Psychotherapist Hal Raglan has developed a method he calls "psychoplasmics", in which he encourages patients with mental disturbances to let go of their suppressed emotions through psychosomatically inducing physiological changes to their bodies. Raglan performs public demonstrations with one such patient, who is able to induce welts and burns to appear on his own body when confronted with memories of the abuse he suffered from his father.
Another of Raglan's patients is Nola Carveth, a severely disturbed woman who is in a legal battle with her husband Frank for custody of their young daughter Candice. Following a visit with Nola, Frank discovers bruises and scratches on Candice. Though his daughter doesn't say how they happened, Frank not unnaturally believes that his estranged wife was responsible. Confronting Raglan about the issue doesn't get the outcome he expects, though: the psychotherapist insists that Candice's weekly visits continue, and threatens to work to deny Frank custody if they do not!
Understandably angry, Frank refuses to back down and sets out to find some leverage against Raglan so he can protect his daughter. That search is soon complicated, however, by the vicious murders of several people close to his wife and to him ...
Director David Cronenberg has acknowledged that The Brood was inspired in large part by the disintegration of his own first marriage. I'm not sure that making a horror film about your ex is any more endorsed by mental health professionals than Dr Raglan's on-screen woo-woo would be, but the actual film itself proves to be a pretty good one. It's not flawless, by any means - the murder scenes are a tad unconvincing in their choreography and some of the blood effects, for instance - but it's genuinely creepy at times and definitely shows the potential that Cronenberg would go on to realise throughout the early and mid 80s.
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