White Terror by Russell Meeuf

Author:Russell Meeuf
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780253060402
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: 2021-12-03T00:00:00+00:00

REPRODUCTIVE TRAUMA, WHITE MOTHERHOOD, AND SOCIAL CLASS

Horrific children are indicators of troubled parents in the horror film, the canary in the coal mine indicating the selfishness and degradation of parenting in the modern age, or really, the failures of mothers, who bear the burden of their children’s bad behavior in Western cultures. The sinister, dead-eyed children who haunt the contemporary horror film express our fears that mothers today have failed not only their children, but society as a whole.

The suspect nature of modern motherhood often yields abject images of reproductive trauma on film. In the opening scenes of Orphan, for example, which are shot through a hazy filter, the protagonist dreams of her recent pregnancy that ended in a stillbirth. She checks into a hospital, ready to give birth, but as she is slowly wheeled across the floor, she starts hemorrhaging blood, which drips through the seat of her wheelchair (see fig. 5.1). An overhead shot reveals the long smear of blood she has left behind. She then dreams of a messy operation, after which the doctor hands her a mangled baby bundled in blood-stained cloths, as if it were still alive. We later learn that her real-life birth experience left her struggling with alcoholism, and while she was drunk, her two older children fell into an icy pond and almost died. Recovering from these crises, the family turns to an ill-fated adoption, and the mother has to confront a monstrous, sociopathic child in her home, as if her trauma and failures as a mother have birthed a horrible offspring that tries to tear the family apart.

The horrific child film is replete with similar stories of trauma and grief. In the 2009 film The Unborn, for example, a young woman is haunted by a pale-faced young boy dubbed Jumby, a Jewish dybbuk who has been trying to infiltrate her family since her grandmother was a young girl in the Holocaust and her twin brother became possessed by the demon during bizarre occult experiments. Now the young woman—who herself was a twin, though her twin brother died in the womb—sees visions of reproductive trauma everywhere she turns, from a blue-eyed fetus she discovers buried in the ground to a vision of Jumby plunging his hand through her stomach and into her womb. A similar pregnancy-possession narrative plays out in Devil’s Due, in which an American woman back from her honeymoon in Latin America discovers she is pregnant. As her pregnancy becomes more traumatic and violent, her husband suspects she is carrying a demon child that she was impregnated with while they were abroad.

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