Hollywood horror gives up theatrics to accommodate the terrors of the womb

Horror has long turned the body into a warzone, but in 2024, the genre has traded its pulpy hack-and-slash theatrics for something far scarier: control over the uterus. This year, horror has set its sights on pregnancy — not as a miracle of life but as the nightmare of control — and has offered up a searing commentary on the precarious state of women’s rights. Once content with sending its scantily-clad scream queens sprinting through the woods in stilettos, horror now chains them to real terror: patriarchy, rebranded as “pro-life.”

Historically, horror has always been a kind of cultural seismograph, sensitive to the tremors of societal dread, but rarely has it wielded its metaphors with such blunt-force trauma. In the wake of the overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022, Hollywood’s horror auteurs have sharpened their knives and turned them on a stark reality: that to inhabit a female body is to live in perpetual peril. The films birthed in this political aftershock rip away the soft-focus glow of motherhood and expose a purgatory of coerced reproduction and institutionalised misogyny dressed up in the platitudes of moral virtue.

Pregnancy as a genre villain

Pregnancy has always been fertile ground for horror. The body, colonised by another entity, changes in uncontrollable and often frightening ways — a metaphor so potent that it has spawned everything from Rosemary’s Baby to the Palme D’or winning Titane. In fact, Julia Ducournau, director of Titane, has spoken about this “violence that is inside” women — an idiosyncratic rage that only horror seems to channel.

Take Immaculate, for instance. The story follows a devout young woman who enters a convent only to find herself mysteriously impregnated with a genetically engineered messiah. Her objections, her aspirations, her humanity — none of it matters. She is treated as communal property, her autonomy subsumed under the weight of divine purpose. Her pregnancy is tormentous: clumps of hair falling out, teeth shattering, her womb a war zone of divine proportions. It’s a miracle, all right — a miracle she does not lose her mind entirely.

Then there’s The First Omen, a prequel to the 1976 classic that feels more like a class-action lawsuit against the Vatican than an origin story. Before the sinister Damian came to be, the Antichrist’s origins are traced back to a nunnery where women are ‘volunteered’ into immaculate conceptions for apocalyptic purposes (a less subtle Handmaid’s Tale of sorts). The real terror, however, isn’t its hellspawn; it is the unnerving parallels to contemporary policies that make women’s bodies feel like state property in all but name.

Meanwhile, in Alien: Romulus, the franchise’s long-standing body-horror allegories for sexual violence sink to horrifying new lows. A scene sees the infamous Facehugger make its ghastly return, leaving a crew member desperately pleading for her life as an alien fetus tears through her ribcage. What was once a symbol of cosmic terror has morphed into something uncomfortably terrestrial — a grisly indictment of reproductive coercion and the systemic indifference to women’s suffering.

What makes this wave of feminist horror so razor-sharp is its utter refusal to sugarcoat. Once swaddled in glowing idealism, the idea of pregnancy is now unwrapped as pure, unadulterated nightmare fuel, and this year’s offerings go straight for the jugular (or the cervical, rather). Women’s bodies are invaded, their autonomy snatched away, their fears brushed off by men who see them as nothing more than ambulatory wombs on loan from the patriarchy.

Birth itself is rendered as a brutal, blood-soaked ordeal that serves to remind us of how society happily wrings women dry, whether of labour, life, or agency. When laws restricting bodily autonomy have reached dystopian levels of cruelty, and decisions about women’s bodies are debated by a venomous (and predominantly male) social media rhetoric, horror is now channelling a very real fury.

Hollywood’s new monsters: women on the verge

For decades, horror has flirted with the taboo of women’s suffering — using it, exploiting it, even reveling in its fetishised glory. But in 2024, there’s been a coup d’etat, to reclaim control over these tropes, and Coralie Fargeat’s Cannes-winning The Substance might be the apex of this movement.

The surrealist fever dream follows Elisabeth, a washed-up TV star played by Demi Moore, who injects a black-market drug promising to make her “the best version of herself.” What emerges is Margaret Qualley’s Sue, an Instagram-perfect doppelgänger of Elisabeth, who promptly begins to dismantle her creator’s life.

The horror here is less in the gore (though it’s as stomach-churning as anything David Cronenberg ever concocted) and more in the existential despair. Elisabeth’s real battle here is against the internalised misogyny that has taught her to equate ageing with irrelevance.

Fargeat’s razor-sharp dissection of Hollywood’s ‘hagsploitation’ is unsettlingly prescient, as the “your body, my choice,” rhetoric of provocateurs like Nick Fuentes claw their way into relevance. The sleazeball men in The Substance are disgustingly accurate avatars of the industry, but the film’s real villain is far more insidious: a system engineered to pit women against each other, reducing them to walking wombs or ornamental facades.

Personal is political — and horrifying

This reckoning, of course, extends well beyond fiction. Films like these are tearing into the cultural fabric, exposing the ugly myths that have long been weaponised against women. Elizabeth Sankey’s documentary Witches, for instance, traces society’s centuries-old terror of “monstrous” women, from witch trials to the stigma around postpartum mental health. That this year’s horror offerings feel like spiritual cousins to Sankey’s work is no accident — they are all hacking away at the same tangled mess of fear, control, and simmering fury.

But what’s most striking is how the genre, long accused of exploiting women’s pain, has become their fiercest defender. A year marked by reactionary politics seeking to erode hard-won rights, has witnessed the genre become a vital, if unexpected, arena for resistance. The final girls of yesteryear have traded their chainsaws for righteous fury, fighting not just for survival but for agency. By confronting the realities of being a woman, these films are doing so much more than merely reflecting these universal anxieties — they are demanding we reckon with them.

Kurt Vonnegut famously said, “Artists are the canaries in the coal mine.” The monsters of 2024 are not lurking under the bed or prowling after dark; they are in the headlines, in the legislature, and often, in the mirror. And we have had a plethora of remarkable canaries constantly sounding the alarm over the possibility that the real horror has only just begun.