Maternal anxiety has proved a horror film fallback for decades, popping up in the likes of Rosemary’s Baby, David Cronenberg’s The Brood, and standouts from the recent New French Extremity, particularly Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury’s Inside. Hellions, the latest film by Pontypool director Bruce McDonald, offers a fair to middling riff on the theme, following a psychological tract that leads to scenes of arty hallucinations, intense violence and, for one reason or another, a field of exploding pumpkins. Unfolding over the course of one nightmarish Halloween evening, the film aspires to canonical virtues, aiming to be the kind of movie that becomes a seasonal tradition. The story even opens with a scenario custom to a Halloween evening in a ’80s horror film: teenage Dora (Chloe Rose) lays about a secluded pumpkin patch with her Johnny-Depp-in-Nightmare–on–Elm–Street boyfriend (Luke Bilyk), sharing a joint and discussing their evening plans.
As the sun sets over the idyllic suburban farmland, the serene setting nevertheless resonates with a sense of impending dread, courtesy of the barren trees swaying softly in the wind. It’s a superb intro, even if the glossy, perfect-to-a-fault digital cinematography offers nothing in the way of texture or visual feeling. The aforementioned dread arrives with news of Dora’s pregnancy, given to her by a sympathetic doctor (Rossif Sutherland) who wears Spock ears while seeing his patients. (Moments of weird humor like this pop up from time to time, though not nearly enough.) Panicked, Dora cancels her evening plans, much the surprise of her concerned mother (Rachel Wilson). Apparently, in this Halloween-obsessed town, staying home on October 31st is cause for alarm, but Dora convinces her that all is well, so mom and little brother (Peter DaCunha) traipse off into the the night. Dora’s stress quickly gets the best of her, and she begins seeing things (visions of bathwater filling with fetal blood, a masked trick-or-treater watching her from across the road), so she calls up her boyfriend after all, donning an angel costume and psyching herself up for the inevitable conversation.
Only her boyfriend never shows, and a creepy kid won’t stop coming around. Soon, more masked children are on her doorstep—one wears a bucket over his head, slits carved into it like The Man in the Iron Mask; another looks like a demented Raggedy Ann; the scariest sports Mickey Mouse ears. Their gazes are fixed on her belly, beckoning for the unborn baby inside her. From there, all hell breaks loose. Dora enters a sort of suspended dream state, tormented by hoards of demon children and unable to escape her isolated farmhouse. It isn’t clear if the action in Hellions is real or simply playing out in Dora’s head, but as much as McDonald attempts to steer the film into a sort of waking nightmare, he’s more interested in exploring the innate psychological fear of an unplanned teen pregnancy. The director exploits anxieties common to the experience—stuff like telling your parents, the fear of slut-shaming, the legitimately horrifying prospect of having another human being growing inside of you—into fairly effective horror-movie scares, but whether intentionally or not, the whole thing quickly turns into a sort of pro-life screed. When they aren’t warbling a menacing tune eerily (and annoyingly) similar to “Silent Night,” the demon children are prone to chanting, “Blood for baby, blood for baby,” as they attempt to rip Dora’s fetus from her stomach. In another scene, a vision of her little brother comes to the door, his initial kindness giving way to a predictable viciousness: “Give us your baby, you bitch,” he sneers, with the kind of macabre intensity the far-right presumes of non-profit health organizations like Planned Parenthood.
Like most anti-choice rhetoric, it’s all needlessly sensationalist, and the director’s attempt to soften the material during the feeble denouement feels like desperate backpedaling. But similar to Pontypool, another conservative-minded horror parable, Hellion is filled with enough eye-popping images to almost make the whole thing worthwhile. One standout features Dora as she’s carried across a pumpkin patch by a demon in a doll mask, the sky blood-red and hazy; another finds a heroic cop (Terminator 2 villain Robert Patrick, in the sort of role seemingly reserved for character actors of his tenure) reliving a personally devastating crime scene, joining Dora in a kind of folie à deux. These flourishes aren’t enough to drown out the needless politicizing, but they are enough to make you grab for more popcorn.