This Fall, TV Ponders What Could Be More Horrifying Than Motherhood

Having a womb politicizes a body. Your autonomy, medical care, and the decision to procreate or not are debated and moralized by the wider world. 2023 has been one hell of a year to choose what's suitable for your own reproductive organs, with states rolling back abortion rights and politicians pushing only the most prescriptive definitions of gender. So, it is no wonder that TV has been filled with the most despairing depictions of motherhood, demonstrating how it can figuratively (and occasionally literally) eat people alive.

Throughout 2023, TV has given us unflinching portrayals of mothers. In April, Dead Ringers, inspired by David Cronenberg’s body horror classic, saw Rachel Weisz take up Jeremy Irons’ dual role as twin gynecologists. Alice Birch’s adaptation had all the avante-garde gynecological tools and “inner beauty” pageants of the original. But the show hinted at further brutality, with close-ups of bodies being torn open in childbirth and, most disturbingly, as so often happens, a Black woman who is not listened to by her doctor. Her husband is left cradling his new baby whilst its mother lies dead in sheets dyed vivid crimson by her blood.

In The Changeling, LaKeith Stanfield’s Apollo finds himself also left holding the baby after a Black woman’s fears are dismissed, having persuaded his wife Emma (Clark Backo) that, as his favorite book claims. “A baby is a dream made real.” But Emma’s dreams do not come true, and she slips into a harrowing spiral of postpartum depression and psychosis. She becomes convinced that the child is not hers and, eventually, that it is not human at all.

The opposite, albeit no less harrowing, path was taken by Dorothy (Lauren Ambrose) in the final season of Servant, where the very much not real Jericho, whom the mysterious Leanne could make appear to be a living child, once again became a doll. Dorothy, who lost her son by mistakenly leaving him in a hot car, breaks out of her delusion and finally grieves the insurmountable loss of being responsible for your own baby’s demise.

To be impregnated and to birth something that is not human speaks to a primal fear that occurs even in some of the most longed-for pregnancies. There were unsettling moments throughout both of mine, with doctors telling me that if I didn’t get enough calcium, the fetus would simply leech what it needed straight from my bones. There was the nauseating sensation of a fetus spinning around in my second trimester and having elbows and knees scraping against my insides in the third, and tiny feet visible on my abdomen. Baby kicks began to resemble John Hurt’s fate in Alien, with something fighting to get out by any means necessary.

Watching many of the year’s television shows is a reminder of the unease so many feel, which was most famously captured by Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby. If this fall’s shows are anything to go by, that feeling has not been assuaged by the era of 3D scans and blood panels that can present an unborn child’s DNA like an early school report. Lionel Shriver’s 2003 book We Need To Talk About Kevin, which was stunningly adapted for the screen by Lynne Ramsay, is almost as significant a text as Levins’. As Shriver tells it, the book was born out of a period of contemplation she had as she approached 40 and needed to commit to choosing to remain childless. She then tried to imagine the worst that could happen if she went the alternative route, and wrote about potentially giving birth to a mass murdering psychopath.

“What is the worst that could happen?” is also asked in the latest season of American Horror Story, and it turns out it is not just being read to filth by Kim Kardashian. Delicate, which reaches its midseason mark Wednesday night, doesn't re-invent the wheel, with hints at the familiar pregnancy horror tropes of demonic offspring, death cults, aliens, and that Satan might have an interest in a person’s uterus. The pregnant Anna (Emma Roberts) is devastated by what she believes to be a miscarriage, but the alternative proves just as horrifying. Her pregnancy comes with bleeding mouths (an actual pregnancy symptom), visions of a belly filled with spiders, and mysterious phone calls warning her, “They did something to your baby."

Over at Prime Video, Erik Kripke’s Gen V suggests it's capitalism that most needs to be kept out of people’s wombs. The long-anticipated spin-off of The Boys sees a young generation of Supes emerge, every bit as f*cked up as the one before it. Vought International dosed a batch of infants with Compound V, breeding a new crop of fascist uber-mensch. Those dastardly plans have dire consequences for mother and child, with arguably the franchise’s most shocking scene involving Marie (Jaz Sinclair), an unwittingly dosed child, accidentally killing her mother with her own supercharged period blood.

The sins of the parents being enacted upon the unsuspecting offspring also crop up throughout the spooky season — Mike Flanagan’s latest Edgar Allen Poe-infused limited series, The Fall Of The House Of Usher, commenced with a montage of an entire bloodline being wiped out. But the worst fate awaits a family member who doesn’t even have Usher blood in her veins. The unsuspecting Morelle Usher (Crystal Balint), wife of Frederick Usher (Henry Thomas) and mother of young Lenore (Kyleigh Curran), is brutalized, tortured, and robbed of everything she holds dear before being reduced to a toy for men to assert their dominance. In a rare act of mercy, the show eventually transposes Morelle’s pain into something positive. Despite having been through incalculable physical pain and losing her only child, she rebukes the patriarchy and turns the ill-gotten gains of the Ushers into a charitable foundation that helps millions, all in the name of her beloved Lenore.

Even the mothers in popular TV comedies are not immune. Horror-comedy Shining Vale brings back Courtney Cox’s Pat, free from the institution she ended up in after being possessed by a ghost and attempting mariticide, for Season 2. She returns to the (understandably) not-so-loving embrace of her children but is willing to be gaslit and dismiss what she sees with her own two eyes to take up the role of perfect mother to her ungrateful offspring. At the same time, Only Murders in the Building saw women committing or confessing to murder to protect their children. Here, protecting their children isn’t a case of shooting a violent maniac coming at them with a knife. As mothers, otherwise upstanding citizens can be pushed to kill in order to stop people being kind of mean to their beloved offspring.

Having gotten through two pregnancies, two births, and raising two kids who have yet to show signs of demonic possession… I get it. Each time someone is kind of mean to my babies, violence is in the cards. And fall’s TV gets it, too, showing motherhood's brutality in fictional stories and news reports. A womb, a birth, and all that comes afterwards are hard enough without the world’s unfeeling intervention. Politicians, supreme courts, and patriarchs need to heed these TV shows’ warnings, leaving mothers to focus on health, happiness, and hoping the dad isn’t Satan.

Leila Latif is Contributing Editor to Total Film, the host of Truth & Movies: A Little White Lies Podcast and a regular at Sight and Sound, Indiewire, The Guardian, The BBC and others. Follow her on twitter @Leila_Latif.