The Horror Advocate — The Brood: Motherhood As the Haunted House
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The BROOD: MOTHERHOOD AS THE HAUNTED HOUSE
The Horror Advocate
David Cronenberg’s 'The Brood' (1979) interrogates motherhood with a fine-tooth comb. Nola is locked away at an experimental psychiatric facility with the radical Dr. Hal Raglan. She is his star patient. A kind of Frankenstein monster, Nola acts as an expression of his practice, his theories, his results, and his narcissism. He encourages Nola to turn her thoughts to flesh and release them. All of her anger and frustration manifest into the one thing her life revolves around - birth. Nola births her rage into an army of creatures hell-bent on avenging all the wrongs against mom.
First, Nola’s parents are found brutally murdered just weeks apart. Her daughter, Candice, sonically witnesses her grandmother’s murder while alone in the house. She is also found alone in the house after her grandfather’s murder. Authorities are puzzled, and Frank is concerned about his daughter’s welfare.
Candice is not only personally but also environmentally attacked when the brood viciously slaughters her schoolteacher. It’s suggested that the schoolteacher is murdered because of her budding relationship with Nola’s soon-to-be ex-husband, Frank. Being a now single parent on the outside, Frank leans on Candice’s schoolteacher for support – perhaps to a fault. Once Nola discovers this she is set on an agonizing path.
Nola’s one obsession is being a mother, incidentally, a much better one than her own. During her sessions, it is revealed that Nola lived a very violent childhood at the hands of her mother, with her father standing idly by. Nola stands accused of the same, however, after bruises are discovered on Candice’s back. When Frank suggests that ‘the kid’ stay with him, Nola panics, and as she is encouraged to do, turns her thoughts to flesh.
Nola dispatches her brood, lusting to punish the past – her foundation, her legacy. Candice is captured by the brood; stashed in the psychiatric facility to wait out the final crescendo. Somehow Frank, who is the primary source of Nola’s rage, moves through the plot unscathed. For all of Nola’s anger about divorce, suspected cheating, and a child custody war, she opts to never cause Frank any harm. This allows him freedom in the final minutes of the film to enact violence on Nola. When Frank ascends upon the psychiatric retreat, he is determined to retrieve his kidnapped daughter and stop his wife's reign of horror.
Even Dr. Raglan is on his side, once he too realizes he cannot control Nola – that her anger has flight. Director David Cronenberg uses this moment to engrave and personify the womb. It has anger, resentment, memory. It is a haunted house of carnal archives desperate to avenge itself and Nola's brood takes all of that on, fearlessly.
Frank finds Nola in the barn, draped in white. He attempts to manipulate her but fails in the long run. For a moment she is taken by this, for the first time in the film she has a sense that her family can be whole again. She stands and throws open her silk coat to reveal an external womb. There’s a pulsating cord running from her stomach to a small sack. Nola takes the sack and tears it open with her teeth. She reveals one member of her brood, naked and covered in blood. Nola takes the fetus and instead of kissing it, she begins to lick it clean. It is a truly bewitched moment, couching motherhood in its primal beginnings.
Frank becomes immediately disgusted, and Nola recognizes this. She sees through his act and begins to rant that she would rather kill her daughter than let him take her away and give her to someone else – someone more “fit”. Here, motherhood emerges as a gaping wound. It is a cavern where one can lose themselves, as Nola did.
Frank orders Nola to make them stop, but she refuses, and so he unleashes his own rage — his own violence. He strangles Nola to stop the brood. He murders the mother of his child with his own two hands, ironically to protect Candice. As Frank places his daughter in the car it is clear she has finally seen too much. The camera zooms in to reveal that she has raised bumps emerging on her arms, similar to her mother when she was a child. Frank's violence and betrayal disturbed the legacy of female rage in his daughter. He killed not for vengeance against wrongs, but purely for control. Nola, at least, had a purpose.
Guest Post By Ava M Fields, The Horror Advocate
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