After last week’s very serious post
about empathy and children, I have been thinking more about my absolute
inability to ‘curate my viewing’, as my friend Ben put it, in the light of
impending/new maternity. If you had asked me a year ago which films should be
avoided in this psychologically delicate state, I would have got as far as
‘Rosemary’s Baby’, and that’s about it. I’m not a horror nerd, although I do
like horror films, and I am sure there are several involving pregnancy and
babies, but they had not crossed my path. Children, sure – The Shining, Don’t Look Now, even
things like The Woman in Blackand The Others. But not necessarily babies.
What follows is a list of films I have watched
recently that seemed, as per the previous post, to be SPEAKING DIRECTLY TO ME,
and which I almost immediately wished I hadn’t seen. Massive spoilers ahead.
The Witch
Have you ever considered the answer to the
question, ‘how can we make breastfeeding frightening’? Robert Eggers has. I
knew from the trailer that his New England nightmare featured a disappeared
baby, but I had forgotten this fact when I sat down to watch it with my mum in
March. In it, the baby (who has indeed disappeared / been snatched using some
nefarious magic) appears to his mother in a dream sequence. She is nursing him,
staring down at his adoring face while he lies contentedly at her breast. And
then reality is revealed and we are left with an image of the woman sitting
alone, staring dreamily into the distance as a GIANT BLACK CROW PECKS AT HER
BOOB. OH MY GOD. I think I was literally breast feeding Maggie as I watched
this film (don’t judge me, my health visitor says they are ‘incorruptible’
until they are one), and it nearly gave me a hernia. So visceral and so
horrible (but also pretty great).
The Babadook
This is primarily a film about being a mother. She
is raising her son, who is quirky and charming but also hugely petulant and
disobedient, in the wake of her husband’s sudden death. It is, as far as I can
see it, an allegory for the fear we have deep within ourselves that we might
end up hating our children; trapped in a domestic cage with a screaming toddler
we might suddenly turn into the monster we teach them to fear. It is also about
the fear that you might lose your partner and be left a single mother
overnight, overwhelmed by grief and loneliness. Possibly it is about psychosis,
possibly it is about the supernatural, but deep down I think it is about the
female capacity for violence and the debunking of the notion that maternalism
is some kind of subdued, lifelong anti-anger state. It has some pretty shonky
animation which you’ll either love or loathe (I kind of loved it, but I wonder
if that’s because it diminished the fear factor). I watched it before M was
born and I thought it was brilliant, but it also pointed to a fear of different
potential futures which I hadn’t really considered before. And the scene with
the boy on the climbing frame made me want to push him off – leading me to feel
like A Bad Person.
Under the Shadow
When I was a child I used to occasionally have
responsibility nightmares about having to take care of my younger sisters. In
one, I had to drive a car because a psychotic man (who was also our Primary
School headteacher – sorry Mr. P) had broken into our house. We were in the
garage with the car running, but I didn’t know how to drive. This is exactly
the feeling of impotent horror that I felt watching the absolutely amazing
‘Under the Shadow’, which is about a mother and her daughter trapped in a block
of flats in Tehran. They are being terrorized by a djin, during/representing
the ‘War of the Cities’ air raids carried out by Iraq in the 1980s. Again, it
is a story of a woman left by a man (her husband has to leave the apartment to
go and fight): she is trapped in a domestic space and her sole responsibility
is to protect her daughter from an insidious, invisible evil. It is fabulous
and, for a new mother, it is also terrifying. And when I watched it it made me
jump out of my skin, and I swear it also made M (still in utero at this point)
jump too.
The Harrowing (actually an episode of Inside No. 9)
This isn’t a film, it’s a TV show, and I only
watched it a couple of days ago. It has made the list because, despite being
funny and a bit silly, it really upset me – possibly more than anything else on
this list. Again, it was something to do with the strange appropriateness of
what I was watching vis a vis what I was doing. It is (like so many Shearsmith
/ Pemberton stories) a grotesque and deeply eccentric tale about an elderly man
living in the top of an old house who has been possessed by a demon. His
brother and sister recruit an unwitting teenage girl to come to the house and
be possessed by the demon in his stead, in order that he might not escape and
run amok when the old man dies. Two things about it made my skin crawl:
firstly, the demon is fed on formula milk and rusks. There is a scene in which
a girl holds the bottle while he suckles on it contentedly, looking up at her
with big eyes. It is so gross, possibly because my recent days have been spent
doing exactly that with M and the parallel is too much. Secondly, in order to
allow the demon to enter the girl they give her an epidural and explain that
‘it’s like giving birth, but the way around’. ARRRRGHHHHHH. and AAAARRGGGHHH
again.
I don’t know why I do it to myself.
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