There are few sights so satisfying in horror film as the truly evil young. In a culture that revolves around the sacrosanct child, now even going so far as to prioritize not-yet-children’s lives over that of their vessel/mothers, it is cathartic to see horror films and TV series acknowledging that children are not always innocent and sweet. In fact, at times they can be little monsters.
Whether it is Regan pissing and vomiting in The Exorcist (1973), the bright-eyed children from hell in Village of the Damned (1960), or the fanged newborn in It’s Alive (1974), the evil child points to both the hellish expectations that can accompany parenthood and our own desires to flee conventions. Through horror films we can vicariously become what Andrew Scahill calls “the revolting child,” an embodiment of our desire for anti-heteronormative liberation.
In the HBO series The Baby (2022) we are denied this spectacle. The demonic baby terrorizing the show’s characters appears disappointingly normal, even cuter than the average tot. However, this superficially adorable demonic child has its own lineage in horror films, from Rhoda (Patty McCormack), the fastidious eight-year-old serial killer of The Bad Seed (1956) to Lucas (Owen Atlas), the sweet-faced satanic five-year-old of Little Evil (2017). In some ways this “normal” evil child is even more uncanny than Rosemary’s devil-eyed baby, once we realize, with Freud, that the unheimlich, first and foremost, points to the familiarity that lies in the unfamiliar.
The uncanny neonate in The Baby is immediately established as an emblem of the terrors that accompany “normal” experiences of motherhood. Tash (Michelle de Swarte), the show’s messy but charismatic protagonist, first encounters the baby after fleeing to a vacation spot to get her head together and escape her feelings of abandonment as all of her friends are becoming mothers. However, instead of achieving the peace she seeks, hell rains down on her as a suicidal woman hurtles from a cliff and lands dead in front of her vacation spot. Seconds later a baby follows, dropping right into Tash’s arms.
From then on, Tash, who never wanted to be a mother, will not be able to rid herself of the little monster. By some spell, people around her assume the baby is hers, and whenever she tries to ditch him, the baby’s own fears of desertion turn to supernatural murder.
Tash is not the first to find herself at the mercy of this little demon. As the series progresses, she learns that generations of women have been plagued by the tiny monster who eventually drove them to suicide or “accidental” death. In a series of photos shown to Tash by a mysterious crone, Mrs. Eaves (Amira Ghazalla), we learn that these forerunners, like Tash, were mostly women of color forced to care for this male and lily-white bundle of endless demands.
We don’t learn these previous mother surrogates’ stories, but we imagine they are similar to those that characterize Tash’s journey. As the show’s terrors reach their climax, Tash’s life completely changes. She is isolated and crazed, living for nothing but sleep. Her apartment was previously filled with the culinary tools and ingredients that she, as a talented chef, needs to be creative and earn a living. Now, it has been converted into a giant nursery, every room brimming with toys and nondescript mashed food that she serves to the baby in uncharacteristically servant-like clothes. Hypnotized by this white baby/stranger she is willing to kill her Black sister and father. Without naming it, Tash’s experience of forced motherhood points to the racialized dimensions of reproductive unfreedom.
The other women who appear in the series all have their own motherhood-related challenges. Tash’s sister, Bobby (Amber Grappy), is obsessively driven to adopt a child, only to have her petition denied. This reminds us of the flip side of forced pregnancy and motherhood—sterilization, the creation of insurmountable economic barriers, family separation, incarceration, and other means of preventing people, especially queer Black women like Bobby, from having the children they want. At the same time, Bobby’s yearning for a baby is so intense that she loses herself and her girlfriend in the pursuit of a child of her own. For her, personhood itself seems dependent on becoming a mother, and this false “solution” obscures her need to heal from life-long abandonment issues. Bobby’s monomaniacal quest shows that for many modern women, the role of the mother is still not optional, and its primacy eclipses a path to self-fulfillment and community.
In search of this community, Bobby and Tash’s mother Barbara (Sinéad Cusack) has joined a goddess-centered, matriarchal commune and spends her days crafting statues that idealize mother and child. And yet, she originally ditched her own children to join this community, pointing to the gulf between the reality of mothering and its idealized abstraction.
On the other hand, Tash’s best friend Mags (Shvorne Marks), who is a mother and wants to be, is frazzled and overwhelmed by a world that individualizes the task of motherhood, offering judgement rather than support, and expecting most women to show that they “have it all” by working endlessly through first, second, and third shifts.
To me, this gradual amalgamation of plots, characters, and scenarios effectively illustrates the diverse but overlapping impacts of reproductive unfreedom and lack of support for reproductive labor. However, reviews of the show begged to differ, calling the show, among other slights “a stuffed diaper of irritating quirkiness.” Unsurprisingly, after one season, HBO canceled The Baby.
Despite this vote of no confidence, most reviewers agreed on the show’s greatest strength. This was a plot, set in the 1970s, that captured the baby’s origin story. Here, we see the story of Helen (Tanya Reynolds), a white woman deeply socialized by fifties-era heteronormative rules. Accordingly, she had forced herself into an unhappy marriage, repressing her lesbian desires. When we first encounter Helen, she is finally on the brink of leaving her husband for her lover, a young Mrs. Eaves/Nour (Seyan Sarvan). This joyous escape is fatally interrupted by her husband’s wheedling tears, as he cajoles her into one last joyless sex act before she leaves.
Still, as soon as her husband falls into his post-coital sleep, Helen bounds out of the house and into Nour’s arms. Nour whisks Helen away to her utopian lesbian social scene where we encounter the show’s first glimpse of happiness. This tight knit group of mostly non-white lesbians seem to live together in what Kristen Ross calls “communal luxury,” a practice of everyday life that inverts hierarchies and prefigures just and joyous ways of living together, free of capitalism. In the case of Nour’s friends this includes collectivizing socially reproductive labor as well as reveling in music, dance, and sex.
Though this group leads much more fulfilling lives than later generations can hope for, they are also more endangered. The same exclusion that liberates them to build their own world also threatens their existence. This is brought home when Helen discovers that her last unwilling coupling with her husband has led to a pregnancy, and she tries to get an abortion. Her husband and his family successfully kidnap her from the clinic and entrap her in her former bourgeois home, now explicitly a prison.
From there, Helen’s story mimics gothic tales such as “The Yellow Wallpaper” and Rosemary’s Baby in which woman’s desire for agency is treated as madness. Here, forced pregnancy is supported by an overtly sexist system that entails the collaboration of husbands, doctors, and family members. Helen is drugged and confined to her dreary bedroom for months, gradually becoming nothing but a senseless vessel for her spawn. This clear conspiracy articulates heteropatriarchal culture to the conventions of the gothic outlined by Eve Sedgewick, including isolation and immobilization, sleeplike and deathlike states, and the unspeakable.
The familiarity and legibility of this 1970’s story contrasts the seemingly chaotic proliferation of maternal nightmares we encounter in Tash’s timeline. However, unlike the show’s detractors, I don’t see The Baby’s complex plot and ensemble of characters as signs of the show’s failure, but rather as symptomatic or perhaps even diagnostic of the difficulties in representing the horrors of reproductive unfreedom in our seemingly egalitarian moment. Tash and her friends are not condemned to be housewives in a gothic, bourgeois home. However, the release from what Betty Friedan called, in The Feminine Mystique, “the problem with no name” did not bring them liberation. In fact, these young women now encounter a new problem with no name, which is the mystery of why, raised with the promise of freedom and opportunity, so much of their lives instead entails grappling with coercion and precarity.
People who have been conditioned to believe that they live in a post-feminist world were ambushed by the end of abortion rights, and with it our sudden exclusion from true citizenship and autonomy. If the pervasive gendered logics of our moment were less mystified, perhaps we wouldn’t have been caught so off-guard. It is understandable that we wish to return to the satisfying and cathartic gothic narratives of women’s oppression characterized by Rosemary’s Baby or “The Yellow Wallpaper.” However, to understand our current, messy moment, we need imperfect shows like The Baby, that help us to map the unmappable, a world that has instrumentalized the veneer of a feminist utopia to mask what for many is experienced as a misogynist dystopia.
Johanna Isaacson writes academic and popular pieces on horror and politics. She is a professor of English at Modesto Junior College and a founding editor of Blind Field Journal. She is the author of Stepford Daughters: Weapons for Feminists in Contemporary Horror from Common Notions Press and The Ballerina and the Bull (2016) from Repeater Books. She has also published widely in academic and popular journals, and runs the Facebook group, Anti-capitalist feminists who like horror films. More info can be found here. She has previously written for Horror Homeroom on the HBO series, Cosmic Slop and Office Killer.
