Pregger Horror: When Birth Day Isn't So Happy

In the found-footage horror film Devil's Due, out on home video this week, a new bride (Allison Miller) has bizarre reactions to whatever is growing in her womb. The movie is not the first time labor terror has spawned box office dollars, so grab your favorite birth control and browse through our gallery of other memorable moments in pregnancy horror.

by Robert B. DeSalvo

Rosemary (Mia Farrow) moves into a new apartment building with her husband and quickly attracts unwanted attention from her overly curious neighbors. Before she knows it she is drugged, ceremonially raped by the Devil, and later gives birth to Satan's spawn … all because her actor husband made a deal with Lucifer to be famous and successful.

Dream stalker Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund) is using an unborn child's dreams to be able to stalk teens in the real world, but the real nightmare comes when Freddy—the "bastard son of 1,000 maniacs"—is reborn on-screen with a face not even his nun of a mother, Amanda Krueger, could love.

In the fifth Child's Play movie, demonic dolls Chucky and Tiffany tie up Jennifer Tilly in her home and impregnate her with a turkey baster (don't ask). Tilly goes from not pregnant to about to pop overnight, suggesting that the twins growing in her womb are of the supernatural variety and might take after their father.

This unsettling horror film about the birth of a killer mutant baby with fangs and claws arrived one year after the historic Roe vs. Wade case that legalized abortion in 1973. On which side of the abortion debate do the filmmakers stand? Just look at this picture of what happened in the delivery room after its birth and you decide.

In the opening scene of this 2007 sequel to the remake of The Hills Have Eyes—everyone's favorite movie about mutated desert rednecks—a nude woman is bound, in labor, and gives birth to a deformed baby with claws. One theater accidentally showed this gory footage to a bunch of kids waiting to watch the PG-rated The Last Mimzy ... and then a spokesperson swiftly extended her "deepest apologies to the children and families."

Geena Davis' character didn't really give birth to a giant maggot in David Cronenberg's The Fly, but after being scared out of her mind when seeing how lover Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum) had transformed into a giant insect due to an experiment gone awry, it is understandable why she would have such a nightmare. You also can't fault her for seeking out an abortion in the middle of the night. "I want it out of my body," she says. "I'll do it myself if I have to."

The best segment of this sequel to the found-footage horror anthology V/H/S is titled "Safe Haven," which is codirected by Gareth Evans—the guy behind the ultraviolent The Raid: Redemption. In "Safe Haven," a documentary crew are invited inside a cult's compound only to discover that the cult is about to unleash hell after a planned mass suicide. When you see what the pictured pregnant woman is about to release onto the world, you'll want to quickly schedule a sonogram if you happen to be with child … just in case.

In this 2009 film based on a 2006 short film of the same name, pregnant Madeline (Jordan Ladd) survives a car accident in which her husband dies only to be told that her unborn child is dead too. Since she tried so long to get pregnant, Madeline carries the child to term, endures a painful natural delivery (see picture) and gives birth to a daughter that miraculously comes to life. However, baby Grace emits strange smells, attracts flies and has an unnatural craving for blood. It's time to bottle feed!

As in Grace, expectant mother Sarah (Alysson Paradis) has been in a car accident in which her husband died and, months later, is waiting to give birth on Christmas Eve in this French home-invasion horror film. Soon Sarah is being stalked by a strange woman who, for reasons unknown, wants to cut the baby out of her with a pair of scissors. That's one way to do it…

The most shocking scene in Ridley Scott's prequel to his own Alien is when archaeologist Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace) gives herself an emergency C-section—with the aid of a sophisticated medical pod—to remove a dangerous, squid-like alien creature that she became impregnated with after having sex with her infected partner. Got condoms?

After surviving her horrific ordeal in Alien and floating in space for 57 years while in stasis, Lt. Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) is revived and finds out that colonists have been sent to LV-426—the planet where her crew first came into contact with the Alien eggs—to terraform it. Ripley wakes up every night screaming after having a dream about a Xenomorph about to burst its way out of her stomach.

Kristen Stewart often has that lifeless, faraway look, but in Part 1 of The Twilight Saga finale, the life is literally sucked out of Bella by her unborn child, Renesmee, who is half-vampire, half-human. Bella will have to be turned into a vampire if she is going to survive the YA supernatural birth of the century, but if she would have caught a look at the creepy, CG-rendered baby Renesmee created for the movie, she might have opted to stay dead.