dirs. Aura Martinez Sandoval & Jackson Rees

It Came From Inside! by Aura Martinez Sandoval and Jackson Rees is a perplexingly familiar yet unfamiliar film. In some ways it feels recognizable with its “evil child” trope and plotlines about stopping the end of the world. In other ways, it is refreshing in its subversion of expectations for gender and sexuality.  

The short film takes place on a fall evening near Halloween. It opens with a secret agent leaving a message on his audiotape for future listeners explaining that the creature he has escaped from “wants our meat.” To prevent this from happening, the device he has stolen from the creature must be destroyed. 

Nearby, after a Halloween party, a couple—Oliver (Luke Harger) and Vicky (Gentry Loghry)—discuss having children. Oliver, who wants to have a child (and comes prepared with a presentation to prove it), is dressed as a nun; Vicky, who disagrees, is dressed as the devil. Oliver shows Vicky a scrapbook of their future life with a baby but is interrupted by the sound of an explosion. They go outside and find the audiotape (which has survived the explosion) in their trash can with the mysterious message from the secret agent. Later, the creature appears, and a baby is born. 

Like Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby, this film is concerned with the connection between the horrors of childbirth, interpersonal relationships, and uncertainties about the future. In both films, the man is convinced it is time to have a child, as if this is an event fated and necessary to happen in the trajectory of everyone’s life. In Polanski’s film, it is Rosemary who gives birth, but in Sandoval and Rees’ film, it is the man who is forced to have a child with a demonic destiny.

Both films embody American scholar Lauren Berlant’s idea of cruel optimism, which she posits as desirable “objects” posing problems rather than delivering the promise of happiness they are expected to fulfill. Having a child is often seen as investing in the future (of not only the relationship but also society at large). Yet, in both Rosemary’s Baby and It Came From Inside! the child is declared to be evil and only promises a future of devastation.

Even though it is explicitly revealed that Rosemary’s baby is the spawn of Satan, the baby is famously never shown on screen. Many people lauded the film for doing this as the horror is implied to be so terrifying we can only imagine it. Though we do not see the baby, Rosemary does, and her change in disposition, her look of tenderness as the lullaby sings in the background, haunts us. It is an immaterial cruel optimism, a promise of something supposedly desirable and good that will cause harm.

Similarly, the baby in It Came From Inside! is unquestionably destructive; at the very end of the movie, the alien says that the newborn child will one day “grow to devour worlds.” It was interesting then, that the directors chose to show the baby, a bloody figure with six legs and a tail. To give the being a body, to make it corporeal, is to concretize this idea of cruel optimism. However, like Rosemary’s Baby, this short film ends with the idea that the future is, in fact, uncertain and cannot be guaranteed to us by certain “objects.”