Stéphan Castang

At last a film with a monster baby!

Frank Davies is awaked in the middle of the night by his wife. The great moment is here: she’s about to give birth to their child. But the happy event is cut short, the newborn kills all the maternity staff as soon as it’s born! A baby hunt is organized in town.

I discovered It’s Alive on VHS when I was 12 and maybe it’s the reason I never wanted to have kids! It could be the only movie to imagine childbirth as a horror scene.

With this baby hunt mobilizing all police forces, the film deploys a ferocious metaphor for Nixon’s America that cannot understand its youth (“our children have become monsters”), for capitalism embodied here by big pharma lobbies, and our relationship to monstrosity. As often in cinema and in our societies, the figure of the monster is useful both for catalyzing and revealing the fears of a community.

The point of view makes the monster, and at the end of the movie, we don’t really know which creatures should be eradicated.

A B-movie become cult, both funny and frightening, written and directed by Larry Cohen (among other things the creator of the series The Invaders), with an impressive score by Bernard Hermann, It’s Alive (a tribute title to Baron Frankenstein’s cry upon his creature’s birth: “It’s alive!”) is not to be missed. The film’s moral may lie in this line uttered by one of the policemen: "Those who don't have kids don't know how lucky they are."