The bond between horror cinema and motherhood remains a central thread in the genre, shaping iconic works like The Devil’s Baby in 1968, The Exorcist in 1973, and Carrie in 1976. Pregnancy stands out as a particularly fertile theme for horror, inviting both visual symbolism around a pregnant body and a narrative pull toward threat. In many stories, the protagonist is pregnant but the plot focuses more on the shadow of danger around the unborn rather than on pregnancy itself. The fear is amplified by questions about what a mother carries or what might be happening inside the womb, and by vivid moments that move from deep trauma to unsettling physical changes. A notable example is Peaceful Place from 2018, where a protagonist must give birth alone and quietly in a bathtub so a sound-sensitive monster will not hear or discover her.
Pregnant and the engine of nightmares
There are also films that place pregnancy at the center, exploring fears tied directly to the act and experience of pregnancy. These fears can be internal, linked to physical, psychological, or emotional shifts, or external, arising from social structures and pressures. In recent years horror cinema and television have embraced this approach across both commercial heavyweights and independent works, continuing a trend that some still compare to the weight of Polanski’s classics. Examples from recent years include Mom directed by Darren Aronofsky in 2017, a pair of films like Prevent from 2016 and Swallow from 2019, and contemporary festival selections such as Nightmares from Norway in 2022 and Huese from Mexico in 2022. The director Michelle Garza Cervera also explores this terrain, shifting the focus from pregnancy as a concrete event to how a female protagonist’s pregnancy can illuminate class, mythmaking, mental health, and diverse family structures while highlighting vulnerability through physical sensations such as the creak of bones. In Garza Cervera’s work, the pregnancy becomes a lens to examine social constraints and personal resilience, rather than a simple plot device.
Contemporary horror cinema increasingly treats motherhood and pregnancy as fertile ground for storytelling. Projects on the topic proliferate in screenwriting labs and attract producers looking for new voices. A clear explanation remains elusive, but one prevailing theory is that this focus invites fresh perspectives from a new generation of creators, especially women, who want to revisit issues historically handled in limited ways. Themes like depression during and after pregnancy, anxiety about physical transformation, and doubts about social structures recur across films and series. In discussing these themes, one filmmaker notes that the obsession with the nuclear family and the fear of following a traditional path still drives much of the conversation. The implication is a wish to interrogate family models, female roles, and maternal instincts in bold new ways, rather than repeating old tropes.
As Garza Cervera explains, a shift away from the notion that pregnancy is an inevitable maternal instinct opens space for films that challenge social constructions around motherhood. Her comment reflects a broader goal behind a wave of films where pregnancy is used to heighten tension and explore culture, identity, and power. This conversation—about who gets to define motherhood and how it is experienced—continues to push the boundaries of the horror genre. The result is an increasingly diverse spectrum of stories in which being pregnant is a source of fear, not just a plot point, and where the fear originates as much from social expectations as from supernatural threat. The takeaway is a growing insistence on fresh storytelling that reflects present-day realities and questions long-standing assumptions about family, gender, and resilience.