The Manic but Fascinating Horror-Feminist Politics of Embryo (1976)

Well, it’s happened (again). I’ve seen the weirdest horror movie of my life.

In 1976, three years after the Roe v Wade decision, director Ralph Nelson cast Rock Hudson (gay icon and crucial figure in the HIV awareness movement in the 1980s) as a grief-stricken mad-scientist doctor and Barbara Carrera (Bond girl from Never Say Never Again) as a modern-day she-Frankenstein in a film about helping underdeveloped fetal tissue to grow and proliferate outside of the womb, into hyperintelligent and often quite violent full-grown people (and dogs).

Yes, I said dogs.

So let’s get embryonic on this shit.

Dr. Paul Holliston hits a dog—a Doberman pinscher no less—with his car. He brings her back to the underground high-tech fetal study lab that he has in his basement (obviously). Turns out, the dog is pregnant. Tragically, the mother dog cannot be saved—her injuries are too severe.

Good thing Dr. Holliston has “canine plasma” in his fridge, as well as “placental lactogen.” He administers these things to the dog and her pups, whom he unceremoniously decants from her womb and transfers to incubator tanks. As he takes care of one particular pup—the one that’s going to live—he says, “Like it or not, you’re going to get one hell of a chance at life. I hope you like it, Number One.”

The pup lives! Frankendog! But it’s weird, the placental lactogen causes the pup to continue to grow at an accelerated rate, so that she’s a full-grown dog in less than a week. And she’s hyperintelligent. Awkwardly, she also occasionally kills other dogs and hides their bodies in dense plants. Holliston doesn’t know about this. All he knows is that he was able to save an otherwise nonviable canine embryo and bring it to maturity.  Unsurprisingly, he writes in his medical notebook, “I have decided, under controlled conditions, to attempt a similar experiment with a human embryo.”

He goes and does the only thing he can: he harasses his friend, a doctor and administrator at the local hospital, so that he’ll donate a fetus from the next dying pregnant woman who shows up at the hospital, ideally from a Jane Doe. The other doctor agrees, because Holliston avers that he would never experiment on a viable fetus: “A six months fetus is a living being with a chance of survival outside of the womb, but 12 or 14 weeks has no hope whatsoever. I’m not asking for anything that has a chance for life on its own. An accident where the mother is dying is what I need. An abortion, even!”

So, three years after Roe, this film is making a modern day Frankenstein narrative, in which pregnant women who die are not themselves resurrected into a monster, but instead in which they contribute their unborn fetuses to be experimented on and brought to life by Dr. Holliston.

The film is extremely (and very annoyingly) discursive; Dr. Holliston understands himself as a warrior for fetuses and families alike, having witnessed his wife lose three pregnancies simply because the babies came too soon—“they were all genetically perfect!” he laments. He wants to help reduce the frequency of late-stage miscarriage. Or, rather, to help miscarried infants survive: “It’s possible that, within a few years, placental lactogen can be used to save miscarried infants and allow them to live.”

Holliston gets a fetus from the hospital, whose Jane Doe mother has died. He accelerates the fetus, using placental lactogen, to full-term size, and “delivers” her from the bath. “I have no delusions about the legal problems I will have to face.”

Yeah, no shit.

But it turns out the law is the least of his concerns: “A terrifying thing has taken place. Despite the discontinuance of the growth hormone, the infant is still developing at an accelerated rate…Existing cells are now aging and dying at a terrifying rate.”

The baby is growing up too fast, and its cells are too unstable. So what does he administer? METHOTREXATE. Does that pharmaceutical name sound familiar? It should.  In the film, this is described as a highly addictive drug. Which, in reality, it is not. In reality, methotrexate is a drug used to treat rheumatoid arthritis, psoriasis, some forms of cancer, and—wait for it—ectopic pregnancy. Which, of course, is a pregnancy that grows outside the womb. Makes sense, kind of? But not really, because methotrexate is the drug that’s used to stop extrauterine fetal development, in order to save the mother’s life. Here, it’s being used to halt the cell-aging process that appears to pose a danger to the fetus/baby.

Holliston’s wackadoodle experiment works. The baby grows in a few days to a beautiful, hyperintelligent women (Barbara Carrera), who can outpace anyone she meets in math, science, chess, or anything else. The film is hilariously (and even cringefully) clear on its politics there: when she challenges the local chess master to a game, he reminds her that chess is “the last bastion of male chauvinism.” And then he runs off screaming and crying when she whips his ass, only to throw the game in the final moments. “Nobody lets me win!” he shouts.

Her name, of course, is Victoria, because she represents victory. Victory for Dr. Holliston, victory for science and medicine, victory for women.

So, if you’re keeping track: the film’s stance on reproductive rights is crazy; this random guy plays God with a fetus, when the mother of the fetus has died. And its stance on feminism is shocking: we get a drop-dead gorgeous Bond Girl supergenius protagonist. As Holliston says of the girl, whom he names Victoria, she’s able to use “damn close” to 100% of her brain. Damn, Victoria.

But, according to this film, you can’t have someone that hot and that smart, without causing some real problems.

Our first signal that something is a little fishy with Victoria is that she pulls an actual fish out of a tank and watches it die. Those of you familiar with the telltale childhood signs of adult sociopathy, I know your bet sense is tingling. Then Dr. Holliston has her read the Bible, ostensibly for her edification, and she says simply that it’s “not very logical.” Uh-oh: a fish-murdering, hot, genius atheist? Look out, 1970s era America.

But there’s also a sorrowful note in the film. Victoria finds out that her mother gave a fake name at the hospital, and that her father’s name is not known to anyone. “I really don’t exist, do I? I’m a nonperson.” She has no family. Her only parent, such as he is, is Dr. Holliston himself. She is, really, quite a bit like Frankenstein’s monster in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

I hesitate to give too much credit to the filmmakers, but I’m going to do it anyway. They had to have been thinking on some level about Mary Shelley in making this film. Remember from last week’s post: Frankenstein was a novel born of repeated, horrific, catastrophic reproductive injury, loss, and reversal. Mary Shelley wrote her novel in part to process her own miscarriages, infant mortalities she lived through, and her near-death experiences during labor. Embryo, this latter-day Frankenstein reboot, imagines a world in which all that reproductive loss could be prevented.

But, of course…it can’t, really.

And we begin to see how destined for disaster it all is when Dr. Holliston and Victoria have sex.  She asks, “Will you teach me?” in a way that strongly evokes the moment for me in Rosemary’s Baby when Mia Farrow says to John Cassavetes, “Do I get a gold star, Daddy?” Is there a word for when you cringe and vomit at the same time? Hurlflinch? Pukewince? Cringespew?

After they hit it, though, something legitimately interesting happens. Victoria gets up and checks out her breasts in the mirror and fondles herself. She does a little dance of ecstasy in the bathroom in front of the mirror, all alone, no men watching her. She appears to be—gasp—taking pleasure in herself. Which is not something the universe of this film is prepared to handle. Wiith lightning flashing, and some janky special effects in play, she keeps erotically frolicking until she suddenly has some kind of bad cramp. She goes to Holliston’s lab, runs tests on herself, and eventually realizes she needs pituitary extract from a fetus of 5-6 months development. Obviously! Because autonomous female pleasure requires human sacrifice!

Victoria knows Holliston won’t help terminate a pregnancy that’s as far advanced as 5-6 months, just in order to harvest pituitary tissue, and she kinda gets that, but at the same time…she wants to save herself. She, like the monster from Frankenstein, wants to live.

Commence murder spree. Victoria murders Holliston’s sister-in-law, basically for no reason. Then she captures a pregnant hooker, hoping to take her fetus’ pituitary gland, and she kills her, too. But too bad: the pregnancy was already dead. Next up: Victoria puts Dr. Holliston’s five-months-pregnant daughter-in-law under the knife, hoping to harvest her fetus’ pituitary gland. Then she murders Holliston’s only child—his adult son—for trying to save his pregnant wife. In the scuffle, the removed fetus also dies. So, at this point, Victoria’s body count is five: three women, one fetus, and one man. Four of those five people are direct relatives of her creator/doktorvater, Dr. Holliston. So he’s upset.

In fact, Dr. Holliston is now dead-set on killing his protégé/sex slave/adoptive daughter Victoria, who has aged rapidly and appears to be about, oh, maybe like 90 years old now.

Which is to say: the hot genius has turned into a witch. Basically because she seduced and then betrayed the patriarch.

Surprised? Don’t be. Remember that Western Patriarchy and its Horror Art has a really, really hard time with powerful women. Think back to prior posts: Inana, the Bacchae, Lilith, Medusa, Erichtho, Grendel’s Mother, Sycorax, probably a thousand actual, historical midwives. So the Patriarchy tends to do one of three things with powerful women: impregnate them in order to domesticate them, make them super ugly, or straight up just kill them.

And here—lo and behold!—we get all three.

When the police arrive on the scene, at the very end, they discover that 90-year-old Victoria is in labor and delivering the child she conceived with Dr. Holliston in their brief, gnar-gnar encounter. She appears to die in the birth.

Hot genius she-Frankenstein Victoria gets fucked, knocked up, aged by 70 years, and killed off. Sounds just about par for human history. Victoria: the Patriarchy. The Patriarchy: Victorious.

So, I don’t know that I can fully recommend this film, because it is a puddle of sick.

But I will say this: if you want to watch a film try its ass off to be a feminist anthem—about reproductive agency, about supergenius women taking down male opponents who explicitly espouse “male chauvinism,” and about taking erotic pleasure in one’s own body—and then somehow collapse into a ham-fisted, reflexive witch-horror, I give you Embryo.