The Scariest Horror Films of 2024 Reflected Women’s Real-Life Terror After Roe v. Wade Was Overturned: ‘You Can Revolt in Your Own Unique Way’

variety.com:

William Earl SPOILER ALERT: This feature contains spoilers for “The Girl With the Needle,” “Immaculate,” “The First Omen,” “Apartment 7A,” “Alien: Romulus,” “The Devil’s Bath,” “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” and “Cuckoo.” “The Girl With the Needle” features one of the most distressing scenes in any film this year, as a woman in Denmark in the early 1900s tries to give herself an abortion with a needle in a public bath.

Even more haunting is the fact that, for many modern moviegoers, safe abortion access is as inaccessible as it is for the characters in this period film. “Needle,” which is being released theatrically in the United States on Friday by Mubi, is the latest in a string of 2024 horror movies that deal with women’s bodily autonomy head-on.

The timing is no surprise, after Americans’ constitutionally protected right to have an abortion via Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022.

The decision, which came as a result of the case Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, was met with an outcry of opposition and polling which showed that the majority of Americans didn’t agree with curtailing access to abortion. “Needle” tells the dark story of Dagmar, a maternal figure who helped women who couldn’t care for their babies to have them adopted by wealthy families — yet the children’s fate was far darker.