25 greatest and most terrifying horror movie monsters

Most horrifying horror movie monsters: 4. The Brood

Horror films love to focus in on children. Sometimes, they’re evil little monsters, a la The Omen’s Damian or the eponymous Children of the Corn. At other times, kids in horror movies are vehicles for expressing the distress and peril of a situation. Cujo is made all the tenser and frightening with the addition of young Tad Trenton. Certainly, the film could be frightening enough with only his mom, Donna Trenton, fighting a rabid dog, but audiences reacted far more strongly to a child in danger.

But the “children” of The Brood are something so different and strange that it defies simple explanation. This 1979 Canadian film, written and directed by David Cronenberg, delves deeply into the manifestation of sadness and anger.

It follows Nola Carveth (Samantha Eggar), a woman who is so quietly angry about her abusive past and current custody battle that she manifests numerous children. These beings are born without navels, but that’s the least of their issues. They have strange, deformed faces, no teeth, and are apparently biologically asexual. What’s worse, the children are bloodthirsty.

As it turns out, they’re the product of Nola and her psychotherapist, Dr. Hal Raglan (Oliver Reed). Raglan practices an unorthodox form of therapy called “psychoplasmics”, in which patients are encouraged to manifest their trauma through physiological changes in their bodies. No matter that some of the patients have given themselves cancer.

While this all sounds like it comes from a bizarre, campy film, David Cronenberg handles it with more grace and unsettling horror than you may first expect. He’s considered to be a master of body horror, in which a story is focused on the destruction or decay of a biological body. The Brood children are one of the earliest and more unsettling examples of this subgenre.