baby's first body horror
why Breaking Dawn Part 1 is my favorite horror movie
Recently, the medical drama The Pitt broadcast a full birth on tv. Men everywhere promptly shit themselves, vomited, fell down and died.
I have chosen not to judge these men, because the first time I had to watch a full birth video in health class, I also wanted to die. It is not a secret that I am terrified of pregnancy. The birth, not so much, because there’s a high chance I can just have the baby extracted from me like a parasite, like all the women in my family have done. But pregnancy? Fuck that.
It’s not just the complications of pregnancy (of which there are many) but the actual, physiological state of it. You know what really rearranges your organs? A big ass expanding uterus! Did you know the increased progesterone levels during pregnancy can cause your gums to bleed and teeth to decay? Did you know most of your weight gain in pregnancy is actually from creating a shit ton of blood (almost an additional 50% of your plasma)? Did you know that amniotic fluid is largely just fetal pee that your baby is drinking and recycling, Dune style?
A friend once described being pregnant as “interactive body horror.” I reference this near monthly, because I have never heard something so viscerally accurate. And also, it explained why I am the only person on earth who loves Breaking Dawn so much.
okay, sure, but what is body horror?
In case you have lived a blessed life and do not know, body horror is a subgenre which involves the human form being transformed in grotesque ways. Parasites and mutations are a big staple of the genre (Alien; The Fly). It’s often explicit and violating, and always excessive (The Human Centipede). It has to be, in order to evoke the feelings required in the observer, to make us uncomfortable, terrified, nauseated or just unsettled. It’s meant to tap into the one thing that all humans have in common: a fallible body.
Because violation and discomfort are at the core of the genre, many body horror pieces serve as commentary. Think Frankenstein and The Metamorphosis. Unfortunately, women are often on the receiving end of that commentary. It is frequently an exploitative genre, and everyone loves exploiting the female body. If you google a list of the best body horror movies, a substantial amount of them involve sexual violence.
Sexual violence? In your horror commentary? Groundbreaking.
My favorite body horror are pieces that take the banal, the ordinary, the lived experience of women, and show you how fucking horrific it really is. Hm. Maybe… something like pregnancy?
Enter, Breaking Dawn: Part 1.
a treatise on feminine suffering
I need everyone to be so clear about something before we start: nothing I say here is ironic. I mean every single word. When I tell you that Breaking Dawn: Part 1 is my favorite horror movie, I am 100% sincere.
Like everything in life, it’s about framing.
Consider this: You are a young woman, self-assured and on the brink of adulthood. You are about to marry your high school sweetheart, a decision that will isolate you from your family and friends. Not because they don’t approve, but because a life with your future husband comes with sacrifices and isolation. He says he hates himself for doing this to you, but in your eyes, it is worth it for love.
On the eve of your wedding, you have dreams of blood and destruction. You are standing on a pile of corpses. And yet, you are so confident of yourself, so assured in your desires and dreams that you go forward. You marry the cold, detached man. You are whisked off to isolation, and your dreams come true. You and your husband finally have consummated this great love…
and then you are put on the shelf. Your husband will not touch you. He says it is because he is the monster, because he will hurt you, but is that the truth? Or is the real reason because of the unspoken truth of your marriage: you are a sexual being, with a body that is warm, and young, and full of life, and so desired by him—and it is unbearable.
And so, you resign yourself to a life of lonely, unfilled needs, trapped in a marriage with a man you love, who will not touch you, who will slowly starve you of love because of his own perceived sins. The monster has vilified your body, your needs, and though he says it’s his shame, you know the truth. It’s yours.1
But then. Then something happens. You are hunched over the sink, gorging yourself. We have never seen you eat before, and suddenly you are consuming everything you see. Cooked meat, raw meat. Eggs. You are craving flesh, the young, the unborn.
There is life inside of you.
This is the miracle of pregnancy. You, a woman with needs, have only lived a life where you are needed. The dreams of your wedding are gone: your husband will not accept you as a self-contained woman, will not make you his equal. But here is something that needs you so desperately, something that gives you purpose.
All you have ever wanted is to be loved. It’s why you found yourself in this position to begin with. What if it was all coming to this moment? This child?
But again, you are alone. Your husband is revolted. Your loved ones are telling you that you are ill. You are sick. You cannot make this choice, you cannot be a woman with agency. You don’t know your own needs.
How can they not see that this is just the miracle of life? That all babies pull energy from their mothers, that all pregnant women have strange cravings? Some women are bedridden for months of their pregnancy, and some are so sick they can’t even gain weight.
Every new mother has to consider what will happen if things go wrong. They make a choice, and they put their faith in their physicians, their loved ones, and the universe.
Why will no one trust you? Why does no one see that this is why you are here? And even if you die for your child, it was your choice. And you will die with a smile, because with every movement of your child inside you, you feel love.
This is why Breaking Dawn: Part 1 is so fucking good. Bella is existing in an entirely different movie the entire time. She’s stuck in a Christian litfic book about the right to life and a mother’s purpose, while everyone else—the Cullens, Charlie, Jacob, the viewers—knows that this isn’t a love story. This is not one woman’s brave choice.
This is a fucking horror movie.
From Bella’s blood-stained teeth as she slurps blood out of a to-go cup to her horrific weight loss, the visuals of Breaking Dawn: Part 1 are fantastic.2 Bella speed runs pregnancy over the course of a month and the artistic minds behind this movie said, hold my beer. Through the magic of CGI and puppetry, Bella is turned into a living corpse, gaunt and pale while her stomach grows bruised and distended.
We watch Bella physically and mentally deteriorate in front of us, all while she insists that this is what it means to be a mother.
And then we are delivered the greatest scene in cinematic history. Bella, emaciated, unable to walk, physically collapses under her own weight. Her back breaks. Her body fails. We hear the visceral snap of her spine, the crunch as her knees slam into the floor. The baby is coming. She is rushed to a hospital table where her husband then has to chew through her uterus and placenta in order to physically extract her baby. The birth and labor are so violent that Bella’s heart has literally stopped.
Meanwhile, the baby is born. She is delivered! The new father is incandescent with joy, smiling a beautiful, ichor-covered smile at his progeny while his wife lays, dying and pulled apart, on the table in front of him. But we don’t forget mother for long—no, her body still has use. The babe is placed upon her mother’s breast to nurse. And nurse she does. The first thing that Bella’s child does is to bite her. She has entered this world through her mother’s flesh, and now she will devour it.
This is what it means to be a mother, Bella tells us. And the women in the audience are nodding, thinking to themselves, yikes, man. she might be right.3
did Breaking Dawn crawl so Nosferatu could run?
yes
Can we not agree that this is the most insane, beautiful, delicious thing we have ever seen? And can we all agree that, if it wasn’t connected to the Twilight franchise, we’d all be obsessed with it?
Unfortunately, the key to loving Breaking Dawn: Part 1 is to intentionally detach yourself from the rest of the franchise. For it to work as a fun piece of body horror designed to comment on pregnancy, motherhood, the false myth of feminine suffering=feminine purpose, and the pro-life movement, you have to pretend that you don’t know anything else about the Twilight world, or that in the next installment Bella wakes up and her baby is like, seven years old and her best friend is in love with it.
(That takes us to a completely different genre of work, and I don’t have time to reread Lolita in order to critically analyze Part 2.)
So how did we get such a fantastically bonkers pregnancy body horror film that was specifically made for teen girls?
First, let us look to the source material.
Stephenie Meyers originally envisioned Breaking Dawn as a direct sequel to Twilight, and then became embroiled in a push and pull with her agents and publisher, who wanted more books about high school and fewer books about babies. That book actually exists, and is called Forever Dawn. Smeyers wrote it for her sister as a gift, and it allegedly is registered and available to read in the Library of Congress. But that book was not a YA—it was adult. And so, when it came time to write Breaking Dawn, Smeyers had basically already done the work almost a decade earlier, but through a very different lens. She will also be the first to tell you that the details and plot barely changed—she just switched things around a little to make it fit with the new details she’d introduced into the world. Forever Dawn was her labor of love, an idea that Smeyers couldn’t let go of. It grew in her, fed on her creative juices and violently burst into the world. Talk about body horror.
So, we have the bloated, parasitic idea of vampire babies that has been lurking in Smeyer’s mind since 2003, and then it is delivered into the hands of a woman who is coming off of a serial killer bender.
Breaking Dawn, like all the Twilight movies, was adapted for the screen by Melissa Rosenberg. In case you didn’t know, Rosenberg also served as head writer for Dexter between 2006-2010. Working nonstop on these projects simultaneously for four years was exhausting, and she couldn’t sustain it anymore. As a result, she left Dexter in 2010, and wrote the Breaking Dawn screenplays that year.
Now I am not saying that Breaking Dawn: Part 1 was a direct result of Rosenberg no longer having a vehicle in which to funnel all her serial killer imagery. But I’m not not saying that.
I’m also not saying that Breaking Dawn: Part 1 is good at the expense of Part 2 because all the puppetry budget went into making Bella’s corpse, and left no energy for Renesme’s Madame Alexander/melting born again doll puppet.4 But again, I will leave you to draw your own conclusions.
But I will say that if you watch Breaking Dawn: Part 1 in a vacuum, and turn it off right at the end and do not watch Part 2, you will be left with a very different story. Some may say it’s not complete, but to me, it delivers the same kick in the jaw as the Nosferatu (2024) ending.
The value of a woman lives in her body, and her capacity to bleed. This is what it means to be a woman, these movies tell us.
And I look around at the current world we live in, and think, yikes. yeah. maybe.
Like Bella, and unlike Willem Dafoe’s little ratfucking character, I believe in choice. So I will give you the choice of two options for your afternoon plans:
Listen to the complete Twilight Saga playlist as curated by me, which removes the songs I don’t like.
Go watch Breaking Dawn: Part 1, and then do not watch Part 2. Then maybe wash it down with Nosferatu.
My husband is very insistent that I’ve been a bit too mean about Mr. Edward Cullen, but for the purposes of this film analysis we’re ignoring the fact that Edward was actually 100% chill and right throughout this film and Bella needs intense psychological counseling.
People like to say that the Breaking Dawns are the tightest, most professional of the Twilight films, and therefore the best. I disagree, not just because I am legally married to Catherine Hardwicke, but also because the soundtracks got worse as the production values got better. (The key exception being New Moon, which has the best soundtrack of all 4 films.)
And the teen girls, too. In this excellent article from teensource.org, “4 Lessons I learned from The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn, Part 1” lesson number 4 is “Try not to get pregnant in the first place.”