It's Alive

• Rick Baker built the mutant infant on an aluminum wire armature with articulated limbs and adjustable eyeballs; for close-ups he made a full-head mask, gloves and a partial body suit worn by his then-girlfriend (later wife) Elaine Alexander. Cohen first pitched him the job by phone while Baker was at Dick Smith's house working on The Exorcist, even floating the idea of strapping the suit onto his cat or 'a chicken or something -- maybe two chickens.'
• Bernard Herrmann scored it and recorded the music at St Giles-without-Cripplegate, a medieval church in London's Barbican. Knowing the poet John Milton is buried there, Herrmann told the film editor before the session, 'John Milton is buried at St Giles about six feet from where I conduct. If I do a good job, he'll whisper to me.'
• Cohen shot it for roughly $500,000 and ran the production concurrently with his blaxploitation picture Hell Up in Harlem, which was filmed on weekends during It's Alive's schedule, with overlapping cast and crew pulling consecutive seven-day weeks. Cohen called it 'a madhouse' and said the editor 'didn't know from one day to the next what picture he was cutting.'
• Warner Bros. buried the 1974 release after the executives who greenlit it were pushed out, giving it a single-theater run in Chicago in April before a limited opening that October.
• The 1977 reissue is what made the money. After yet another executive shakeup, Cohen got the new regime to re-screen it. A fresh TV spot showed a baby carriage scored to 'Rock-a-bye Baby' with a voice-over warning 'There's only one thing wrong with the Davis baby. It's alive.' The campaign drove the film to about $7.1 million in U.S. rentals, well over ten times its shooting budget.

The pharmaceutical subplot makes the baby a corporate product, not a curse. Lenore was on contraceptive pills for years, the drug-company executive privately admits liability and demands the child be destroyed to bury the evidence, and the monster becomes a recall problem with teeth. Read that way, the 'thing' to fear isn't the infant but the men in suits who'd rather kill it than be sued.

Frank's arc is the real horror engine. He spends the film insisting the creature is an 'it' to be exterminated, and the turn comes when he can no longer hold that line and cradles the thing as his son. The monster never reforms; the father does. The threat the movie is actually working on is a parent's revulsion at a child who came out wrong.

It's an anxiety film about not trusting what we put in our bodies, made the same era the culture was souring on the pill, additives and medicated everything. The baby murders a milkman and gorges on milk in his truck, weaponizing the most innocent feeding image there is, so the takeaway lands as: the food chain itself has been poisoned, and the newborn is just the first to show it.

Frank Davis sells public relations for a living, which is the cruelest joke in Larry Cohen's monster movie, because the thing his wife Lenore delivers in a Los Angeles maternity ward cannot be spun. It tears the delivery room apart, kills the staff, and crawls out into the city to feed and to kill when it's frightened. Frank wants it dead. The cops want it dead. The drug company that may have made it wants it dead and quiet. The horror is that a father slowly stops being able to say the word "it."