Thus in a real subversion of the film’s religious horror roots, Margaret discovers her paternal church fathers secretly raised and nurtured her with the intention of always seeing her impregnated by a familiar of the Devil, a demonic jackal who we learn was also Margaret’s father. In other words, because the film’s Church believes it will empower their institution if the Antichrist appears (and thereby cause a secular world to return to Catholicism for salvation), they force Margaret to carry to term an unwanted child that was created by both rape and incest. The Church even aids this defilement by drugging her like the witches in Rosemary’s Baby and offering her body up to violation by a demon who is also her own father.
The metaphor is not subtle nor should it really need to be. In the five decades between Roe and Dobbs, the issue of abortion never really left the culture war frontlines, even if more folks turned a blind eye. And it was occasionally expressed in cinema, including of a genre variety, over those years—although often in more secular terms. In Ridley Scott’s 2012 Alien prequel, Prometheus, Dr. Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace), manually extracts (read: aborts) an alien monstrosity in her body after her nefarious A.I. doctor (Michael Fassbender) attempts to drug her so she’ll carry the beastie to term. It’s the most disturbing and electrifying scene in the movie. In David Cronenberg’s remake of The Fly (1986), the film is entirely sympathetic when Geena Davis realizes she is pregnant with larvae due to the mutating genetics of her beau (Jeff Goldblum).
But these types of films tend to view the issue on an increasingly secular playing field: Fassbender’s robotic A.I. wants to force Rapace’s archaeologist into alien motherhood because he thinks he is entitled to seeing the offspring’s birth. He does it because he can, with the proverbial mother’s fate not even registering as an afterthought. Goldblum’s devolving Fly-Man, meanwhile, is reverting to a bestial state when he is enraged by the idea of losing a mother and child. The idea of the woman making her own choices breaks his disintegrating mind.
So it is telling, then, that after an entirely Catholic majority of jurists on the Supreme Court welcomed another century of men controlling women that both Immaculate and The First Omen are addressing the religious source for so much entitlement over women’s bodies. Which makes these movies the most forcefully pro-choice horror films perhaps ever.
Consider that even though these new movies are heavily inspired by Rosemary’s Baby, that film came out during a far more religious moment in the U.S. and was itself directed by a man who would one day drug and rape a minor. According to a Pew Research poll in 2022, only about 64 percent of the U.S. population now considers itself Christian, down from a whopping 91 percent in 1976. Furthermore, researchers predict Christians are projected to fall as low as 35 percent of the American population in the next 50 years. Perhaps not surprisingly, as the country has become more secular, support for abortion being legal in most circumstances has risen.
So in Rosemary’s Baby, the greatest evil is literally Satan and his followers, openly evil witches preying on the innocent and secular like Rosemary. Nonetheless, Polanski and Levin cannot imagine a scenario where the mother isn’t ultimately won over by the sight of her baby boy, even if he has his father’s eyes. Immaculate and The First Omen, meanwhile, provide a counterpoint. One (First Omen) is written and directed by a woman; the other while being written and directed by men is still produced by its star in Sydney Sweeney; and each has an exhausted ferocity that has no patience left for patriarchal platitudes or the often antiquated archetypes placed on women by those institutions and their ancient religious (pre)texts.
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