The plot of “Delicate Situation” is described on its again cowl as certainly being about an actress named Anna Alcott who stars in impartial films and is certainly trying to get pregnant by way of in vitro fertilization. Anna fears somebody is hiding her injections — drugs, it appears, goes lacking with alarming frequency — and is intentionally stopping her from having a child. Ultimately, Anna is advised she’s miscarried her child, which is alarming information to her, as she will be able to nonetheless really feel one thing rising and shifting round within her. All the spider-like imagery in “Delicate” TV advert campaigns would possibly lead one to assume that she is pregnant with a spider monster, though the spider could be a metaphor.
EW talked to Valentine who known as her novel a horror story about being pregnant, a notoriously fraught time in a mom’s life. She mentioned:
“It is a novel exploring not simply the precise bodily gruesomeness of what being pregnant is, but additionally the medical gaslighting that even fashionable, very privileged ladies expertise as they are going by way of their pregnancies and the signs that I really feel we as a tradition nonetheless do not discuss for unusual causes.”
When requested if she took inspiration from Levin’s “Rosemary’s Child,” one of many extra well-known horror tales of a terrifying journey of being pregnant, Valentine mentioned she most popular to consider “Delicate Situation” as akin to Ridley Scott’s 1979 movie “Alien,” a movie a couple of killer creature that incubates contained in the stomach of a human host earlier than bursting out. The parallels to the physique horror of being pregnant are fairly clear.
Valentine, although, needed to set the file straight, as “Alien” was made by cis males.