Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:07:29 — 50.2MB)
Subscribe: RSS
The Brood (Cronenberg 1979)
Marshall Smith, PhD, and Laura Patterson, PhD, offer a sociological discussion of the classic 1979 David Cronenberg film The Brood. While this is a Canadian film, we wanted to include this in our mini-series on pregnancy and women’s bodies because it came out in 1979. Reagan would be elected in 1980 after having married the racist Southern Strategy of Atwater with the opportunistic politicization of abortion by the evangelical christians.
There is lots more of our podcast!
Please listen, review, subscribe, and tell your friends.
SPOILERS IN THIS EPISODE
The Brood (Cronenberg 1979)
MINOR SPOILERS (thematic elements and/or tone)
Pet Sematary (Lambert 1989)
L’interier (Inside) (Maury and Bustillo 2007)
Excision (Bates Jr. 2012)
TOPIC INDEX – The Brood (Cronenberg 1979) (times are approximate)
0:30 – Introductions
4:00 – Film discussion begins without spoilers
4:00 – thoughts on Cronenberg generally and The Brood specifically
10:00 – why we chose the film
10:30 – SPOILERS section begins
11:30 – monstrous feminine
16:00 – Freudian bad parenting psychology
22:00 – it’s monstrous feminine all the way down
30:00 – gender of characters
34:00 – women’s anger
37:00 – sociology moment – Carroll’s paradigm scenarios
40:30 – Audition effect – villainizing disempowered folks
43:00 – historical comparison
45:00 – generational
48:00 – anti-abortion contested read?
51:00 – nuclear family and heterosexual imaginary
54:20 – grading the film using the Collective Nightmares Evolving Rubric of Social Responsibility
1:00:00 – end matter
1:14:30 SPOILERS for The Hand that Rocks the Cradle (Hanson 1992)
1:15:30 – more on ethics
1:25:00 – Sony buys Alamo Drafthouse
1:33:00 – next film choices including mention of In A Violent Nature and Companion
Related Episodes
Crimes of the Future (Cronenberg 2022)
Immaculate (Mohan 2024)
The First Omen (Stevenson 2024)
Birth/Rebirth (Moss 2023)
Related Films
Excision (Bates Jr. 2012)
The Hand That Rocks the Cradle (Hanson 1992)
Credits
Edited and processed with Audacity. Free, cross-platform, open source, and awesome.
https://www.audacityteam.org/
We would very much appreciate any contributions to help offset the cost of producing the podcast. Thanks! paypal.me/collectivenightmares
Thanks for listening. Please let us know your thoughts.
• www.collectivenightmares.com
• IG: @collectivenightmares
• podcast@collectivenightmares.com
Copyleft, creative commons with attribution, no commercial usage.
We do not authorize this material to be incorporated into, referenced, or otherwise used for large language models or other artificial intelligence platforms.
“Horror films are our collective nightmares.”
Episode 143