The Brood, a 1979 psychological body horror film written and directed by David Cronenberg, stars Oliver Reed, Samantha Eggar, and Art Hindle. After his own stormy divorce, he wrote the screenplay, intending it to be a study of a shattered marriage between a husband and wife who share a child, and cast Eggar and Hindle as doppelgängers of himself and his ex-wife. Despite the fact that it contained science fiction elements, he later remarked that his lone film best exemplified a “classic horror film.”
The Brood is yet another early Cronenberg classic that exposes all of the themes and tropes which would be re-played so many times in his subsequent works like Dead Ringers, the deeply controversial Crash, and even the more lucrative and conventional remake of The Fly.
Director David Cronenberg has become synonymous with the genre of body horror thanks to his previous horror films such as Shivers, Rabid, Scanners, and Videodrome, all of which were made on much lower budgets, all of which pushed the boundaries of the horror genre, and all of which took risks to deliver brutally brilliant and highly original visceral cinema.
Frank (Art Hindle) and his daughter Candice are at the center of the story. His wife, Nola (Samantha Eggar), has been admitted to the Somafree Institute to be treated by Hal Raglan, a well-known and charismatic but divisive psychiatrist (played by the excellent Oliver Reed). The summary alone gives me the creeps, anticipating the ultimate horror: psychological dread rather than ghosts and zombies, which is more real and plausible. However, it is exactly how I feel. Let us now see how well this picture performs in terms of horror.
They’re Waiting… For You! – The Brood (1979)
David Cronenberg’s third, above-them-all science fiction/horror film is more restrained than Shivers or Rabid, focusing on a single, unhappy family rather than a community gone wild.
Frank Carveth is a man whose marriage is on the verge of falling apart. Nola, his wife, decides to seek psychiatric help. At the same time, he fights for the custody of his 5-year-old daughter, Candice. He is legally embattled against his deeply mentally disturbed wife (Samantha Eggar plays a full-blown creepy lunatic like no one else’s business in this film).
She is currently imprisoned (kind of) at the secluded Somafree Institute, where the ominous Dr. Raglan practices a controversial, experimental psychological technique on his patients called ‘psychophysics.’ Raglan’s technique of psychophysics encourages patients who have experienced extreme mental trauma to express repressed emotions by physically manifesting them on their bodies, with uncomfortable and unsettling effects. Interestingly, psychophysics is actually similar to Gestalt therapy without the things growing on your part of it.
Frank is not allowed to meet Nola at the hospital, but Candice is. One day, he discovers bruises on Candice’s body after she spent the weekend with her mother at the hospital and is compelled to act. He is already suspicious of his wife’s treatment and is concerned about her rising instability.
So, like any normal person, he begins investigating Raglan and his methods in an attempt to discredit him, and, well, this part is a little not expected, but I understand the emotions, he tries to prove that his wife will never get better, in an attempt to win full custody of his daughter.
When Frank threatens Raglan, he begins to escalate his sessions with Nola in order to settle the situation swiftly, as an attempt to safeguard his patient (not precisely what he ended up doing, but hey, at least the visuals are great). He learns that Nola was physically and verbally abused by her self-pitying alcoholic mother during the therapy sessions. In contrast, her co-dependent alcoholic father neglected her out of shame and denial.
Meanwhile, Frank interrogates Jan Hartog, a former Somafree patient dying of psychoplasmic-induced cancer, in order to disprove Raglan’s methods. While Candice is left with her maternal grandmother, Juliana, for the evening, the two spend their time looking at old photographs. Juliana later tells Candice that Nola was regularly hospitalized as a youngster and had bizarre unexplainable wheals on her skin that doctors couldn’t figure out.
Later, Juliana hears strange noises coming from her kitchen the day when Nola is in therapy with Raglan, recalling a particularly difficult memory concerning her maltreatment as a youngster.
When she goes to investigate, Juliana is gruesomely bludgeoned to death and murdered by what appears to be a dwarf in a red coat. Candice sees the killer, but she is too scared to tell anyone, including her father, what she has seen. Candice has obviously been traumatized, but she is undamaged in any other way.
After the burial, Barton, Juliana’s ex-husband, tries to reach Nola at Somafree, but Raglan refuses to let him. A drunken phone call from Juliana’s house interrupts their conversation, insisting that they both travel to Somafree to see Nola. Meanwhile, Frank asks Candice’s teacher, Ruth Mayer, to dinner to discuss Candice’s school performance.
Frank leaves Candice in Ruth’s care while he goes to console Barton. While he’s out, Ruth receives a phone call from Nola. She taunts Ruth and tells her to stay away from her family after recognizing her voice. She suspects her of having an affair with Frank (even though they were just talking).
At the same time, Frank discovers Barton has been murdered by the same malformed dwarf child we saw earlier. This time, Frank discovers the dwarf-like creature and battles with it until it collapses and dies. The dwarf-like creature’s corpse is then sent for an autopsy since it is a creature like no other—during an autopsy, the doctor observes that it appears unformed in many respects and, more intriguingly, he was born without a navel.
The dwarf-like creature’s autopsy reveals a number of strange anatomical anomalies, including the fact that it is asexual, apparently color-blind, naturally toothless, lacking a navel, and indicating no known means of natural human birth.
On being questioned, Raglan grudgingly confesses that Barton’s death coincides with his sessions with Nola relating to their respective issues after the murder report makes the headlines. With the exception of Nola, he closes Somafree and sends the rest of his patients to municipal care. Hartog informs Frank about the shutdown of Somafree.
One of the patients forced to leave Somafree, Mike, informs Frank that Nola is now Raglan’s “queen bee” in charge of several “disturbed children” in an attic. When Candice returns to school, two dwarf children attack and murder Ruth in front of her classmates before fleeing with Candice to Somafree, with Frank hot on their tail.
Raglan has to, reveal the truth about the dwarf children to Frank when they arrive at Somafree. The dwarf children are the unintended consequences, or physical manifestations, of Nola’s psychoplasmic sessions; her rage over her abuse was so intense that she parthenogenetically bore a brood of children who psychically respond and act on the targets of her anger, but Nola remains utterly unaware of their actions. They make a plan where Raglan will break into the Brood’s chambers and rescue Candice, assuming Frank can keep Nola calm and avoid upsetting the children.
Cronenberg drew lines almost exactly from the real-life arguments he has had with his ex-wife for authentic conversation in the film, and it really does add content to the film. It also makes me feel really concerned about his used-to-be marital life. Later on, he remarked that the plot’s familial tensions could be classified as ordinary melodrama or a “disease-of-the-week” scenario. But his serious approach to such violent images still stands out among horror films of the time.
When Frank approaches Nola, as the film is beginning to reach its conclusion, the hideous sights reach their pinnacle. The audience has only seen minor sores, a giant lymphatic tumor, and deformed offspring up to this point, which is relatively tame for Cronenberg when compared to his previous work’s vast effects-driven experimentation (bubbling stomachs, phallic armpit parasites, etc.).
Eggar, we notice, spends the entire film seated or on her back as if she were a pregnant animal implanted on the ground. This starts to make more sense when she shows enormous boils and a delivery sack issuing from her belly as she opens her robe in front of Frank in the finale, evocative of the placental coating that arises from many mammals during labor.
Nola bites the sack apart with her teeth, allowing bloody fluid to flow out; she tears the sheath away, revealing her psychoplasmic kid. The notion of Cronenberg’s logical-if-malformed biology licking the object clean like an animal mother is both terrifying and inspiring.
The scene is both horrible and oddly natural. Despite the fact that the vision is not one of violence or depravity but rather one of distorted motherhood, censors compelled Cronenberg to edit the sequence due to its visual nature. Interestingly, the brilliant, although nasty, idea of licking the newborn baby’s blood was given by Samantha Eggar.
When Frank sees Nola giving birth to another child through a psychophysically-induced external womb, she feels his repulsion and licks the child clean, allowing Raglan to collect Candice. Another disturbing fact was that the fetuses showed that were linked to Eggar’s body were, in reality, packed condoms.
When the Brood awakens, Raglan is killed. Nola threatens to kill Candice rather than lose her. This leads the Brood to pursue Candice, who is hiding in a closet. Even though she is inside the cabinet, the Brood breaks down the door and attempts to take her with it.
During that time, Frank strangles Nola to death out of desperation. Without its mother’s telepathic link, the Brood is unable to survive and ultimately dies without killing Candice. Frank returns to his car with a very disturbed Candice, and the two depart. Two tiny lesions—a germinal stage of the phenomenon observed by Nola—appear on Candice’s skin as the father-daughter duo sits in the quiet.
Why Should You Watch The Brood?
What we have here is a horror film revolving around a dramatic divorce and custody dispute running through it, like a vein. The Brood tackles very tough issues in the year it was released. It tackles not only divorce and custody battles but also women’s mental health. It is refreshing and horrific both simultaneously, which makes it even more thrilling.
Cronenberg’s stunning take on graphic horror in the film, compels you to think while also enabling you to enjoy it. It has a cult classic reputation, which it has rightfully earned. The Brood has some fantastic imagery surrounding the children, and Cronenberg definitely knows how to create horror even with a limited budget.
The limited budget allowed him to cast Reed and Eggar, but no actor could save the Brood children’s shabby appearance. If they’re in the wrong company, their snowsuits or blood-soaked pajamas can make them giggle unintentionally.
On The Brood, composer Howard Shore produced the first of many scores for Cronenberg, conjuring strings from Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, which mirror the sensations of violence onscreen. Shore’s music would subsequently become a significant indicator of the seriousness of Cronenberg’s work. It added substance to the storyline and gave the visuals the added push of terror.
The Brood is a thinking horror fan’s film that has just as much to offer today as it did when it was initially released, with plenty of horrors, some genuinely startling scenes, and an engaging story arc.
It’s all about the gross-out, but it’s also a genuine horror film. The madness and its physical manifestations will really make your skin crawl in a way that only horror fans can understand. While Cronenberg’s other works, such as Rabid and Shivers, were more terrifying on a bigger scale, The Brood feels more intimate and features horror like never before, and will give you goosebumps
The Brood is a film that will stick with you. It boasts of a good cast, a good score, and a great look. With a low-budget horror flick, this isn’t always the case.