Theme: Pregnancy Horrors

Pregnancy Horrors are stories about malevolent pregnancies and/or births. This is a genre that specifically plays on women’s fears of gynaecological horrors.

The genre began with Village of the Damned (1960) in which women of a village all go to sleep and awaken pregnant and give birth to alien children. The work that popularised the genre was Rosemary’s Baby (1968) in which Mia Farrow is certain that the child she is pregnant with was fathered by The Devil. A great many films followed in which the child is satanic, mutant or alien in origin. Another version is of the heroine sought by a Devil Worship cult in order to impregnate.

Another variant on the theme is where a pregnant women is abducted and imprisoned, or is imprisoned to be impregnated. There are also some films about the attempts to snatch foetuses from the womb. The Alien Abduction film features a number of cases where women are impregnated after being abducted by UFOs.