From Rosemary’s Baby and The Handmaid’s Tale to the new film Breeder, horror has long exposed the terrifying consequences of losing control over our own bodies.
This review contains spoilers for Cuckoo and The First Omen, two films from 2024.
Alex Goyette’s new psychological horror film Breeder, opening in U.S. theaters Wednesday, Oct. 28, explores the terrifying ambitions of Patti (Dot-Marie Jones), a poodle breeder who lures young men to her remote ranch with promises of research funding. Russell (Daniel Doheny), a cash-strapped researcher working to save endangered bees, however, finds that Patti is keeping men trapped as breeding stock as part of her own eugenics-style program. “I’m actually moving on from dog breeding,” Patti says in the trailer, “Now, I’m doing something more important: I’m breeding people.” Patti will force Russell to breed with her daughter, and warns that if he fails, he will face a fate like all of the other studs who failed: He will be put down.
What makes Breeder particularly unsettling is its connection to both the history of American eugenics and contemporary debates over pronatalism: the belief that people should be encouraged to have more children. It’s part of a new genre of horror—pronatalist horror—responding to and exploring the deep-seeded fear about being coerced and forced into having children.
This new wave of horror draws on real histories of colonization, forced assimilation and systemic violence. Films such as No One Gets Out Alive (2021), It Lives Inside (2023), Mārama (2026) and Sinners (2025) explore how oppressive institutions and historical injustices can be just as terrifying as supernatural monsters. Rather than locating evil exclusively in an isolated killer or supernatural threat, these films expose the systems of oppression that make violence possible. This new horror casts systemic injustice—from school-to-prison pipelines, bureaucratic indifference and religious hypocrisy—as the villain. Even the home, traditionally imagined as a place of safety, becomes a site of financial precarity, coercion and violence.
In Breeder, Patti’s idyllic farmhouse sits on an isolated stretch of land, far from anyone who might intervene. The violence at the heart of Breeder may unfold in isolation, but the ideology driving it has a disturbing real-world history. The trailer suggests Patti kills men who refuse to participate in her breeding program or fail to produce children she deems desirable. Though fictional, her scheme echoes the chilling logic of historical eugenics programs, which sought to control human reproduction in pursuit of supposedly superior genetic traits.
The modern eugenics movement emerged in the late 19th century, alongside a growing fascination with selective breeding and hereditary traits. British scientist Francis Galton coined the term eugenics in 1883, advocating the pseudoscientific idea that human populations could be improved through controlled reproduction.
As the eugenics movement took hold in the late 19th century, wealthy individuals became enamored with pedigree dog breeding, which has been described as “eugenics by another name.” They established “purity” standards for dog breeds, developed stud books that eventually closed to new bloodlines and formalized competitive dog shows (still in existence today) to identify the dogs that best represent each breed. Many of the dog breeds we know today—including those with lifelong health problems linked to selective breeding—trace their modern pedigrees to these early efforts to standardize and “perfect” dog breeds. Like the pedigree breeders who sought to produce animals with particular physical characteristics, eugenicists believed that controlled reproduction could produce supposedly superior human populations—with devastating consequences.
Although eugenics originated as a formal movement in Britain, the United States became an early and influential laboratory for translating its theories into law. By the early 20th century, eugenics had gained significant political and institutional influence in the United States. Under the leadership of biologists Charles Davenport (who founded the Eugenics Record Office) and Harry Laughlin, with the support of Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations, the American eugenics movement pushed for forced sterilization and immigrant quota legislation. Between 1907 and 1970, over 60,000 Americans were forcibly sterilized under state laws. Many of them were poor and disabled people, incarcerated people, and people of color. Eugenics supporters also lobbied for strict immigrant quotas and even hosted “better baby” and “fitter family” contests at state fairs to promote ideal genetic traits in the 1920s and 1930s.
While many historians argue that the last forced sterilizations as part of these eugenics programs occurred in the 1960s, forced or coerced sterilization continues in American prisons and detention facilities to this day. And of course, long before eugenics became an organized movement, enslavers in the United States had exercised coercive control over enslaved people’s sexuality, reproduction and family information.
When people hear the word eugenics, many think of Nazi Germany’s sterilization and Aryan supremacy programs. But the American eugenics movement served as a model for these shameful laws and racial theories. In December 1935, Nazi authorities established the Lebensborn program, which encouraged births among those deemed racially desirable. The program provided maternity homes for pregnant women and gave authorities control over whether some mothers could keep their children. During World War II, it also became involved in the kidnapping and forced Germanization of children from occupied territories. Hitler himself instituted the practice of awarding German women the Cross of Honour of the German Mother for having more than four children.
Both of Trump’s terms in the White House (but especially the second) follow a long history of conservative presidents espousing not just traditional family values but also economic concerns about changing birth rates and the workforce.
- President Ronald Reagan and his allies promoted tax relief for traditional families amid concerns about a mounting “baby bust.”
- President George W. Bush’s administration laid further groundwork by signing the Unborn Victims of Violence Act, which recognized fetuses as separate victims in certain federal crimes, and expanding federal funding for abstinence-only sex education.
- In April, Trump launched Moms.gov as a resource for new and expecting mothers. When it launched, I warned Ms. readers: “At first glance, Moms.gov may look like another awkward attempt at government outreach. But the site is much more troubling, harmful and deceptive: It directs pregnant women to crisis pregnancy centers, promotes ‘TrumpRx’ fertility medications, and warns about birth control and medications like Tylenol using language that echoes longstanding antiabortion misinformation campaigns.”
- Trump’s Department of Transportation has directed federal grantmakers to favor communities with higher-than-average birth and marriage rates.
- The Trump administration canceled 53 of 67 grants under the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program, cutting approximately $68 million in funding for programs designed to prevent unintended teen pregnancies. The administration also proposed new guidelines emphasizing abstinence-only sex education and fertility awareness. Although a federal judge blocked those changes in August, the canceled grants remained unrestored. As students returned to school, the funding cuts threatened access to comprehensive sex education, which research has shown can reduce teen pregnancy rates. Reproductive rights advocates have warned that restricting access to evidence-based pregnancy prevention will lead to more unintended teen pregnancies—a particularly troubling possibility amid the administration’s broader pronatalist agenda.
- Just like Hitler’s Cross of Honour of the German Mother, the Trump administration contemplated giving out $5,000 cash bonuses to American mothers following deliveries and potentially even a medal to honor mothers who give birth to six or more children.
- Trump referred to himself as the “fertilization president” during a White House event in March 2025.
Contemporary filmmakers and artists who grew up under these administrations are confronting these anxieties through stories about reproductive coercion, bodily autonomy and the consequences of treating human beings as instruments of reproduction.
Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, P.D. James’ Children of Men and Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby represent the earliest examples of the subgenre.
Modern films like Mother! (2017), Impetigore (2019), False Positive (2021), The First Omen (2024) and Cuckoo (2024) all depict the threat of medical and scientific forced breeding, many within religious institutions.
In Cuckoo (2024), a 17-year-old girl joins her father, his wife and her half-sister at an isolated German resort. She comes to realize the owner of this resort (Dan Stevens) is using resort guests to breed a form of cryptid without their knowledge.
In The First Omen (2024), a young American novice uncovers a conspiracy inside the Catholic Church to impregnate women so that they conceive the antichrist. They hope the antichrist’s presence will reassert the Church’s importance amid an increasingly secular society.
Breeder (2026) will likely be a third powerful example.
As opposed to womb or maternity horror, which focuses on fear surrounding pregnancy or the birth of a monster (especially fear of maternal mortality), pronatalist horror focuses on eugenicist frameworks that demand people produce children for the “greater good.”
There are overlaps—for example, Rosemary’s Baby depicts a woman coerced into conceiving a Satanic baby without her consent, but pronatalist horror specifically references when people are denied the choice to or forced to have a child as Russell experiences in Goyette’s new film.
Amid the rise of Trump’s pronatalist agenda, pronatalist horror reflects many women’s deep-seated fears of reproductive coercion and exploitation. Like the broader horror renaissance, which casts oppressive systems as villains and transforms familiar sanctuaries into sites of fear, pronatalist horror locates its terror not just in the supernatural but in the everyday. This year’s Obsession explored horror within intimate relationships, while Other Mommy finds it in the people we are supposed to trust.
Ultimately, the most terrifying threat may lie in the people and institutions we trust to protect us and their power over our bodies, especially at a time when women are increasingly denied reproductive rights.
*
A note from Ms. editors: We want to hear from you for The Majority, a new campaign collecting stories about how reproductive freedom has enabled readers to build the lives they want and need.
Poll after poll shows a majority of Americans support reproductive healthcare access. Yet public debate overlooks the lives shaped by abortion access, contraception, IVF, miscarriage care, maternal healthcare or comprehensive sex education—countless women who chose to pursue an education, have children, not have children, protect their health and chart their own future. What’s your reproductive freedom story? Add your voice. Together, these stories will help show not only why reproductive freedom remains a majority value, but also what it makes possible.
