Misfit Robot Daydream: The Brood (1979)

The Brood

The Brood is a horror film about the stress of parenthood and child rearing. The film centers on a little girl who is terrorized by child-size mutants (the titular "brood"), and the efforts of her father to protect her. Meanwhile, her mother is in a mental institution, trying to deal with the psychological damage of being abused by HER parents, while she in turn is suspected of abusing her own daughter. Oliver Reed plays her psychiatrist, who has an extremely unorthodox treatment that involves his patients role-playing that he is their father, and may cause the patients' mental problems to physically manifest themselves on their bodies as sores, tumors, and possibly even worse things.

Murder in the Kindergarten

Their are several scenes with the little girl topless that I don't think would even be legal if they were filmed today. It's weird, because I don't know if they were INTENDED to be disturbing then, or if that is just a sign of the changing standards of what is considered appropriate between the 1970s and today (probably both). There is one scene where the daughter stands topless in her bedroom, bathed in golden light, as her father snaps Polaroids of her, and he's actually doing it to record evidence of her scratches and bruises, because he thinks her mother is abusing her. But when I first saw it, my reaction was "WTF, is he making child pornography?"

Young Child is Attacked by The Brood

Meanwhile, the film has confrontations with mental patients, and violence perpetrated against the little girl's grandparents and school teacher, before culminating in a shocking showdown between the father, the mother, the psychiatrist, and "The Brood," that must be seen to be believed. Like most David Cronenberg horror, this is a disturbing film that affects you on an almost subconscious level and really gets under your skin.

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