Women and Queerness in Horror: Grace

Content warnings: This article contains spoilers for Grace (2009), as well as discussion of pregnancy, miscarriages, childbirth, and stillbirth.

Watching Good Manners last week turned me on (no, not like that) to a subset of queer horror movies that (until now) completely escaped my notice. I’d loosely describe it as Rosemary’s Baby, subtracting Roman Polanski and adding lesbians. Fortunately for me, this covers my entries into this series for the next two weeks at least. I say fortunately, because finding movies to watch and write about for this series that don’t make me want to pull my hair out is, perhaps unsurprisingly, actually pretty difficult.

There’s a lot of Hays Code-related exhaustion and even more overt cases of “this movie promised to be gay but is either a) homophobic, b) softcore porn for men, or c) both” out there. As a result, let me tell you, I’m tired. Not that those movies don’t have something worth saying about them, mind you, but “hey, don’t watch this if you don’t want to be cranky for the rest of the week” isn’t much fun to read.

All this is being said with a fairly major caveat: “mommy horror” can be a hard sell if it’s not done thoughtfully. Because of that, I have to say I’m not entirely sure this week’s entry, Grace, worked for me. It wasn’t a bad movie. It’s not something I regret watching. It’s just not something I have any particular plans to rewatch any time soon. We’ll get into that.

Grace, released in 2009, is a fairly slow-burning 85 minute film written and directed by Paul Solet. It is based on the 2006 short film of the same name. Fans of the “mommy horror” subgenre — or just people who’ve been reading this series since I started writing it — have probably already had a question mark come up. Wait, isn’t mommy horror usually written and directed by women? In recent years that has been somewhat true, with movies like Relic (2020), Prevenge (2016), to an extent Dark Touch (2013) and The Babadook (2014) coming to mind. However, there are exceptions, like Shelley (2016) and Still/Born (2017), which were both directed and written by men.

Grace, however, belongs to a different and perhaps less contemporary legacy, treading more in the veins of Inside (2007), The Brood (1979), Demon Seed (1977), and, yes, Rosemary’s Baby (1968). Though Grace is framed less around the pregnancy itself and more focused on the aftermath — essentially picking up where Rosemary’s Baby left off, if you will — it’s difficult to ignore the particular presence of a cishet masculine anxiety about pregnancy, childbirth, and child-rearing in this movie; despite the story being heavily driven by women, several of whom are (perhaps ambiguously) queer.

Case in point: at least one man, attending a midnight screening of Grace at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival attempted to flee the theatre, passing out before reaching the front door due to the childbirth scene. Now, I can’t speak for anyone other than myself, but I have a notoriously delicate constitution, with more than one seemingly unprovoked fainting or vomiting spell in my childhood and teen years. I might go out on a limb here and say that if your local physically fragile, queer, nonbinary uterus-having gremlin found that scene certainly unsettling and uncomfortable but not worth fainting over, that might say more about you than it does about the movie.

Okay, I get it: I might have to look into writing a pregnancy/mommy horror series after I wrap this one up. There’s a lot to unpack in that subgenre in its own right. Focusing in on Grace, though, for now I’ll just say: don’t watch this movie if you’re pregnant, or trying to be. Me rolling my eyes at some of these reactions in no way negates that these sequences are hard to watch if you’re expecting, or thinking about, children. While it didn’t turn my future hopes for parenthood on their head, it did make me kind of grateful I have no intentions (or means) to get pregnant anytime in the near future.

Moving on into the plot itself. Grace pretty much opens on our lead, Madeline, having remarkably dispassionate sex with her husband, Michael. I know, I know: Zoe, why is there a movie in your queer horror series that opens with sex between a cis man and a cis woman? Yeah, it threw me, too. I have seen so much more of Stephen Park’s butt than I ever wanted, especially out of a scene that clearly was supposed to be more tragic and hollow than sexy. All the same, it’s clear that this scene is not about intimacy. The couple is trying, for what we later learn is not the first time, to conceive a child.

It is no easy feat, given that Madeline has miscarried twice in the past. That isn’t something we learn until later, but it ties in the very rote, even mechanical pattern their sex life has fallen into. There’s nothing fun about their sex for either of them, really — its sole purpose at this point is to conceive — and even the desire to have a child is further complicated by past grief and loss. In short, this marriage is not doing well, though it’s nearly entirely due to external factors beyond either of their control.

Madeline does manage to conceive though, and in a subsequent scene over lunch with Michael’s parents, we learn that one of those external factors is the presence of Michael’s highly opinionated, decidedly overbearing mother. Vivian, I should add, spends basically the entire movie trying to vicariously live out her maternal instincts through Madeline’s pregnancy, now that her own son is a married adult and expectant father. In doing so, she introduces the film’s central conflict between what will soon be three maternal figures. She also brings to light the fact that the men in this movie are mostly there to be ineffectual and (at best) thinly-written plot devices.

In some cases, this is a welcome subversion for the horror genre; I’ve spoken positively about it as a writing strategy in CAM, for instance. Here, though, it’s a little murkier. Are the men in this movie weakened and rendered kind of useless to put its women at the centre of the story, affirming that Paul Solet knew this story wasn’t about or for him? Are they reflective of cishet masculine anxiety about pregnancy and their relative lack of relevance to or control over the emotional and physical changes that their pregnant partners go through? Good question. I have no idea. I’d like to be generous and believe the former, but you know… horror movies. I’ve seen some things. It is important to note though that three out of four of the women are some form of queer.

Anyway. One of the major sources of friction between Madeline and Vivian — muddled through with Michael’s relatively milquetoast attempts to stand up for his wife — is Madeline’s insistence that she does not plan to consult doctors or give birth in a hospital. She would prefer to work with a midwife, while Vivian repeatedly tries to persuade her to work with Dr. Sohn, a friend of hers. This conflict is further complicated when we learn that the midwife Madeline has in mind is an ex-girlfriend of hers named Patricia Lang, who now has a new — visibly younger — girlfriend-slash-assistant named Shelly.

I wanted to like Patricia. I may even be more generous with her than the movie really intended for me to be. I have a crush on Samantha Ferris that definitely has nothing to do with me giving her the benefit of the doubt … oh, who am I kidding? Even at our most generous reading, and crush notwithstanding, it’s difficult to overlook some of the weird notes the writing hits.

When Patricia first greets Madeline at her office, audience members who are attentive — or specifically looking for it — will quickly pick up on the past relationship. It is also easy to see the fact that Patricia is clearly not over Madeline. It’s unclear how many of these feelings were reciprocated at the time, and it’s certainly unclear how many are reciprocated now though. Our third maternal figure of the movie has been introduced, while Shelly and Michael both look on, and are various shades of uncertain, unconvinced, and maybe even threatened by the shadow of this past intimacy.

It’s hard to tell if Madeline has told her husband about this past relationship — or if Patricia has told Shelly — but despite Michael’s distinctly ineffectual characterization, neither of these characters are stupid. They’re clearly picking up that this relationship isn’t a purely platonic or a purely professional one. It’s arguably to Grace’s credit that it positions both Shelly and Michael as visibly uncomfortable, as opposed to just leaning into the “straight man threatened by lesbian” trope.

Still, Michael and Madeline don’t really seem to discuss this history at any point. Even as an intimacy stirs up between Madeline and Patricia while they discuss the birthing process and neatly exclude Michael from the conversation, rendering him the third wheel in his own impending parenthood. This is either a good thing — subtly signposting that Michael is aware that his wife isn’t straight, has dated women in the past, and despite some uncertainty about his place in the new dynamic between Madeline and Patricia, isn’t unduly concerned — or it leans into the idea that the maybe-bisexual Madeline is emotionally, if not physically, incapable of monogamous commitment.

You’ve probably gathered by now that I spent the majority of this movie playing a game of “should I be generous or suspicious?” between conflicting possible interpretations. This question is never really answered, though, as it’s not long before Madeline starts facing a complication. She begins experiencing chest pains and, dismissing her requests to call Patricia, Michael rushes her into the ER. It plays into familiar tropes of women in horror movies being spoken over, dismissed, or disbelieved about what’s going on with their own bodies.

To Michael’s and the film’s credit, though, he actually realizes quite quickly that he was wrong, when the doctors on staff and Dr. Sohn (following Vivian’s intrusive instructions) claim Madeline is experiencing pre-eclampsia and that they have to induce labor, despite her only being 31 weeks pregnant. Michael, in maybe his only useful decision of the movie, changes his mind and calls Patricia. Upon Patricia’s arrival, she quickly proves herself to be more competent and attentive than any of the hospital employees, or Dr. Sohn. She’s quick to identify what’s really going on with Madeline, which is a gallstone that is then harmlessly resolved. Madeline is later discharged safely.

All’s well that ends well, right? It’s nice to see a — presumably lesbian, though the words lesbian, bisexual or even queer are never actually used in the film — woman taken seriously as competent in medical care, especially in a horror movie. It’s almost like women know what they’re talking about with regard to their own bodies. It’s almost like people with uteruses in medical professions might be more switched on to the fact that there are a host of possible complications that accompany pregnancy, not immediately or directly related to the actual fetus.

Sure, until the night time drive home from the emergency room, at which point something in the mechanics of Michael and Madeline’s SUV is revealed to be faulty. This causes a crash that kills Michael and the fetus, though Madeline herself survives. The incident marks the movie’s turn from a slow-creeping “something is wrong with this pregnancy, maybe” to a horror movie in earnest. Madeline decides she’s going to carry the fetus to term, and, once cleared to return home, walls herself off from the rest of the world to grieve.

The pervasive isolation — while entirely understandable — contributes to Grace’s stifling atmosphere as Madeline doesn’t answer the phone, leave the house, and doesn’t answer the door, rendering this movie into something that might be less scary and more suffocatingly tense. For what it’s worth, this aspect of the movie really worked for me, opting out of elaborate CGI or unnecessary jump scares to instead capture the particular, dissociative and smothering kind of fear that comes with grief, loneliness and the inability to connect with or relate to the world around you in the wake of trauma.

Madeline spends much of this time on some kind of autopilot, culminating in a visit to a children’s clothing and toy store, where she looks miserably through its collection of stuffed animals. When an employee of the store approaches to ask if she needs help, Madeline fails to give any meaningful answer, before her water — rather bloodily — breaks, and she promptly collapses. We then jump to Madeline undergoing what is clearly a deeply painful labor at Patricia’s clinic. She is helped by Patricia, another midwife, and Shelly, who mostly looks on in increasing discomfort.

Bringing home the core tension between Grace’s three mothers, Patricia is so emotionally involved with Madeline and the delivery of the film’s titular fetus that she begins crying herself when she’s able to lift Grace out of the birthing pool. There’s a long, uncomfortable moment where Madeline asks to hold her baby, and Patricia seems frozen, almost reluctant to hand the baby over. However, she eventually concedes, and the three midwives leave the room to let Madeline say goodbye in peace, though she is still being watched through the clinic’s security cameras.

As part of this farewell, Madeline brings her child to her breast as though to feed her, tearfully pleading with her to stay. This prompts Patricia to re-enter the room, planning to tell Madeline she “can’t will a baby back to life.” She is cut short when the newly-named Grace can be seen and heard stirring and whining with the familiar cry of the hungry newborn. Despite Patricia’s clear concern and confusion, there’s not much standing in the way of Madeline returning home with her newborn — which is exactly what she does.

All traces of the previous depression are seemingly banished. The house is newly washed in warm, sunny yellow lighting that mirrors the vast improvement in Madeline’s mood and the liveliness of her baby. The house does feel empty, but comfortably so, having traded out the previously stifling weight of isolation for the busywork of being a new mother. Everything isn’t perfect, though: Madeline is blocking her mother-in-law’s efforts to meet her granddaughter. She is also rejecting out of hand all insistence that she should have Grace checked out by Dr. Sohn, despite what should probably be a self-evident concern over a dead baby suddenly … not being dead anymore.

Yeah, just go with it. It’s a horror movie. No one promised that horror movie protagonists are clever. In fact, they’re more often quite the opposite. Notably, though, Vivian’s inappropriate and clearly uninvited intrusions — you know, her inability to respect the clearly set boundaries of a woman with whom she isn’t even entitled to a relationship anymore if Madeline doesn’t want one, given that the person that tied them together is unfortunately deceased — are far from the only example of off-base behavior carried out by the three maternal figures in this movie.

Patricia, for instance, comes over to check on Madeline and Grace. She also takes the opportunity to bring Madeline flowers, excuses herself to the bathroom to check her hair, then tries to touch Madeline’s hair, as though she’s not too busy raising her child and grieving her very recently deceased husband. Girl, get a clue. This isn’t a romcom. Actually, that probably explains a lot of Patricia’s behavior: she thinks she’s in a different genre movie. Oops.

Still, this is also the sequence that takes Madeline and Patricia’s romantic history from the loosely implied to the more explicitly confirmed. It is made clear between Madeline flinching away from Patricia’s overture, and Patricia’s allusion to the fact that a former friend of theirs used to joke that the two of them were playing “ma and pa” to Madeline’s cat, Jonesy. Madeline’s rejection makes things awkward enough that Patricia promptly leaves again, and once she’s gone, the reality that something is wrong with Grace comes to the foreground.

Her hair comes out in fairly sizable clumps no matter how gently Madeline brushes it. She breaks out into a bleeding rash when bathed. Flies begin to swarm and gather in Grace’s nursery room, crawling around her crib and on her face, attracted to the inexplicably off smell of her skin. Jonesy — who I find it hard to believe isn’t a nod to the beloved cat-slash-protector of Alien fame — is mistrustful of and even hostile to the baby. We also see that something has changed in Madeline too. The movie went to great lengths to establish her pacifist nature and veganism, but when she perceives the flies swarming the nursery as a threat to her child, she doesn’t hesitate to kill one, and even seems to enjoy it.

Meanwhile, Patricia is shopping for a mobile home, and is badly lying to her assistant-slash-girlfriend about it when Shelly confronts her. She is seemingly making plans to run away with Madeline and Grace, despite not actually talking to Madeline about these plans. Additionally, she largely ignores Shelly’s hurt feelings and rather on-point insistence that Madeline is “sick,” and that whatever past relationship Patricia and Madeline had “is over.”

Grace toes a weird line with its queerness. On the one hand, it’s fairly unspectacular; Patricia’s (along with Shelly’s, and Madeline’s) queerness does drive a significant portion of the plot. It does so without being their sole trait, and without being sexualized for male consumption. On the other hand, there’s some ingredients of the story that don’t quite pan out because Grace takes itself so seriously.

Patricia tracking down and buying an RV after being reunited with Madeline for about five minutes — okay, I’m exaggerating, but you get the point — sits too close to the U-Haul lesbian stereotype to be ignored. Madeline’s cat being hostile to the maybe-a-monster baby falls into some “cat lesbian” tropes, too. However, Grace isn’t playing these as a joke. It’s not winking at anyone. It’s almost like Paul Solet sat down with his script and thought to himself: “well, lesbians like RVs and cats, right? If I include these plot elements, my viewers will know there are lesbians.” Yawn.

It is worth mentioning at this point — in one of what is by now several ambivalent elements of this movie — that its queer women are pretty noticeably sexless, too. There’s emotional intimacy, and some touching, but … any more direct envisioning of queer sexuality seems nearly completely absent from this movie.

If we’re being generous, this might be Paul Solet deliberately trying to avoid writing and directing sex scenes between women for the enjoyment of men. I’d certainly like to believe that’s the case, and I probably would prefer no queer sex scenes to one that feels exploitative, on balance. On the other hand, we’ve all heard “I don’t want to write [insert minority here] because I might offend [insert minority here]” enough times that, ultimately, I have to be wary of men writing sexless lesbians just so they don’t have to deal with it. Ooh, women have sex drives that don’t have to include men. So scary, so threatening, so difficult to write. Double yawn.

This sexlessness doesn’t stop the movie from leaning into Patricia’s off-kilter behavior, though. For instance, Patricia parks outside Madeline’s house at night, essentially watching the house. This coincides with Madeline properly realizing Grace is drinking her blood, rather than breastfeeding on milk. It’s the conjuncture of two unsettling revelations in relationships that take from Madeline more than she’s being given.

While that’s normal between a mother and infant (though obviously not to this degree), Patricia’s behavior is clearly inappropriate. On the other hand, once again, there’s another, more generous reading: that Patricia is in some way supernaturally aware of Madeline and Grace’s distress due to the intimacy of the birthing process. Your mileage, as ever, may vary as to which interpretation rings more true for you. However, the movie doesn’t really commit to either.

Still, as Grace’s behaviour and state of health becomes increasingly concerning, Madeline becomes increasingly desperate in her attempts to get through to Patricia. Shelly, however, blocks her calls, claiming that Patricia is out and that she’ll pass the message along, when she clearly has no intention of actually doing so. At the same time, Vivian who has still not been allowed to see her granddaughter, — though now it’s obvious why Madeline is trying to hide Grace from people — enlists Dr. Sohn to help her prove Madeline isn’t a fit parent so she can claim custody over Grace.

Grace, in essence, increasingly resembles a convoluted three-person tango between mother figures behaving badly by this point in the movie. Patricia is essentially leveraging her history with Madeline and her involvement in Grace’s birth to work her way back into Madeline’s life, even at the most generous interpretation possible of her behavior. Vivian is attempting to gain custody over Grace, who she’s never met. This is essentially in an effort to replace her — adult, deceased — son. Madeline ignores all suggestions that she isn’t equipped to raise Grace healthily or safely.

The horror, such as it is, central to this part of the movie works in two ways. The first leans into things that would happen with pregnancy and early child-rearing even under entirely normal circumstances, albeit especially when combined with grief, but dialed up to eleven. Madeline’s displays of anemia, fatigue, dissociation, isolation, paranoia, and desperation for control, are scary. They aren’t scary in the way of It’s Alive or even Rosemary’s Baby. They’re scary because the things Madeline is experiencing are uncanny; much like Grace herself. They’re next-door-neighbors to what’s real, but they come back wrong.

The rest of the movie’s horror — as best I can discuss it without fully spoiling its climax, since that sequence does work better if you go in not knowing anything — is actually less about the baby Grace herself. It’s more about the dizzying lengths the three maternal figures will go to to fulfill their maternal drives.

With the film’s resolution, if it can be called that, we see Patricia, Madeline, and Grace fleeing in the RV bought earlier in the movie. I can’t describe the ending as romantic, exactly, but Patricia’s intentions, at least, are clearly to raise the increasingly voracious, carnivorous Grace together. It’s unclear, however, how much Madeline is in this as her romantic partner, or how much she’s just on a sort of maternal autopilot.

In essence, while Grace does bring to mind similar reflections to Good Manners on what a family is or should be — though I’m not sure this reading is deliberately baked into the movie — it seems a lot less positive. The driving force of the movie’s ending is the extreme lengths these women are willing to go to. Not to protect the child or raise her well and healthily, but to fulfill their own arguably selfish needs as parents.

From a film criticism or analysis standpoint — if this article can be called that, given my total lack of qualifications in film criticism — Grace has a lot to offer. It is populated with clever cinematography and deeply evocative soundscaping that provides a powerful backdrop to the movie’s understated cues and suffocatingly unnerving slow-burn. From an audience standpoint, I can see why it might have under-performed, netting for instance a 5.1 out of 10 score on IMDb and a fairly predictable mismatch between critic and audience reviews on Rotten Tomatoes.

From an analytical standpoint, Grace not spoonfeeding you all its answers — and, in fact, leaving some questions unanswered altogether — gives us a lot to say about it. Perhaps especially giving talking points around the fact that Grace doesn’t always seem to be entirely sure what it’s saying. As an audience member, though, I can see that people expecting a queer romance to figure more prominently — or, indeed, positively — in Grace might be disappointed, as will people hoping for an It’s Alive or The Brood-style monster baby.

All in all, is Grace worth a watch? Sure, though maybe just once; unless you watch it and love it, in which case, more power to you. However, it’s the rare case of a horror movie that I’d say people will benefit from knowing what it is beforehand, so they don’t go in hoping for something that this movie, probably, isn’t.