The human body is capable of
doing amazing things, but they are often pretty disturbing. Such is the case
with pregnancy and childbirth. Because bearing children is such an important
part of life, it’s also a frequent subject of many, many stories. Sometimes,
the arrival of a new baby serves as the blessed beginning or happy ending to a
romance.
Other times, the vulnerability
and absurdity associated with the birthing process make it great fodder for
gross-out comedy. In the majority of those cases, birth is a plot point or a
joke, and a realistic depiction of the process is rarely the goal. Water
breaks, women scream, then in the next scene, they’re dewy-faced and holding a
far-too-clean newborn.
Some movies aren’t afraid to
show childbirth in all its protracted pain, high risk, and natural gore,
though. Maybe because of the inherent stakes and shock value, pregnancy and
delivery often serve as climactic moments in dramas, thrillers, and even
supernatural horror and science fiction films.
Cinematic births can be
difficult to sit through for a number of reasons. Some are too realistic for
comfort. Some pervert the phenomenon for over-the-top or out-of-this-world
purposes. And, as is reflected in real life, sometimes the outcome of a
birth-gone-wrong is worse than all the contracting and pushing could ever be.
Here’s a look at some of the most distressing births the big screen has to
offer so far.
A
Quiet Place
For most people, the ideal
birth scenario is a well-equipped hospital room or home setting with a doctor
or doula coaching the expectant mother through all the rhythmic breathing and
power-inducing grunts and groans. Once the baby’s born, its cries are a
relieving sign of vitality. Usually, though, there aren’t giant, ravenous
aliens called Death Angels lurking around every corner like what poor Evelyn
Abbott is up against in John Krasinski’s 2018 post-apocalyptic
horror “A Quiet Place.”
In the film, sightless aliens
with supersonic hearing hunt down anything that makes a sound. The Abbotts lose
one young son to a heartbreaking attack, and a year later, Evelyn is visibly
pregnant with their fourth child. The family has designed their entire lives
around the goal of keeping quiet (using sign language thanks in part to having
a deaf daughter), so Evelyn plans to manage any potential noisiness related to
her birthing process.
Things are worse than she
expects, though, when she suddenly goes into labor alone and steps on a rusty
nail. Screaming is a big no-no in “A Quiet Place,” so she has to keep
it together as she painfully climbs her way to the upstairs bathroom, her foot
bleeding and her cervix dilating all the while. Then, she has to deliver the
baby herself in a cruddy bathtub without making so much as a peep, as Death
Angels lurk nearby and listen intently for her to make a mistake. As soon as
the newborn wails, Evelyn retreats to a flooding basement where she has to hide
her baby in a box, then hide herself from the monsters and hope for the
best.
Apocalypto
2006’s “Apocalypto”
is a fraught but thrilling movie with an equally fraught but thrilling birth
scene near its conclusion. The movie was released shortly after writer-director
Mel Gibson’s infamous arrest for DUI, during which he infamously shouted
out some heinous anti-Semitic statements, and the reactions were mixed; some
consider the film a masterpiece, while others critiqued his culturally
inaccurate and overly bloodthirsty portrayal of his subject.
In the story, Jaguar Paw’s
tribe is raided by Zero Wolf’s tribe, who burns most of the village to the
ground, kills or captures the men, and leaves the few remaining children to
fend for themselves. Jaguar Paw’s father, the chief, is murdered and he’s taken
prisoner, but not before he can hide his pregnant wife Seven and their son
Turtles Run in a deep forest pit. Seven’s pregnancy is Chekhov’s baby, and
she’s stuck at the bottom of that pit for a long time before her husband can
fight his way to freedom and come back for her.
She starts having contractions
just as the waters from a heavy rainstorm begin to spill into her hidey-hole.
An incredibly stoic Seven gives birth standing up and holding firm to a tree
root, as she tries to keep her own head above water, with Turtles Run carefully
balanced on her shoulders. This is anything but a new-age water birth. Seven’s
baby comes into the world amongst violent waters and even more brutal violence
upon the land.
The
Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 1
In the first half of the
two-part adaptation of Stephenie Meyer’s “Breaking Dawn” Bella’s
pregnancy and resulting childbirth become the main storyline in “The
Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 1.” Now, pregnancy, labor, and delivery
are no walk in the park for anyone, but being knocked up with a vampire’s kid
makes everything much worse.
After Bella and Edward Cullen
marry, they have sex on their honeymoon, and — two weeks later — the new bride
suspects she might be pregnant. Since the father is a vampire, the fetus is
developing at twice the rate of a human baby.
Worse, the human-vampire
hybrid baby is likely to kill Bella, which leads to a standoff between Bella
and the vampires who think she should terminate and the werewolves who think
both mother and child should be killed to avoid a calamity. However, Bella
wants the child despite the fact that she’s pretty obviously dying — and she
has to drink blood to appease her growing bundle.
When Bella needs an emergency
C-section, it’s a ghastly scene as Edward performs the procedure and
the werewolf boy who still has feelings for her watches on. Jacob
considers killing the baby girl after the birth appears fatal for Bella,
but he accidentally “imprints” on the babe instead, marking her as
his future love interest.
Meanwhile, Edward turns Bella
into a vampire so she’ll survive after her heart eventually stops. At the end
of the whole strange, bloody affair, the Cullens are one big, happy family. But
the process of bringing baby Renesmee into the world is a disturbing one
indeed.
Children
of Men
Alfonso Cuarón’s critically
acclaimed 2006 film “Children of Men” is entirely about the birth of
one very important child. In this particular dystopian version of the year
2027, no babies have been born and survived for almost two decades. That’s
thrown the civilized world into chaos; few functional societies remain as
people panic and struggle to comprehend the coming extinction of the human
race.
Theo, a British government
employee, is kidnapped by an activist group run by his ex-wife Julian with whom
he shared a child named Dylan who died in an earlier pandemic. Julian tasks him
with finding a way to get a refugee named Kee to a supposedly safe group of
scientists known as the Human Project. They’re working to figure out what’s
behind mass infertility.
Kee is of use to them, it
turns out, because she is the only known pregnant woman on Earth, but that also
means there’s a bounty on her. Theo has to pull strings and watch his and Kee’s
back as various forces — the British military, revolutionaries and refugees,
mutineers in their own circle — conspire against them.
As their allies are picked off
one by one, Kee starts having contractions. Theo has to help her deliver the
baby in a dark room and in secret as a war breaks out on the other side of the
door. As if having a baby under those circumstances, isn’t stressful enough,
after she gives birth, Kee and her baby are almost immediately kidnapped. Theo
has to brave the gunfire between the fighting factions to get mother and child
to the vessel that’s come to rescue them, the Tomorrow.
