mothers and monsters

Immaculate

 The past week's movie outings have included, as I mentioned, a screening of Ti West's House of the Devil (a great 1980s throwback that doesn't miss a beat at feeling like it is truly an 80s satanic panic film) as well as two similar, and somewhat related movies about nuns. One, The Omen prequel The Last Omen and the other Immaculate. Both are movies that feel, even in their basic premise, very similar. Young novitiates arrive in Italy to take their vows and give up the pleasures of the world only to find that the church and the people in it have far shadier and possibly demonic intentions for their bodies. 

I was thinking about this in relation to choice and abortion and how the themes in both are very much about not having control over your own body and what happens to it. The women in the movies are potential vessels, who are tortured, tied down, assaulted, and all manner of horrors in the interest of producing a Christ-like child or an anti-Christ depending on the movie, but both feel very much like feminist takes on possession/birth movies and the church itself. Particularly in the brutality of the ritual and birth scenes in both films.

The First Omen

They have very different outcomes, though the women do escape their captors in different ways and with different twists (one startlingly brutal, the other triumphant, but hinting at a potential sequel to come in The Omen canon.) The gist of both seems to be that people within the church, sometimes even the church itself, for all their deference to God, are very apt to play God themselves when it suits them, while women get wrapped up in the story as birthing machines (actual or potential.) This was, of course, brought home with House of Devil, in which the heroine escapes the house full of Satanists, but winds up in a hospital pregnant with some sort of demon spawn we're led to conclude. It's incredibly interesting, considering the legacy of similar movies like Rosemary's Baby, how embedded the idea of demonic pregnancy and the fear around it are woven into the culture. I am halfway in to AHS: Delicate, which is working toward a similar vibe.