What Spawned in 1979

I wonder how I should feel that a movie about a woman giving birth to monsters was released a month after I was born. That's 1979's The Brood, which I watched again last night. It's a David Cronenberg movie, one of his best.

It'd been at least fifteen years since I'd last seen it. It's the first time I'd watched it since I started working with children. As such, I now find child actress Cindy Hinds' performance much more effective.

She plays Candice, the human daughter of Frank (Art Hindle) and Nola (Samantha Eggar). Now Nola, under the experimental psychotherapy of Dr. Hal Raglan (Oliver Reed), is giving birth to a brood of demon children, manifestations of her pent-up psychological issues.

I used to think Hinds' performance was too stiff, that Cronenberg simply lacked the ability to work with child performers. Maybe he does, but now I think Hinds works perfectly well. I found the shot of her approaching the kitchen door, behind which she can hear her grandmother being brutally pummelled to death, really heart-rending.

I've worked with kids who are this emotionally withdrawn and seeing her pulling her head back just a little speaks a lot to me about what she's going through.

Before she gets killed, Candice's grandmother (Nuala Fitzgerald) has an interesting line about how people rewrite the past in their minds. "Thirty seconds after you're born, you have a past, and sixty seconds after that you start to lie to yourself about it." I like how the movie never settles the question as to how abusive Nola's parents actually were to her. She remembers them being abusive, is the important thing, and now those memories, real or imagined, have taken dangerous corporeal form.

The Brood is available on The Criterion Channel.

X Sonnet #1783

Erasers take the place of vengeful ghosts.
Per pumpkin kills amount to ninety-nine.
Repayment chilled the itchy, writhing hosts.
On grounds of square we chopped the second pine.
With dinner done, the lunch could linger late.
However fast the break commenced, we wait.
And thus we close another book of fate.
Ordaining food as masters close the gate.
No swath of snow could sooth the child beast.
In scores of suits, the monsters beat the turf.
Condensing clouds exclude the warming yeast.
Deserving pumpkins ship to ev'ry surf.
Beneath the vibrant hoods were demon spawn.
Across the patchy snow's a ruddy dawn.