The Brood is a 1979 Canadian horror film written and directed by David Cronenberg. It stars Oliver Reed, Art Hindle, and Samantha Eggar, with Henry Beckman, Nuala Fitzgerald, Susan Hogan, Cindy Hinds, Gary McKeehan, and Nicholas Campbell.

It was a profitable film, grossing over five million dollars. Positively received by critics, The Brood became a cult film in later decades. Academics have shown a scholarly interest in the film for such themes as mental illness and parenthood.

The Chicago Film Critics Association named it the 88th scariest film of all time in 2006.

Here‘s a link to quotes from the film, and here‘s a link to the complete film.

Cronenberg’s inspiration for The Brood was his own acrimonious divorce and bitter child custody battle over his and his ex-wife’s daughter. In fact, Hindle and Eggar were cast as Frank and Nola Carveth because of their physical resemblances to Cronenberg and his ex-wife.

Another inspiration for the film was Kramer vs. Kramer, though The Brood is meant to be a correction of the optimistic ending of a marriage in the American drama that came out the same year. In spite of the science fiction element (“psychoplasmics”) of The Brood, Cronenberg described it as “more realistic” than Kramer vs. Kramer, and he called it “the most classic horror film [he’d] done” in retrospect.

Of course, divorce causes serious emotional trauma in the children caught in the middle of their parents’ fighting, and the link between The Brood‘s themes of mental illness, parenthood, and separation lead to another key theme in the film: child abuse–not just physical, but also emotional. I’m reminded of that poem by Philip Larkin, for in many ways, that’s what The Brood is all about.

Parental abuse, however, isn’t the only kind of abuse to be explored in this film. The ways in which psychotherapy can be abusive, intentionally or not, are also an issue here. And when one considers the ramifications of transference, an abusive psychiatrist, psychologist, or psychoanalyst can be just like an abusive parent, as we see in the film’s opening scene.

Dr. Hal Raglan (Reed), a psychotherapist, is demonstrating to a group of people something he calls “psychoplasmics,” a form of therapy he’s devised to get his patients to release suppressed emotional trauma by making it appear as physiological changes to their bodies. His audience watches him facilitate a father transference in a patient, Mike (McKeehan), who has abandonment issues with his biological father.

Raglan speaks cruelly to him, like an authoritarian father, calling Mike weak and feminine for not looking him in the eyes. His harsh words are meant to bring out Mike’s psychological pain, as part of the therapy, but it just looks as though Raglan is retraumatizing him. Indeed, the last thing that those spots seen all over Mike’s chest and face look like are signs of healing.

Nonetheless, at least one of the members of the audience is amazed at the results of psychoplasmics, and thinks Raglan is a genius. Frank Carveth is less impressed, and he’ll be furious when he sees marks all over the body of his daughter, Candice (Hinds), concluding that Raglan is a fraud and that his ex-wife, Nola, has physically abused their daughter.

That demonstration, with the lights turned down low and Raglan and Mike on a stage embracing at the end, looks more like a theatre performance than real therapy. The doctor switching from abusive words to hugging Mike, in fact, looks like traumatic bonding.

In these contradictions, we see the anti-psychiatric critique in The Brood. Psychotherapy is supposed to help the mentally ill, not make them worse. One could consider this film to be an allegory on religion, too, with Raglan’s therapeutic innovations as the beginnings of a new cult, conning people into following him and paying him for a salvation that is nothing of the sort.

Indeed, Nola has been receiving Raglan’s therapy for her own mental health issues, and she’s getting worse rather than better. Frank wants to stop his ex from seeing their little girl, to protect her from further physical abuse, but Raglan won’t have it, since he feels that Nola’s seeing Candice regularly is crucial to her recovery. Frank threatens to sue Raglan.

Now, what is “psychoplasmics” as a form of therapy, really, in its essence? Symbolically speaking, it’s projection, and projective identification. The patient tries to push his or her pain outward, to get it out of him- or herself, hence the markings on the patient’s body.

The problem is that through projection and projective identification, the pain that is pushed out tends to be put into other people, and this is what is personified by the brood of deformed, killer kids that Nola parthenogenetically produces. “They fill you with the faults they had/And add some extra, just for you,” as Larkin says in his poem.

The thing about projection and projective identification is that, as ego defence mechanisms, they act as a kind of amateurish therapy for the self, a self-soothing. If people have hurt you, by projecting that pain onto others (often not the ones who initially hurt you), you can relieve yourself of it, then carry on your life in a reasonably functional way. You kid yourself into thinking you’ve removed the pain from yourself and passed it on to somebody else (“Man hands on misery to man”), though that pain is still rooted in the unconscious.

This passing on of pain is what Nola is doing by creating the brood and having them kill for her. First, we see Raglan do a therapy session with her, in which he takes on the role of Candice to bring out the source of the abuse the little girl suffered. At first, Nola naturally denies it, even going to the point of claiming that “Mummies don’t hurt their own children.”

This, of course, is utter nonsense coming from Nola’s mouth. The ideal mother would never hurt her own child, certainly not intentionally…”They may not mean to, but they do.” Many mothers and fathers out there at least don’t deliberately hurt their children…but some do. Nola’s certainly aware of the knowingly hurtful ones, for as Raglan carries on with his therapy with her, the repressed pain comes to the surface, and she admits that “bad mummies…fucked-up mummies” sometimes hurt their kids (“But they were fucked up in their turn”).

Raglan gets her to admit that her own mother physically abused her. He now takes on the role of her mother, repeating her denials of mothers ever committing abuse in order to provoke more of a surfacing of Nola’s pain. And just as with Mike, he has her physically manifest her pain…but it doesn’t appear as mere marks on her skin. It comes out as the brood.

The fact is that Nola’s trauma is far more severe than Mike’s ever was. He suffers abandonment issues, which are surely terrible, but she as a child was beaten, scratched, and thrown down the stairs. Her alcoholic mother, Juliana Kelly (Fitzgerald), is as much in denial of what she did to little Nola as Nola is of what she did to Candice…through the brood, mind you, as we will learn.

These parental denials add a new dimension to the abuse, a psychological dimension called gaslighting. The victim’s refusal to acknowledge the pain she’s been through–as we see initially in Nola and in Candice’s quiet non-reactions to any violence–is a coping mechanism: an attempt to remove the pain by pretending it isn’t there.

But Nola, having felt the pain resurface, can find only one way to get rid of it now, and that’s through projecting it into the brood, one of whom goes over to Juliana’s house, where Candice also is. The evil, deformed child attacks and kills Candice’s grandma, and Candice, seeing the bloody corpse in the kitchen, gives no emotional response, but just goes up to her room to sleep, and forgets about the whole thing.

And just as Juliana would deny any knowledge of how little Nola got all those bumps on her body, Candice seems to know nothing of how Juliana got her injuries. The police psychologist, Dr. Birkin (played by Reiner Schwarz), has examined Candice, and he can tell that she has repressed trauma that must be dealt with. Taking Birkin’s advice, Frank tries to get his daughter to talk about what happened, but she stays quiet.

In another therapy session with Raglan, Nola has a father transference with him, complaining of her fears that Frank is taking Candice away from her. Raglan, taking on the father role, defends Frank’s actions as protective of their daughter; he claims that in a similar way, Nola’s father did his best to protect her, which provokes her into denying that protection, which truly never happened. As a codependent, alcoholic ex-husband to Juliana, Barton Kelly (Beckman), sat back and allowed Juliana’s abuse of Nola to happen.

When parents look away and ignore abuse, pretending it never happened, just as the abuser denies it, and even the victim pretends it never happened, all of this denial enables the abuse. When the victim does this, it’s wrongheaded but understandable, as confronting and trying to process the pain feels almost impossible; but when abusers, flying monkeys, and codependent enablers let the abuse slip by without judgement, they are in many ways as guilty as the abuser is.

Interestingly, as Nola is tearfully telling Raglan (as her father transference) that he looked away and never protected her from Juliana, he turns his back on her and looks the other way. At one point in the scene, he, in the role of ‘loving father,’ kisses her on the cheek and calls her ‘sweetheart.’ He, as a psychiatrist, is being as emotionally abusive to her as her father was, in however indirect that way Barton was (and Raglan is). In fact, that kiss also suggests he has a sexual interest in Nola, who is an attractive woman.

Frank takes photos of Candice’s bruised back as evidence to be used in a court case against Raglan and Nola. He also receives a visit from Barton, who’s happy to see his granddaughter, but saddened to know the cycle of intergenerational family abuse has resurfaced.

To get more evidence against Raglan, Frank sees Jan Hartog (played by Robert A. Silverman), who has also received psychoplasmics therapy and has lymphosarcoma on the front of his neck. Hartog knows he can’t prove in court that Raglan’s methods caused his cancerous condition, but he hopes that even a losing court case will hurt Raglan’s business by giving him bad publicity. Frank’s hoping for more convincing evidence for the court case.

Barton drives over to see Raglan about telling Nola of her mother’s murder, but Raglan doesn’t want her father to contact her, claiming that her isolation is key to her therapy. Isolating someone is, of course, a kind of emotional abuse, reminding us that therapists can be as bad as abusers, especially ones with Raglan’s narcissistic tendencies, i.e., his apparent god complex, which is something I’ll elaborate on later.

Barton is infuriated with Raglan’s refusal to let him see Nola, so he gets drunk that night in his old house with Juliana. Meanwhile, Frank is having dinner with Candice’s teacher, Ruth Mayer (Hogan), and there’s a potential romantic interest between the two, since she could be a new mother to the little girl. Nola will find out, though, and her rage against her non-protective father, and her jealousy of Ruth, will get both objects of Nola’s rage killed by the brood.

Now, before Barton is killed by one of the brood, as I said above, he gets drunk and ruminates sadly over his failed family in his old house, the one he lived in with Juliana. He talks on the phone with Frank, and he’s on the verge of tears.

The word brood has two significant meanings as far as this film is concerned. As a noun, brood refers, of course, to the group of deformed killer children that Nola produces out of her rage. As a verb, to brood is to ruminate sulkily about whatever is making you unhappy, as Barton does before he’s killed, and as Nola does in her rages that produce the brood.

While Frank is gone to get Barton before he does something foolish in his drunken depression, leaving his dinner date, Ruth, in his home, Nola phones Frank, with Ruth receiving the call and inflaming Nola’s jealousy…and causing her to brood in her own right. Just before Barton is beaten to death, he looks at his brood-killer and sees Nola’s face on it. Of course he does: the brood are all her projections.

When Frank arrives at Juliana’s house and finds Barton dead, the killer child tries to kill him, too, but it soon ‘runs out of gas,’ so to speak, and dies. The child’s body is examined, and we learn that it is sexless, having no genitals. It also has no navel, and therefore wasn’t born the natural, human way. It’s toothless and colourblind, too.

One should consider the implications, from a psychoanalytic viewpoint, of it apparently seeing only in black and white. Since these brood children are fueled by a murderous rage, and are projections of Nola’s mental instability, we can understand their black-and-white vision as representative of black-and-white thinking, or psychological splitting.

The brood’s murderous rage comes from seeing the world as either all white (i.e., all good, as in Nola and Candice) or as all black (as all bad, or those to be killed). There is no grey in-between for them. Such is the mental state of what Melanie Klein called the paranoid-schizoid position (PS): paranoid, because of the paranoid fear that comes from contemplating a retaliation from the hated object; schizoid, because of the splitting of objects into absolute good and bad ones. All babies experience PS at first, but soon enough will acknowledge people as a grey mixture of good and bad, resulting in the mental state called the depressive position (D). The brood can never integrate the black with the white, so instead of experiencing D, they’re always in PS.

In this permanently split state, the brood can never be fully human, hence their lack of teeth, genitals, and retinas in their eyes; their physical deformity (including cleft lips) is symbolic of this human incompleteness. Furthermore, their tongues are too thick and inflexible for proper speech; all they can do to communicate is to grunt and scream without any articulation.

This inability to form words means that the brood cannot participate in society and culture–they have no sense of what Lacan called the Symbolic. Their violent world is that of the Real, an undifferentiated, traumatic, inexpressible world.

Nola’s mental instability is at such a severe state that she splits off and projects her hostility in personified forms that are symbolically comparable to what Bion called bizarre objects, projections that take on a life of their own.

When Raglan learns of the killing of Barton, and that the killer was obviously one of the brood, he realizes that, through psychoplasmics, he’s created a monster…or many monsters. In spite of his narcissistic tendencies, he isn’t all bad, for he’s feeling a pang of conscience.

That pang, nonetheless, isn’t inspiring him to make the best of moral choices, for he tells Chris (Campbell) to have all of his patients, save Nola, removed from his institute. This will feel like he’s abandoning these patients, especially Mike, as Chris tells Raglan. And while it’s true that Nola’s care needs special focus, Raglan’s form of therapy is the last thing she needs; the fact is, he still wants her for himself, so his narcissism wins out.

Frank learns through Hartog about Mike being sent out of Raglan’s institute, and that Nola, “the queen bee,” is the only one Raglan is interested in. She doesn’t even have to pay for the therapy, because Raglan can use her to prove how ‘effective’ psychoplasmics is at projecting pain outward. He, of course, isn’t really going to cure her: the creation of the brood is feeding his god complex.

Mike is now desperate for a father substitute, having been abandoned by his real father and now by Raglan. Mike wants Frank to be his new ‘daddy,’ and he’ll do anything for Frank in exchange for that. Mike will spy on and try to find out what Raglan’s doing with Nola.

To get an idea of how ‘effective’ the projections are in removing pain from oneself, we see after the killing of Ruth how at peace Nola is from waking from a restful sleep. The removing of that pain, however, is only temporary, for she’ll continue to be raging, jealous, and possessive of Candice, who’s been taken, by the pair of brood-children who killed Ruth, back to her.

Frank learns from Mike that Raglan has the brood under Nola’s care in a work shed at the institute, and he surmises that Candice, who’s been missing since the killing of Ruth, must be with Nola. So he rushes over in his car to the institute. He confronts Raglan in front of the work shed, the latter having a gun, and he learns that she is the brood’s mother, and that it was the brood that beat Candice at the beginning of the movie.

And here is where Raglan’s god complex comes in. Even though he can be implicated in the killings of Juliana, Barton, and Ruth, since it’s his psychoplasmics that created the brood in the first place, he won’t use his gun to shoot the killer kids, except in self-defence, as he does to some of them at the film’s climax. Deep down, he loves the brood, because he’s their father, if indirectly. He’s proud of his creations.

Raglan, in this sense, is like God the Father, though he’s more like the inferior Demiurge, creator of what’s physical (i.e., the skin markings, the brood). He’s an evil god, or at least an inferior one, and Nola is an evil Mary, giving virgin births to evil Jesuses, as it were, who kill rather than give life, then die themselves soon afterwards.

So in this sense, The Brood is not just a statement against failed parenting and bad psychiatry; it’s also symbolically a critique of religion’s failed attempts at healing and guiding people. “They fuck you up, your mum and dad”: this includes therapists as parental transferences, priests (the Fathers in church), the Mother of God, and God the Father…whether they mean to, or not.

Interestingly, the first verse of Larkin’s poem was recited by a judge during an acrimonious divorce/child custody case in 2009, reminding us of that of Cronenberg and his ex-wife, which in turn inspired this film. The misery man hands down to man, incidentally, reminds me of Exodus 20:5, in its relation to a wrathful, jealous father-God.

Raglan, in an attempt at redeeming himself somewhat, offers to fetch Candice from the room where she is to sleep with the brood, as long as Frank can go in the work shed and speak to Nola in a conciliatory way, to keep her calm so the brood won’t be enraged and attack Raglan and Candice. The plan works at first, until Nola reveals her external womb, created through psychoplasmics, which produces brood-babies. Frank cannot hide his shock and disgust at her ripping open the womb, taking a bloody baby out of it, and licking the blood off of it.

Offended at Frank’s disgust, Nola is enraged, and the brood attacks Raglan, who uses his gun to shoot a few of them before the rest kill him. In her jealous possessiveness of their daughter, Nola tells Frank she’ll kill Candice before letting him take her from Nola. This forces Frank to choke Nola to death, since he knows otherwise that the brood will kill Candice through Nola’s rage; but with her death, the brood dies, too.

In Frank’s killing of Nola, since the two characters represent, and the actors even resembled, Cronenberg and his ex-wife, we can see just how much bitterness the writer/director must have felt toward her, enough to include a scene that is, in effect, a wish-fulfillment. I’m reminded of Phil Collins’s “In the Air Tonight,” a song about the drummer/singer’s own bitter divorce–these lines in particular: “if you told me you were drowning, I would not lend a hand.”

Frank fetches Candice, takes her to his car, and drives away. The movie ends with a shot of her arm, which has two of the kind of lesions Nola had as a child, which her mom noticed on her. Now, whether Juliana was telling the truth about Nola’s lesions as being there irrespective of the mother’s abuse of her daughter, or if she was lying and in denial about having caused the lesions, they are certainly at least symbolic of the passing on of intergenerational abuse.

The sins of Juliana’s and Barton’s generation are being punished in not only Nola’s but also Candice’s generation. “Man hands on misery to man.” Even outside the realm of family abuse, the sins of the baby boomers and those before them are being punished in generations X, Y, and Z. The brood, in their deformities, incompleteness, and violence, are surely personifications of this problem.