Horror and pregnancy have always been topics that horror filmmakers fit together like a hand in a glove, but 2024 has been an especially active year for the subgenre. Earlier this year, The First Omen provided a shockingly scary refresh to a classic series, but it’s Alien: Romulus and Immaculate, the latter of which is now on Hulu, that tie together most closely, and make for one of the year’s best and most twisted double features.
[Ed. note: This story contains light spoilers for both Alien: Romulus and Immaculate.]
Immaculate, the fantastic low-budget horror movie from earlier this year, stars Sydney Sweeney as a nun who joins an odd and exclusive convent in Italy. Shortly after she arrives, weird things start happening and she suddenly becomes pregnant — a verifiable miracle according to the male clergy around her.
The movie is beautifully shot, with dark, brooding shadows hanging over the halls of the convent and sinister figures lurking at the edge of every frame. It’s full of all the luridness and grime you might expect from an exploitation-lite horror movie about nuns, but on the surface it still feels like it’s setting up for something very Rosemary’s Baby. You can practically feel the devil creeping through the hallways in the movie’s deliciously eerie nighttime scenes. So when Immaculate’s excellent twist arrives, and it turns out things are more sci-fi than Satan, the movie turns all our expectations on their heads just in time for the most shocking finale scene of the year.
But aside from setting up its brutal shocker of a conclusion, Immaculate’s twist also makes it relevant to this week’s number one movie at the box office: Alien: Romulus. While Romulus may be a little hit-or-miss with some of its scares, one of the most undeniably effective sequences comes via a similarly mysterious sci-fi pregnancy, which leads to a finale that’s no less bloody, brutal, or disturbing than Immaculate’s ending.
This big connecting thread makes these movies a perfect pairing: two profoundly fucked up movies about the horrors of being an expecting mother. So if you’re planning to catch Alien: Romulus sometime soon, throw Immaculate on first so you can double down on the screams.
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