I Don’t Want to Be Born

I Don’t Want to Be Born, aka The Devil Within Her, is a 1975 British horror directed by Peter Sasdy and written by Stanley Price. The cast is a notable list of British thesps including Joan Collins, Ralph Bates, Donald Pleasence, Eileen Atkins and Caroline Munro.

The film opens to the cries of Lucy (Collins) in the throes of labour. To see to her needs is Dr Finch (Pleasence) and Nurse (Floella Benjamin). “What’s wrong, sir?” enquires the nurse. “This one doesn’t want to be born,” replies the doctor. Finally born with the aid of forceps, a twelve-pound baby boy, Nicholas, begins a catalogue of unfortunate events which might or might not be the work of the Devil. Within minutes of being born, baby Nicky has blood on his hands when he gouges the face of his mum, Lucy.

Ralph Bates plays the husband and father, Gino. Quite why Stanley Price decided it was a good idea to make him Italian is beyond comprehension — Bates’s character speaks fluent Italian but fails to grasp basic English. When his sister arrives, a Catholic nun called Sister Albana (Atkins), a whole spiel of questionable Italian accents is on display. Albana declares to Dr Finch, “She believes the baby is possessed by the De-vill.”

Baby Nicky — not Old Nick, obviously; that would have been a step too far even for this film — is soon causing mayhem, trashing his nursery from the confines of his cot, ripping the heads off dolls and having a violent tantrum when faced with his own baptism in holy water. Cue Dr Finch to administer a sedative: “He is a remarkable child, astonishingly strong and well developed for his age. I had to sedate him with a higher dose than I usually would.”

Lucy starts to doubt her maternal bond with the baby and recounts to her friend Mandy (Munro) the circumstances leading up to meeting and marrying Gino. She explains that when she was a go-go dancer in the dinner club where Mandy still works, her act involved a routine with a dance partner, a dwarf called Hercules. (Stay with me — it gets even better.) Lucy rebuffs Hercules’s amorous advances but decides to get it on with club owner, the sleazy Tommy. The spurned Hercules declares to Lucy, “You will have a baby, an evil monster, conceived in your womb, as big as I am small, and possessed by the Devil himself.”

Baby Nicky seems to be channelling Hercules’s resentment, and Lucy frequently sees his face when looking at her baby. A series of mishaps befall anyone who comes too close to the child. A hired nanny is pushed into a park lake and drowns after hitting a rock. Other extraordinary deaths include Gino hung from a tree while Nicky drops a noose around his neck, and Dr Finch decapitated by a spade. Lucy suffers the indignity of being pursued by her own baby brandishing a knife. “You can’t kill me, I’m your mother,” she pleads, before being brutally stabbed.

Only Sister Albana is able to save the day by performing an exorcism. The baby screams as Albana unleashes her Latin incantations. We see Hercules at the club, surrounded by his dancing girls, as he lurches and keels over dead on stage. The exorcism is a success, and Nicky looks as relieved as I was that it was all over — though he still has the trauma of having been responsible for four murders and being raised by an Italian nun to look forward to.

The soundtrack is by Ron Grainer, a prolific TV and film composer famous for the theme to Doctor Who. He uses minimal electronics, slabs of musique concrète, and a light bossa nova during a love scene between Lucy and Gino.

I Don’t Want to Be Born wasn’t a critical success at the time: one review called it “an abominable screenplay by Stanley Price, ludicrous acting, and worst of all, Sasdy’s directing.” Another labelled it “sensationalist and vulgar, an unholy cross between The Exorcist and Rosemary’s Baby.” The film also carries the alternative title Sharon’s Baby, despite Collins’s character being called Lucy throughout.

Collins’s Hollywood star had burnt out by the early seventies and she fell into horror to pay the bills. Other notable appearances from this stretch include Tales from the Crypt (1972), Fear in the Night (1972), and my personal favourite, Tales That Witness Madness (1973), which has Joan in a ménage à trois with a tree that has to be seen to be believed.

The moral of I Don’t Want to Be Born: beware amorous dwarfs and their curses if you’re looking to start a family.