ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the exploration of pregnancy, abortion and foetal subjectivity in horror film, be they in explicitly narrative or more abstract aesthetic modes, alongside philosophical encounters with pregnant subjectivity. Rosemary's Baby and Demon Seed each serve to expand the gothic and phallocentric association of the home and domestic space with the woman's sexed body by collapsing the women's bodies and their visual expressions of subjectivity into the presentation of domestic and on-screen home space. Each woman is, corporeally, a vessel or a maternal environment for her foetus, a designation that potentially reframes the pregnant woman as object rather than subject, or at least complicates the relationship between autonomous cogito and the embodied self. "Pro-Life", then, comes the closest of many of the abortion-centric films discussed so far to privileging the subject position of the pregnant woman, although it nonetheless frames the story in terms of the foetus as monstrous other.
