The Fetus

“If you wore a condom, we wouldn’t be in this mess,” Alessa tells Chris, her sort-of boyfriend. Chris’ condom broke during intercourse, and he didn’t tell her. The next day, she’s pregnant. “Things happen faster for me,” she explains. “I’m a freak.” That seems like an exaggeration until a tendril emerges from her, flashing teeth inside a mouth hungry for blood. The Fetus is a horror movie about a baby from hell. With conservatives gutting women’s bodily autonomy of late, curbing their access to healthcare and reproductive control, many movies have turned these anxieties into horror scenarios. The subject matter isn’t new to horror—see Rosemary’s Baby (1968), It’s Alive (1974), and Grace (2009)—but it’s been making a comeback in recent years thanks to increasing limitations placed on women’s freedoms. False Positive (2021), Immaculate (2024), The First Omen (2024), and many more have grappled with forced or monstrous births, reflecting present-day anxieties. 

Writer-director Joe Lam tackles these themes in his low-budget shocker, where a demon pact leads to a woman carrying a child from the netherworld. Fortunately, Alessa is played by Lauren LaVera, whom horror fans will know from Terrifier 2 (2022) and Terrifier 3 (2024). She’s a committed performer and stunt professional who knows how to sell physical torment. It’s a good skill to have in The Fetus, where Alessa is overcome by sharp pains and demon growls from inside her womb. Chris (Julian Curtis), her douchebag boyfriend with daddy issues, happened to see a demonic face with horns on Alessa when they last had sex. He thinks nothing of it. Trying to make up for his shitty behavior, which includes using a hookup app, he agrees to take Alessa to see her father, Maddox (Bill Moseley). Blinded in Vietnam, Maddox had sex with a hellhole (yes, really) in exchange for his eyesight. The result was Alessa. 

The screenplay is clunky. Characters say phrases such as “by golly” and “What is this monkey business?” in earnest. Its attempts at humor sometimes prove wince-inducing. When sitting down to a meal with his daughter and Chris, Maddox asks if he’d like a drink. Chris declines. Maddox asks him, “Are you gay?” in a moment that gave me pause, wondering if Lam was poking fun at plaid-wearing alpha males like Maddox and, if not, what he was attempting to accomplish. The story soon descends into a series of funny and gross sequences, where Maddox and Chris attempt to feed the creature growing inside of Alessa—a slimy little demon that looks like a close relative to the baby from David Lynch Eraserhead (1977). Sometimes it’s rendered with practical effects; sometimes, the CGI looks like the retrograde VFX from 1990s movies such as Mortal Kombat (1995) and Deep Rising (1998). 

The production was partly funded by a Kickstarter campaign to complete the post-production effects, so that might explain why The Fetus occasionally has that SyFy original movie feel. The Kickstarter page indicates, “Joe Lam’s prior business involved designing, manufacturing, and shipping hundreds of thousands of e-commerce products through Amazon.com, Walmart.com, and 99 Cents Only Stores makes him well suited to deliver the Rewards.” Indeed, it’s a strategic page, focused on marketing, member benefits, and audience ownership. In a similar way, The Fetus feels engineered to appeal to the most possible hardcore horror fans while walking a fine ideological line—as though Lam studied what worked in horror and tried to replicate it here. That alone isn’t cause for condemnation; a lot of filmmakers get their start making movies by imitating what they love and what has worked in the past. 

Though it has the potential to be a fun late-night watch, The Fetus feels inauthentic and unfocused—its strives for controversy and relevance but without a clear point of view. Even so, every time I started to resolve that The Fetus was D-grade shlock, LaVera pulled me back in with her performance. She acts about as convincingly as one can under the circumstances, and I hope some major filmmaker recognizes that she’s a commanding screen presence. Elsewhere, Moseley’s half-hearted performance is far from one of his wacky sadists in various Rob Zombie projects. Note his rushed and passionless rendition of “Amazing Grace,” as though he were trying to get through the song so he could get to dinner on time. Curtis, looking vaguely like Casey Affleck, never quite overcomes the character’s initial behavior, despite his later, and unearned, reversal. Undoubtedly, cultish fans of LaVera’s work in the second and third Terrifier movies alongside Art the Clown and those who appreciate Moseley’s forty-year legacy in the horror genre will find much to appreciate here. 

Still, the movie’s message is too muddled to have much to say about parenthood. In his director’s statement, Lam claims The Fetus explores “both sides of the Pro-Choice/Pro[-Life] debate.” However, I found it difficult to decipher any ideological message or symbolism amid the demon woman, the mounting body count, and the fiery portal to the underworld. Maybe the message is that anyone who gives their baby up is doomed to hell? Or maybe it’s that you should take proper precautions to avoid pregnancies, because once you’re pregnant, the experience is a nightmare? One could interpret both meanings but no clear point of view. It’s not that a film has to have a message or theme, but it helps. Lam tops off the scenario with a lame gotcha ending reminiscent of Carrie (1976) and many imitators. Like much of The Fetus, it doesn’t work.