American Horror Story: Delicate Was Inspired By A Truly Horrifying Novel
Even if one doesn't watch Ryan Murphy's and Brad Falchuk's "American Horror Story," one is likely familiar with the show's amazing ad campaign. Soon beginning its twelfth season, "American Horror Story" has always sported surrealist original artworks that only vaguely allude to the content of the series. The first season saw a pregnant woman and a man in a full-body vinyl outfit suspended in an all-red room. The third season, "Coven" featured a snake passing between the lips of three women standing close together. The fifth season, "Hotel," used an eyeless human face made of mattress panels, a key spearing its cheeks. The seventh season, "Cult," sported a woman with an elongated tongue.
The latest season, "Delicate," continued with the tradition by depicting the season's stars, Emma Roberts, Kim Kardashian, and Cara Delevigne, handling outsize spiders in vaguely pregnancy-themed tableaus. By FX's own description, "Delicate" is about motherhood: "In 'American Horror Story: Delicate,' after multiple failed attempts of IVF, actress Anna Victoria Alcott (Roberts) wants nothing more than to start a family. As the buzz around her recent film grows, she fears that something may be targeting her — and her pursuit of motherhood."
One might note that the premise might be similar to the plot of Ira Levin's 1967 novel "Rosemary's Baby." "Delicate," however – according to EW — is based explicitly on the 2023 novel "Delicate Condition" by Danielle Valentine ("How To Survive Your Murder"). This is the first time "American Horror Story" is based on a specific book.
Delicate Condition
The plot of "Delicate Condition" is described on its back cover as indeed being about an actress named Anna Alcott who stars in independent movies and is indeed attempting to get pregnant via in vitro fertilization. Anna fears someone is hiding her injections — medicine, it seems, is going missing with alarming frequency — and is deliberately stopping her from having a baby. Eventually, Anna is told she's miscarried her baby, which is alarming news to her, as she can still feel something growing and moving around inside of her. All of the spider-like imagery in "Delicate" TV ad campaigns might lead one to think that she is pregnant with a spider monster, although the spider may just be a metaphor.
EW talked to Valentine who called her novel a horror story about pregnancy, a notoriously fraught time in a mother's life. She said:
"It's a novel exploring not just the actual physical gruesomeness of what pregnancy is, but also the medical gaslighting that even modern, very privileged women experience as they're going through their pregnancies and the symptoms that I feel we as a culture still don't talk about for strange reasons."
When asked if she took inspiration from Levin's "Rosemary's Baby," one of the more famous horror stories of a terrifying journey of pregnancy, Valentine said she preferred to think of "Delicate Condition" as comparable to Ridley Scott's 1979 film "Alien," a film about a killer creature that incubates inside the abdomen of a human host before bursting out. The parallels to the body horror of pregnancy are quite clear.
Valentine, though, wanted to set the record straight, as "Alien" was made by cis men.
Alien
Valentine recalled making the connection between "Alien" and pregnancy for the first time when she was preparing to have a child, saying:
"It's really a movie about pregnancy, but it's been written by a man who doesn't understand that that's what he's writing about. [...] It's what happens when a guy thinks, 'What's the scariest possible thing I can come up with?' And it's this idea of, what if you're growing this creature inside of you and it's using your resources to get bigger and you can't control it? It has a mind of its own, and then one day it just bursts out of you in this gruesome, bloody mess. When I first saw it when I was a kid, it didn't occur to me that that's basically what pregnancy is ..."
Valentine also noted that "Condition" was influenced by recent politics. She said:
"It really bothers me when I hear particularly male lawmakers and male politicians talking about how women can go through pregnancy and give the baby up for adoption or what have you, and really not giving enough weight to what it is to experience pregnancy and how life-altering that experience is."
"American Horror Story: Delicate" premieres September 20, 2023.