The Brood (1979)

The Brood arrives at the tasting table as a 1979 Canadian body horror picture, written and directed by David Cronenberg in the bitter aftermath of his own divorce. It concerns a man, his institutionalized ex-wife, a psychotherapist with unconventional methods, and a brood of parthenogenetically born dwarf children who bludgeon grandparents and schoolteachers to death with mallets. Cronenberg considered it his most classic horror film, a claim we can accept without reservation, provided we understand classic to mean unpleasant and profitable.

On the matter of contemporary social consciousness, the vintage is thin. The cast is uniformly white, the relationships uniformly heterosexual, and the psychology on offer treats mental illness as a wellspring of monstrosity, not an identity to be affirmed. Race does not appear. Climate does not appear. Capital does not appear. The body is a site of wheals, lesions, external wombs, and other departures from the standard arrangement, which places the film at some distance from the body positivity movement. Nobody lectures us about anything. The creatures simply arrive, and people die.

What scholarship has found here, and it has looked hard, is a woman's rage, motherhood, and the monstrous feminine. Barbara Creed reads Nola's births as a demonstration of the horrors of unbridled maternal power. Robin Wood read the whole affair as reactionary. Carrie Rickey defended it on the grounds that the women are not bad, merely drawn that way by male scientists. We note the debate and record it as a faint trace of feminist interest, present in the criticism more than in the text. The dialogue does spend some minutes explaining psychoplasmics, but it explains a fictional therapy, not a social grievance. We score accordingly, and we move on to the next bottle.