“Now here’s a particularly nasty little number,” says Roger Ebert in his one-star review of David Cronenberg’s 1979 film The Brood before launching into what exactly makes it so nasty–killer clones disguised as first-graders, a fetus-licking Samantha Eggar, teachers bludgeoned to death with toy hammers. No offense to Ebert–the iconic film critic had a love-hate relationship with the genre, and I’ve always respected his reviews even when I disagreed–but in his dismissal of The Brood as a “nauseating” “el sleazo exploitation film,” he actually made it sound tantalizing, especially for body-horror freaks like myself who love seeing women at their worst. 

If you haven’t seen it yet, let me introduce you to The Brood. Dr. Hal Raglan (Oliver Reed) tries a radical form of psychotherapy on Nola Carveth (Eggar), a traumatized woman fighting for custody of her five-year-old daughter, Candice (Cindy Hinds). When Candice returns from one of her visits with Nola with scratches and bruises on her back, her father, Frank (Art Hindle), documents her injuries as evidence in order to win full custody of the girl. Nola might not be the best mother, but there’s no way she’d hurt her beloved daughter. There might be something else—actually, many little somethings—hurting Candice. And they’re all made out of Nola’s pain and DNA, ready to attack the targets of her rage. 

While Ebert didn’t quite get Cronenberg’s vision back then, plenty now praise The Brood’s “off the wall” but “emotionally realistic” depiction of divorce, especially how it affects children. To be clear, this isn’t to say divorce is an inherently bad thing. But like Kramer vs. Kramer, which came out the same year as The Brood, or 2019’s brutal melodrama Marriage Story, Cronenberg accurately captures how quickly children can become collateral damage when adults don’t play fair. 

But before you start thinking The Brood is probably more tame than Ebert suggested, I’m going to remind you that the film is gross. This is Cronenberg, after all. As Sharai Bohannon put it in a round-up of Cronenberg’s “sickest” films earlier this year for Dread Central, “This psychological body horror hits all of the WTF notes we have come to expect from the filmmaker.”

I mentioned earlier that Eggar licks a fetus in a moment that famously makes stomachs crawl, but that doesn’t come close to capturing just how freaky The Brood actually gets. I won’t spoil anything, though. You’re just going to have to watch yourself. 

The Brood is streaming on HBO Max. If you love it, let me know: @ashjenexi on Instagram and X.

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