I Don’t Want to be Born and I have a history...a long, turbulent history. I first encountered this film in the mid-to-late 1980s, I can’t pin-point the exact date –maybe 1985- but I am certain of the circumstances. I was on holiday with my parents and grandparents, staying at a caravan site/holiday camp every bit like the ones you see in movies like ‘The Best Pair of Legs in the Business’ and ‘Confessions from a Holiday Camp’, and I’d have been around the same age as the Nicholas Bond-Owen character in the Confessions film. Anyway, because we were all cramped into this caravan like sardines and because it was a special occasion I was allowed to stay up with the adults and watch the late night movie, which just so happened to be ‘I Don’t Want to be Born’.
Now, here’s a question...what horror film first disturbed you as a child, was it Night of the Living Dead, Psycho, The Birds, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre? If so, I envy you, because those are the films that it is okay to admit to having being scared of as a kid, you can hold your head up high and proudly admit those films ‘got to you’. Me, I’m stuck with I Don’t Want to be Born, and I’ve had to go through life having to admit to this being the first horror film to get under my skin, embarrassing...isn’t it? So, this is a film I’ve had a long term love/hate relationship with, on one hand it is part of my past, forever intertwined with happy memories of childhood holidays and relatives who are no longer around. On the other hand, I’ve had to carry around the stigma that a film which is deservedly the source of ridicule, unintentional hilarity and scorn by so many, once had such an impact on me.
This wasn’t a film that ever seemed to go away either, indeed for a film that nobody actually seems to like, I Don’t Want to be Born has had quite the shelf life on British TV. If you grew up in front of the box during the 1980s and 1990s, I’m certain you will have had your own run in with I Don’t Want to be Born. This film, along with Psychomania and Crucible of Terror rarely seemed to be off the BBC back then, and I’m sure for a whole generation growing up then, that unholy trilogy were not only their first introduction to 1970s British horror films, but an early tip-off that there was more to explore Brit-horror wise beyond the confines of merely Hammer and Amicus. For the longest time I did wonder if the BBC didn’t just own I Don’t Want to be Born, Psychomania and Crucible of Terror outright. Those three were like the British horror equivalent of Dad’s Army or Only Fools and Horses, in that they were repeated so many times that you eventually began to resent them, especially as you became more and more aware that there were many, many other British horror films they could be showing. While I don’t think you can ever truly tire of Psychomania...he who is tired of Psychomania is tired of life...when it came to I Don’t Want to be Born and Crucible of Terror, repetition can definitely breed contempt. Eventually though those films did begin to get retired from late night television, Psychomania hasn’t been on the box since 2008, Crucible of Terror since 2009, and British TV has also been a I Don’t Want to be Born free zone since 2009.
Still you have to hand it to I Don’t Want to be Born, it is a film people do tend to remember. Throw its title in the direction of somebody who has seen it and after they’ve done rolling their eyes and remarking “OH GOD, THAT ONE” they are still able to paint you a mental picture of the film and remember things like Joan Collins playing a stripper...the dwarf...the possessed baby...the Italian accents. I Don’t Want to be Born isn’t one of those British horror films that people tend to mistake for any other. In a way that if you said ‘Vault of Horror’, someone might come back at you with ‘isn’t that the one where Peter Cushing comes back from the grave’, and you’d have to correct them and point out that they’re thinking of Tales from the Crypt, then they’d say ‘oh, Tales from the Crypt isn’t that the one where Joan Collins has a tree for a love rival’, and you’d have to point that no, that’s Tales that Witness Madness. I Don’t Want to be Born is in a class all of its own, and for better or ill it’s a film that stays with you over the years. Incidentally, of all of the multiple titles this film has had, I’m going with I Don’t Want to be Born on the basis that it was clearly close to the heart of its scriptwriter, given that they work it into the dialogue on at least three occasions (“this one doesn’t want to be born”, “I know why you hate me, you didn’t want to be born”). All of which is rendered meaningless if you are watching this as ‘The Devil Within Her’, ‘It Lives Within Her’, ‘Its Growing Inside Her’, ‘The Monster’, ‘The Baby’, ‘Sharon’s Baby’, ‘Evil Baby’, ‘The Devil’s Baby’, ‘Son of Satan’, and who knows how many more titles this film has had.
Should you be among that rare and fortunate breed whose childhood wasn’t marred by I Don’t Want to be Born, the film stars the one and only Joan Collins as Lucy, a former stripper who has traded in the dens of inequity of Soho, for a plush Kensington address by marrying wealthy, Italian businessman Gino Carlesi (Ralph Bates). Lucy might have done gone throwing her bra and panties at all and sundry, but her sordid past threatens to return to haunt her after she gives birth to her first child. Formerly one half of a stripper and dwarf routine, the split between this double act wasn’t an amicable one, after Hercules the Dwarf (George Claydon) made sexual advances to Lucy, groping her breasts backstage on her last night working in the strip-club.
After rejecting Hercules’ advances, Lucy fell into the arms of strip-club owner Tony (John Steiner), the kind of crude, bit of rough that characters played by Joan Collins tend to be a sucker for, and ended up making love to him backstage instead. Bitter, frustrated and jealous, Hercules, who appears to move in both light entertainment and devil worshipping circles, places a curse on Lucy as she leaves the club “you will have a baby, an evil monster, conceived in your womb, as big as I am small, and possessed by the devil himself”.
A few months and one birth later, and Hercules’ powers seem to be validated when Lucy’s baby begins exhibiting such anti-social behaviour as scratching its mother’s face, kicking up a storm at its baptism and trashing its bedroom. Before long the baby has graduated to murder by hanging one character, decapitating a meddling party, and drowning another. Lucy’s evil offspring also likes to prank its mother by appearing to her in the form of the man who is possessing it. One minute Lucy is dotting on her baby, the next she is horrified to see Hercules, dressed in baby clothes, laying in the cot instead. A moment, that given Joan Collins’ recent involvement in those Snickers chocolate bar ads, surely cries out for a ‘You’re not yourself until you’ve had a Snickers’ meme.
All that stands in Hercules’ way is Gino’s nun sister Albana (Eileen Atkins) who detects possession and performs an exorcism. Sis Albana managing to get the upper hand over Hercules, who has become preoccupied from possessing the baby by the demands of performing in a song and dance routine at the strip-club. The film’s indifferent attitude towards Hercules has intrigued me for years. There is scope here to portray him as a tragic, Quasimodo type figure, cruelly treated by his employee, besotted by a beautiful woman who rejects him. An angle the film never pursues, instead Hercules is simply a predatory little creep, who the film encourages us to be repulsed by. Saying that, I Don’t Want to be Born doesn’t put much effort into demonising him either, with no cutaways to him scheming or performing black magic, we are left to take his villainy as hearsay. Indeed, whenever we see Hercules outside of the context of Lucy’s flashbacks, whether it is backstage with the other strippers or simply minding his own affairs, there is little evidence of the vengeful, vindictive character he is meant to be. An actor like Michael Dunn or Skip Martin could have brought much to the role. It is possible that George Claydon didn’t have the same range, which may have limited the amount of time we spend on Hercules. The rest of Claydon’s career consisting of bit parts, an uncredited role as an Oompa Loompa in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, and a memorable appearance as the evil dwarf who eats the wing mirrors of Marc Bolan’s car in Born to Boogie (1972) , the concert film cum excuse for Bolan and Ringo Starr to piss about on film. Whatever Claydon’s limitations, the guy could do terrifying, his hateful rant at Joan does at least justify some of the childhood trauma this movie caused me.
Looking back at the film now though, I do have to come to the conclusion that it was simply the circumstances and the impressionable age I was at the time that caused I Don’t Want to be Born to have an effect on me. For me the film would have represented a number of firsts. It certainly wasn’t the first horror film I’d ever seen, I was already familiar with the Hammer films by this point, but the fact that the films of theirs I’d seen were gothic period pieces, gave a fairy tale like safety net to them. Whereas I Don’t Want to be Born was one of the first horror films I’d seen to be set in a more recognisable, contemporary world, which ludicrous as it sounds, made the film more believable in my eyes. Here you had characters who swore, drank, had sex lives and backgrounds working in seedy strip-clubs. It all seemed very intimidating, if not I’ll admit the source of some curiosity to my young eyes. The fact that I was able to stay up late and the fact that I was getting this tiny window into the world of adults –both on and off screen- all must have caused me to psyche myself up for the experience.
I Don’t Want to be Born opens with a violent, traumatic birth scene, which I remember as being the first aspect of the film to unnerve and take me off guard. Chances are that the people the film was especially targeting were pregnant women or new mothers, there is much in this film that plays on their anxieties about giving birth, failing to bond with and being violently rejected by their children, but I suppose the film can inadvertently also give you the fear if you are young and had previously had an idealised impression that babies were delivered by storks and didn’t involve all this screaming, pain, syringes and gynaecological equipment. As you might expect from a real life mother of three, Joanie sells that difficult birth scene with some conviction.
By rights I should have learned from Psycho and Night of the Living Dead that nice, sympathetic characters don’t always make it to the end of the horror movies. However this was a life lesson destined to be taught to me by I Don’t Want to be Born, which kills off one major character at around the hour mark, and another about ten minutes before the end. While at the same time allowing two hateful characters –the crabby old bat of a housekeeper and the spivvy strip club owner- to escape relativity unscathed. I Don’t Want to be Born was also- I’m fairly certain- the first time I ever saw Donald Pleasence onscreen, an actor who let’s face it is always going to leave a strong impression in whatever it is you first encounter him in, be it James Bond, Halloween or even Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. The same could be said of Ronald Lacey, who I had simultaneously become aware of thanks to late night repeats of Crucible of Terror. I Don’t Want to be Born does also give you a sombre, humourless Donald Pleasence performance as well, bereft of the entertaining hamminess he was prone to in the later Halloween sequels.
It has to be said that everyone here is playing their roles with so much dedication and seriousness, nobody is mocking their roles or going the tongue in cheek route, even though the film doesn’t deserve a whole lot more. I Don’t Want to be Born does have one of the most preposterous , farfetched ideas behind it of any British horror film of the 1970s, and yet its delivered with an unbelievably straight face. I Don’t Want to be Born is a pompous, Emperor’s new clothes of a movie that walks around blind to its inherent silliness, and would probably slap you around the face, call you a ‘bastard’ and throw a glass of champagne in your direction if you dared make fun of it. There are scenes in this film- such as the possessed baby punching a guy in the nose after he looks into its cot, a dream sequence in which a dead Ralph Bates is dressed up as a nun, or Sister Albana performing an exorcism on the baby, which causes the baby to fly around the room like a burst balloon, which if you were to describe to someone they’d probably think you were talking about a horror spoof, if not an out and out comedy, but when you watch the film you are in no doubt that those involved genuinely thought they were making something that was going to be the equal of, if not superior to Rosemary’s Baby or The Exorcist. Perhaps the scariest thing about I Don’t Want to be Born is its delusions of grandeur.
The actual nationality of I Don’t Want to be Born is something of a minefield, at face value it appears to be an entirely British film, made here with a cast of well know British actors. All isn’t quite that straight forward however, the director Peter Sasdy was Hungarian born, but since the majority of his career has played out in Britain is considered an honorary Brit, the production was initially Canadian and Italian financed, but ran into money problems and had to be bailed out by The Rank Organisation. Officially making this a Spaghetti, Brit-horror, Canuxploitation film. The Italian aspects of the production tend to manifest themselves in the sheer amount of London that you see in I Don’t Want to be Born. It embodies the tendency of many Italian horror and giallos that partly filmed in the UK of overemphasizing the London locations, and making damn sure that the extra cash that was used to relocate these productions to the UK was all up there onscreen. Shots of student parades, black cabs, Big Ben, Chelsea, double-decker buses, the Kings Road, Fortnum and Mason, The Holiday Inn, Parliament Square...the film can’t get enough of this stuff. I Don’t Want to be Born piles on so much location footage that Harold Baim could have probably cut together a London travelogue from it, paid Telly Savalas to narrate it and pissed off on holiday with the Eady money.
Then there are the Italian accents, and the instance that two of the main characters in the film, Gino and Sister Albana be played as Italian, another decision which you suspect was born out of the Italian side of the production. Rightly or wrongly, whenever I think of this film’s origins, I can’t help imagining its co-writer/co-producer Nato De Angeles being along the lines of Giovanni from Mind Your Language and pitching the film to Barry Evans.
“Hey professore, I gots an idea to makea one of those X-rated horror movies, and itsa gonna havea that Joan Collins in it, but I thinka she’da be a bit too mucha for an English man to handle, I thinka her husband such be a red hot Italian lover, not unlika yours truly, capeesh? So, we gotsa to get that Ralpha the Bates to put on an Italian accent. Scusi?, whats the filma about? It’s about a poor bambino who gets possessed by the day-vil, Santa Maria!!! All because Joan didna wanna do it with a little tiny man. Whatya mean that sounds stoopid, ah shaddap you face, it’s a gonna be better than anything by that William Shake-A-Spear ”.
I don’t think I’ve ever read a review of this film that doesn’t guffaw and bring up the exaggerated Italian accents sported by Ralph Bates and Eileen Atkins in this film, which conspires to bring both of these competent thespians to their knees. Eileen Atkins might become a Dame, win as many Baftas, and appear in as many series of Doc Martin as she likes, but to me she’ll always be the nun who pronounces ‘the devil’ as ‘the day-vil’, and yet somehow still manages to get complimented by Donald Pleasence’s character on how good her English is. You have to wonder just what the Italian backers of the film made of those wonky accents, not to mention the catty remarks in the script about Italian men being under the thumb of their mothers or being part of the Mafia. Let’s just hope Nato De Angeles had a sense of humour about himself, in fact let’s hope that anyone who had money in this film had a sense of humour when they saw the end result.
Like many horror films of the mid-1970s, I Don’t Want to be Born lives in the shadow of The Exorcist, a film that had particular resonance in catholic Italy. Watch a few of the Italian Exorcist clones, and it becomes clear that many of their makers had personal demons to exercise of their own, filling their movies with blasphemy, sacrilege and attacks on the church, before wrapping things up with some phony baloney ‘good triumphs over evil’ climax to appease the conservatives. In comparison, I Don’t Want to be Born is a well behaved, good Catholic movie. Sister Albana ain’t got time for none of that doubting, crisis of faith shtick that appeared to be mandatory for characters in movies chasing the Exorcist dollar. While you’d understand it if Albana resented her brother running off and marrying a social climbing former stripper, Sister Albana is surprisingly forgiving and faultless in that respect too, being not only the ideal sister (in both senses) but the ideal sister-in-law too. There is also the sub-plot about Albana working in the field of animal pathology, which doesn’t really go anywhere, other than to defensively emphasize that Albana can be equally involved with the religious, medical and scientific worlds, without there being a conflict of interests there. A subject that the film returns to in Albana’s tete-a-tetes with Donald Pleasence’s character, and you have to hand it to Sis Albana , she is right when she points out that while she’d make a very good doctor, Donald Pleasence wouldn’t make a very good nun.
By far the rudest thing about I Don’t Want to be Born are the lamps you see in Gino and Lucy’s abode. Is it me or are those the most obscenely phallic looking lamps ever seen in a 1970s horror film. Suspiciously these orange coloured, boner shaped kitsch monstrosities only seem to grace the screen when Joan Collins and/or Caroline Munro are present. Note, that despite Sis Albana being in that house allot in this film, she is always relegated to the hallway, Lucy’s bedroom or the bambino’s room. The closest Albana gets to them is a scene in the adjoining dining room, and even then the naughty lamps are hidden in the shadows, and the only lamp that is visible is a far less bulbous and sexually suggestive one. All a coincidence, or were the makers of this film trying to splice in hidden sexual imagery which carry the message that while it is okay to be turned on by Joan Collins and Caroline Munro in this film, Sis Albana is off limits when it comes to getting the horn. No nunploitation movie, is this.
I have to hold my hands up and admit that my enthusiasm for writing about this film greatly diminished upon watching it again. I guess you had to be too young to see the film in order to appreciate it. Outrageous as the film sounds as an anecdote, I have to concede that it is a dull, lifeless film to experience, representing the middle of the road side to the 1970s British horror film. Even the Omen fashioned deaths, and strip club sleaze are thrown in there without a great deal of enthusiasm, and come across as condescending concessions to the exploitation market which the filmmakers seem to view as being beneath them. Is it possible to have affection for something while never really thinking highly of it, if so then that’s me and I Don’t Want to be Born in a nutshell. I Don’t Want to be Born is the cinematic equivalent of white dog shit, it’s something you don’t see around often these days, therefore has an undeniable in-built nostalgic quality to it, but at the same time it’s not something I’m keen to step into again anytime soon.
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