short of inspiring. Laura revealed that the original genesis of the story began with a series of journal entries written from the perspective of a woman in jail, justifying her position in stealing a child’s dead body and reanimating it without the mother’s consent.  

The moral grey area of this movie is so worth exploring, and I’ve spent a lot of time unpacking it myself. What would you do if it was your loved one, and you knew it was possible, as long as you were willing to reduce other people to means to an end? Even if your loved one might never be the same again, even if they might come back a monster, would you try? And what kind of monster would that make you?

From the heart-wrenching performances of all four leads, to the masterful editing and sound design, to the grounded in reality all-too-possible science, I highly recommend this movie and I hope more of my friends see it so we can talk about it. I think it’s a masterpiece and a prime indicator that we’re in a golden age of horror, and I truly can’t wait to see what Laura Moss does next.