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The Unborn: To Call It Satan’s Abortion Would Be Too Kind

by Jonah Spangenthal-Lee

Two minutes into The Unborn, the audience was laughing. The film’s spooooky opening—featuring an undead kid, a dog in a mask, a spooooky wool glove, and a fetus in a bottle—elicited hysterical laughter. Not usually a good sign for a horror film. And things didn’t get better.

Nubile, young college student Casey Beldon (Odette Yustman) starts seeing a weird dead kid everywhere, who haunts her dreams, mirrors, medicine cabinet, and a glory hole in a nightclub bathroom. Casey tracks down her secret Holocaust-surviving, Kabbalah-practicing grandma (with the help of a sassy, superstitious, and wise black friend) and Grandma tells Casey about the family curse: Her great uncle died in Auschwitz and now wants revenge on the family (which makes no fucking sense—shouldn’t he want revenge on the Nazis?). Then a yarmulke-clad Gary Oldman shows up to collect a paycheck and arrange a big exorcism party at an abandoned asylum.

Writer/director David Goyer (Blade 2, The Dark Knight) has shown himself to be an at-least-mildly-capable filmmaker in the past, which is why it’s baffling that he managed to cram so many bad ideas (see the film’s ridiculous tagline, “Jumby wants to be born now”) into 90 minutes.

The film lacks any real scares or likable characters. There’s blatant wholesale theft from vastly superior horror films like Prince of Darkness and The Exorcist and, on top of all of that, The Unborn is PG-13, which means it’s not even a crappy boob-filled bloodfest like Hellraiser 8 or Friday the 13th XXVI: Jason Goes Bananas.

Do not under any circumstances see this movie. There is nothing scary, interesting, or remotely redeeming about The Unborn.