General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

It's Alive

It's Alive is a 1974 American horror film written, produced, and directed by Larry Cohen, in which a Los Angeles couple's newborn infant turns out to be a fanged, clawed mutant that kills when frightened and escapes from the delivery room.¹ Made for a reported budget of $500,000 by Larco Productions and distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures, the film initially performed poorly but became a hit on re-release, earned about $7,000,000, and spawned two sequels.²^•³

Key fact	Detail
Director, writer, producer	Larry Cohen, for Larco Productions, Inc.; distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures²
Release	Los Angeles opening the week of 16 October 1974; US release date 26 April 1974 is also listed²^•⁴
Runtime and rating	91 minutes; MPAA rating PG; color (Technicolor), filmed with Panavision equipment²
Budget and earnings	Budget $500,000 (per a 19 May 1975 Boxoffice article); total earnings about $7,000,000²^•³
Notable crew	Score by Bernard Herrmann; makeup and puppet effects by Rick Baker¹
Critical standing	Metascore 72 (generally favorable); Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer 65% from 23 reviews⁵^•⁴
Sequels	It Lives Again (1978) and It's Alive III: Island of the Alive (1986)⁶

Spoilers

Plot

Frank Davis (John P. Ryan), a public relations consultant, and his wife Lenore (Sharon Farrell) are expecting their second child in Los Angeles; they had avoided having a child for several years while Lenore took contraceptive pills. They leave their son Chris (Daniel Holzman) with a family friend, Charley (William Wellman Jr.), and go to the hospital for the birth.¹

The baby is born monstrously deformed, with fangs and claws. A doctor attempts to suffocate it immediately after birth; the child kills the doctors and nurses and flees through a skylight. Making its way across the city, it kills people it encounters, including a musician and a milkman, while the press and police hound the parents.¹^•⁶ A pharmaceutical executive privately acknowledges to the prescribing doctor that the child may be a genetic monstrosity created by the prescription drugs, and wants it destroyed to prevent research pointing to its origin.¹

The father's arc. Frank denies the child is his son and joins the hunt, associating himself with Dr. Frankenstein after talking with the medical researchers. Lenore, by contrast, accepts the infant and hides it in the basement. In the climax, set in the storm drains of Los Angeles, Frank realizes the child is simply frightened, apologizes, and picks it up; when he tries to shield it from a mob of armed police, the fertility doctor screams for them to open fire, and the police kill both the infant and the doctor. As the Davises are driven home, a call reports that another monster baby has been born in Seattle.¹

Production

Cohen wrote, produced, and directed the film for his own company, Larco Productions, with Fenton Hamilton as cinematographer and Peter Honess as editor.² The score was composed by Bernard Herrmann, known for his work on many films of Alfred Hitchcock, and the makeup and puppet effects were by Rick Baker.¹ After Variety published a negative review on 16 October 1974 questioning why so illustrious a composer had scored the film, Cohen wrote in a 26 November 1974 letter that Herrmann had willingly accepted the job at his usual fee, "one of the highest in the industry."²

The baby itself was presented in a series of fast, almost subliminal shots, which the Science Fiction Encyclopedia credits as a wise choice: the creature disturbs because it does what all babies do, crawl around on the floor.⁶

Release and box office

The film opened in Los Angeles the week of 16 October 1974 in twenty-four theaters and grossed an unimpressive $210,480 in two weeks. It later performed well in Paris, France, and Singapore, and after taking in $255,000 in one week of test engagements in Baltimore, Maryland, and Washington, D.C., a spring 1977 re-release was set. The re-release succeeded in southern U.S. states, ranking eighth on Variety's list of top-grossing U.S. releases, and New York magazine speculated that the "ridiculous" film was "making millions" on the popularity of Rosemary's Baby (1968) and The Exorcist (1973).² The Television Academy biography of Cohen puts total earnings at $7,000,000.³ At Avoriaz, France's Festival of the Fantastic Cinema, the film won the "Prix Special du Jury," announced in a 10 February 1975 Hollywood Reporter item.²

Reception and interpretation

Critical reception was mixed at release and has remained divided. Rotten Tomatoes' critics consensus calls it "tough and unpleasant," throttling the viewer with its "bizarre mutant baby theatrics," and the Tomatometer stands at 65% from 23 reviews with a 41% audience score.⁴ Metacritic records a Metascore of 72, generally favorable, with Slant Magazine rating it 88 and calling it perhaps one of Cohen's best films and one of the finest American horror films of the last 30 years, while Variety rated it 40 and called it "stomach-churning."⁵

Critics have read the film as more than a monster picture. Kim Newman of Empire gave it 4/5, describing it as at once a suspense and monster film and "a darkly comic soap opera about strained parent-child relationships."⁴ The Science Fiction Encyclopedia highlights the film's transition from seeing the baby as a monstrous menace to seeing it as somebody's child, calling the father's attempt to protect his offspring in the storm drains "curiously moving though absurd" and noting that the setting deliberately evokes the finale of Them! (1954).⁶ Screen Slate's essay argues that John P. Ryan's performance as the shattered father lifts the film beyond genre curiosity, and that, like Herrmann's score, there is something atonal about the film that robs the final scene of the catharsis usually expected from a horror ending.⁷ A 2025 scholarly note observes that, unlike comparable films, the blame in It's Alive is explicitly placed on the pharmaceutical industry.⁸

Legacy

The film spawned two sequels, It Lives Again (1978, also titled It's Alive II) and It's Alive III: Island of the Alive, dated 1986 by the Science Fiction Encyclopedia and 1987 by other listings.⁶^•⁹ A novelization by Richard Woodley appeared in 1977, three years after the film.⁶ Cohen's filmography also includes a 2008 remake of It's Alive.¹⁰ The film is now regarded as a cult favorite; Netflix catalogs it under "Cult Favorite" and "Evil Kid" tags.¹¹

A different 1974 film, The Bat People, carried the working title It's Alive! and was also released as It Lives By Night and Angel of Fear; it is unrelated to Cohen's film.¹²

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Horror films (individual works) › Monster and creature films

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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