The Unborn

The snow just kept falling and falling on Sunday. On Monday, I couldn't even move the car and spent the early afternoon waiting for the snowplow to arrive. In rural Massachusetts, everyone gets their driveways plowed. The hardware stores are always stocked with the little reflector poles that people use to mark the driveway path in deep snow.

Fortunately the snowplow arrived in time for me to get on the road for the 2:50 showing of The Unborn at Tyngsboro. Before I left, I spent a frustrating hour trying to print out my new insurance card from the Internet. What a nightmare. A horror movie seemed like just the ticket, especially after the long two-month hiatus of the holidays, when no horror movies are released. January is a great horror month.

The Unborn is a Michael Bay production, so I knew not to expect anything too intellectually challenging. Like I said, I was actually in the mood for this kind of throw-away entertainment.

In the opening shots, we are high above the winter cityscape of Chicago. Eventually we float down to a young woman jogging all by herself in snowy park by the lake. This frames the base-layer source context of the horror as the existential isolation of modern urban life.

Later we are introduced the additional layers of source context of the horror: the young woman is left on her own by her father (parental neglect). Moreover she is sexually active without being married (premarital sexuality). This last layer actually turns out to be the most potent, since the surface-level horror arises from her nightmares concerning an unborn child. In social narrative terms, the horror thus arises from sexuality without reproduction---the stoppage of the flow of life and the denial of childbearing by the sexually active woman. This will culminate the final "gotcha" horror twist at the end of the movie.

The story of the movie is mostly a Jewish version of The Exorcist, down to some outright ripping off the exorcism scenes involving Max Von Sydow, except in this case it is Gary Oldman as rabbi, chanting away the devil in his presence.

Halfway through the movie, I realized I had miscounted. I had thought there were three Holocaust movies out this season, but it turns out there were four, since the historical source of the horror in the story is an event that occurred among the prisoners at Auschwitz.

The interesting twist was that the horror-creation incident occurs within the Jewish prisoners at the camp, and the supernatural influence is an evil demon from Jewish folklore who is attempting to reborn through a Jewish woman. The demon has the power to possess Christians as well.

It was quite an interesting movie to come out in the context of the Israeli-Gaza War. As it happens, Israel has a more complex history than many people realize. Just look up The Transfer Agreement, or read this article for background information that you will not hear in the U.S. media, one that sheds light on how evil can propagate. There is a reason why things have turned out the way they did.

All this from a Michael Bay movie!