What’s up guys?
Helen here.
Horror films right now are very, very good.
A genre that has long been disparaged by Big Cinema is now getting a whole lot of critical
and academic love.
And it’s no wonder why- the genre is arguably the most subversive in film, often confronting
some of the darkest fears and obsessions that we don’t typically talk about in our day
to day lives.
As we reflected on some of horror’s greatest films, we noticed something -- and once we
noticed it, we saw it everywhere: What do Psycho, Rosemary’s Baby, Carrie,
Friday the 13th, The Exorcist, The Brood, The Others, "Mother!", Goodnight Mommy, The
Babadook, Hereditary, Halloween, Us, The Prodigy, and The Curse of La Llorona all have in common?
Motherhood is either central to the plot, or at the very least, heavily explored.
So today we’re asking, why does motherhood permeate the horror genre.
And why does it appear to be so prominent now specifically?
Welcome to this Wisecrack Edition on Horror Movie Moms.
And spoilers for Psycho, The Brood, The Babadook, Goodnight Mommy and Hereditary ahead.
Before we look at individual scary mommys, let’s first ask: Why exactly do moms and motherly love
make for such scary horror movies?
Well, it has a lot to do with how we view motherhood as a society.
Our image of mothers has changed over time, from mom as the Victorian-era moral center
of the household, to the mandatory helicopter-momming of the early aughts.
But one thing has remained consistent: we see moms as inherently nurturing.
As such, the word “Maternal” suggests care and emotional attachment, while “paternal”
often evokes outside authority, as Erin Harrington writes in her book Women, Monstrosity and
Horror Film: Gynaehorror.
What’s more, philosopher Patrice DiQuinzio suggests that motherhood has been framed as
a function of “woman’s essentially female nature.”
As a result, motherhood has become part and parcel with our social definition of femininity,
and women who don’t become mothers or worse, mother inadequately, are “deviant or deficient
as women.”
Motherhood is viewed as “primal” with the sense that a mother will go to any extremes
to protect her kids.
At the same time, the socially-defined interpretation of a “good mother” is constantly changing.
A “good mom” in 1950 probably spanked her kid liberally, a good mom today makes
daily kale smoothies for her toddler.
So there are three takeaways.
One, there is nothing worse than being a bad mom.
Two, there's no clear stable definition of what makes a good mom.
And three, moms are animalistic and scary.
If you’re NOT thinking that this equals major social anxiety than you’ve… never
laid eyes on a mommy blog.
Horror is, more so than perhaps any other genre of cinema, a playground for social anxiety.
As a result, it’s not surprising that, as scholar Sarah Arnold claims, “The horror
film represents the mother as a site of both fascination and repulsion."
While moms have been sprinkled through horror since the genre began, they experienced something
of a breakthrough moment with the classic film Psycho.
In Psycho, Norman Bates’ murderous mother looms large over the Bates motel, a threat
to any woman her baby Norm thinks is hot.
Now, in the end we find out that Norman’s mom is dead dead dead and he’s been dressing
up as her while he goes on murder-y rampages and tries to preserve her body like one of
his taxidermied birds.
Even though Mrs. Bates is never seen living and breathing, the effects of her inadequate
and perverse mothering are clear: Norman’s homicidal impulses are presented as the direct
result of a lifetime of mommy issues.
The message here is simple: The stakes of bad mothering are so high that loads of people
will literally DIE if you mess it up.
Hitchcock clearly touched a national nerve: In critic Robin Wood’s classic essay on
horror film, he notes that since Psycho, the genre has been largely preoccupied with all
things family.
To a large extent, this means all things MOM, and all the ways that Mom messed everything
up for her killer son and/or possessed daughter.
As Harrington also explains, the influence of Psycho can most readily be seen in a series
of films released from the mid 1970s to the early 1980s, all of which are incredibly similar
in their portrayal of overbearing, infantilizing, bossy mothers.
These include The Killing Kind, The Brood, Carrie, Burnt Offerings and Maniac.
In each, poor mothering catalyzes bloodshed.
Lots of it.
While all these movies owe Psycho a debt when it comes to their template, we suspect there’s
probably more to the surge of evil moms at this specific moment in time.
Specifically, second-wave feminism, which was at its zenith in the early to mid ‘70s.
During this era, women banded together in demand of equal rights.
They protested the way women had been systematically excluded from public life, and had been relegated
to domestic work and child rearing.
Increasingly more women left their domestic lives and entered the workforce.
Importantly, they were often painted as the enemy of the nuclear family.
Through this lens, a film like Carrie becomes about way more than a religious nutcase locking
her daughter in a little Jesus altar room.
Carrie’s mom is single, hectoring, pushy and fiercely ideological.
Also, she hates men, and thinks they plus sex are the source of all evil.
Now she’s no feminist; her craziness is fueled by religious fervor.
But practically speaking, she’s a 1970s hyperbolized fever dream version of what a
feminist is, and what a single-mother’s household might look like without the presence
of a paternal figure.
The hysterical mother archetype -reigned supreme in the 1970s, most notably in David Cronnenberg’s
film The Brood, which features Nola, a troubled young mother who is sent away to a psychiatrist.
The word “hysteria” actually comes from the Greek term that basically meant “womb
trouble.”
Throughout civilization, there’s been a persistent idea that a woman’s womb “wanders”
throughout her body and leads to all kinds of maladies - including hysteria.
This wasn’t some fringe idea, but advocated by figures like Plato and Hippocrates and
subsequent thinkers until at least the 1700s.
In The Brood, hysteria is literalized when Nola’s womb manifests outside of her body,
resulting in a primitive, animalistic birth ritual that would frighten even the world’s
least squeamish gynecologist.
The film makes it clear that Nola’s hysteria is not only the reason for the dissolution
of their marriage, but of their daughter’s troubles.
Perhaps mirroring anxieties about the breakdown of the family at the time, the movie suggests
that a mother’s rage could lead to major destruction, as she gives birth to a brood
of demon kids inexplicably dressed like snowboarding power rangers that murder anyone she’s expresses
anger at.
Meanwhile, The Exorcist pretty heavily hints that single mom Chris was too busy trying
to be an actress, live her life and complete her divorce to protect young Regan from getting
possessed by the devil.
In the book version, the demon literally says “It is you who have done it!
Yes, you with your career before anything, your career before your husband, before her.”
In a broader sense, the film is about religion’s relevance in an increasingly secular world,
with Chris’s single motherhood representing the breakdown of the nuclear family order.
Chris curses, uses a ouja board, and most importantly “denies” Reagan a two parent
home.
The Exorcist was the first of many films to deal with anxiety surrounding one parent households,
which would increase in prevalence onscreen in horror films as they increasingly became
more common in real life.
Now, that’s not to say all horror films wanted to put women back in the kitchen.
The classic Rosemary’s Baby, in its depiction of a housewife who becomes pregnant with the
spawn of Satan, manages to avoid that by making Rosemary the protagonist.
Though her pregnant body is the source of much of the film’s horror and grossness,
we empathize with her.
As a result the film effectively functions as both a commentary on sexual abuse AND abortion
in depicting the horrors of what is essentially an unwanted pregnancy.
At the same time, it shows Rosemary grappling with questions about how to be a good mom
when Satan is literally your baby daddy.
Ultimately, what the 1970s show us is that, when people are debating a woman’s place
in society, motherhood becomes a ripe place for exploring and typically, hyperbolizing
the, very real issues of the day.
So it’s fitting that, over the past decade, we’ve seen echoes of motherhood in our horror
films.
We’re once again in a time in which gender is majorly destabilized, as the internet has
served as a rallying place for women to talk about their experiences.
We’ve seen mothers take to horror movie screens with a post-Psycho-like vengeance,
exploring issues of modern motherhood.
Specifically, we’re seeing films exploring the myth of “having it all,” and the expectations
that women should easily balance motherhood with full time jobs, often in single-parent
households.
Significantly, these questions are explored in the breakthrough 2014 Australian film The
Babadook, made by writer-director Jennifer Kent.
The Babadook follows the distinctly unpleasant experiences of widow Amelia who loses her
husband in a car crash while on the way to the hospital to deliver her baby.
The resulting child, Samuel, is, charitably, an odd duck.
He builds weird weapon contraptions and generally doesn't play nicely with others.
A monster attempts to enter their lives via storybook
[BABADOOKDOOKDOOKDOOK], but over the course of the film it becomes
pretty clear that the monster is Amelia.
She is eventually possessed by “The Babadook” and tries to kill her son.
As we watch Amelia unravel, her hatred of and resentment towards her son become the
scariest force in the film.
Kent was explicit about what she was trying to convey with the film, telling Vice that
“Motherhood is very hard, and I do see women lose themselves.
It's the big lie that we're told – that motherhood is just great and fulfilling and
rewarding.
Of course, it is all those things for people, but… it's also a great difficulty for a
lot of women, and it's not spoken about.”
Here, the traditionally “terrifying” mother is given a more nuanced and sympathetic view.
Just as Amelia is terrifying, so too is the sacrifice she is supposed to be making for
her son.
Whereas moms themselves used to be scary, motherhood is now posited as scary too.
Similar themes appeared in the 2015 Austrian film Goodnight Mommy, which depicts the terror
two sons feel when their mother returns from extensive plastic surgery covered in bandages.
Here, “plastic surgery” is representative of the unnamed woman’s apparent “vanity.”
Vanity is construed as antithetical to motherhood, which is all about endless self-sacrifice
and subordination of one’s own desires for those of your child.
Were she merely the villain the entire film, it could be seen as some traditional maternal
horror.
However, as the film transpires, the “monstrous” behavior comes not from this mommy-like boogeyman,
but from the children, as they imprison her demanding that she tell them where their real
mother is.
In this way, the mother’s refusal to subordinate every part of herself, to have a life and
existence outside of the small world of her children, is punished.
Fittingly, at one point, the children glue their mother to the floor, as if to ensure
that she won’t be able to leave them.
In this film, the expectations of motherhood are as horrifying as the children’s violence
itself.
Hereditary also explores themes of motherhood as an ongoing generational exchange of trauma.
Here the hysterical, bad mother is reimagined in the form of Annie.
After being hit with two tragic losses - her mother and her daughter - Annie struggles
to stay sane, communes with dead spirits and spontaneously levitates.
The metaphor of Annie’s art — she makes miniature house scenes based on her own life
- has been interpreted in a number of ways.
One reading is that it reflects how she is a “puppet” in the grander scheme of the
Paimon- worshipping cultists.
Another reading proposes that instead of nurturing her own home, Annie is nurturing and mothering
her own art.
This may comment on the way women are often expected to choose between their art or passion
and their family life, and judged harshly if they make the less socially acceptable
choice.
Were Annie portrayed as a one-dimensional shrew, this film would look quite a bit like
a 1970s picture.
But both Collette’s performance and the meatiness of the role depicts something different
- a woman suffocated by intergenerational grief and anger, uncomfortable with her own
abilities as a caretaker, and violently resentful of her children.
At one point, we learn that Annie has a sleepwalking problem, and once almost sets herself and
her kids on fire using paint thinner.
"And I woke myself up striking the match which also woke Peter up and he started to scream."
This makes for one of the most haunting moments of a movie, far scarier than any naked old
people cult shenanigans.
To see a mother treat her children this way is distinctly disturbing, it violates our
most primal sense of human interaction - that a mother will love and care for her child.
It’s proof that motherhood remains one of the richest topics for exploration through
the horror genre.
It’s not only the scary mommys who are changing in onscreen horror.
Increasingly, the genre is portraying motherhood as something that is powerful.
Take the new Halloween, which reinterprets a classic of the slasher genre through the
lens of intergenerational female trauma.
Laurie, portrayed by Jamie Lee Curtis, has survived Michael’s attacks, but doing so
has turned her into a paranoid recluse essentially living in a fortress.
Though her daughter resents the fear-mongering that constituted her childhood, Laurie’s
anxieties are proven as justified: Michael comes back, and her home’s excessive safety
measures literally save her family.
Similarly, A Quiet Place depicts a mother transforming into anything but a hapless victim
[Emily Blunt loads shotgun in last scene].
Meanwhile, Us centers around two mother figures who each behave with super scary moral complexity
in attempts to protect their families.
All of this is to say that the future of moms in horror is complicated, gnarly, and pretty
exciting.
But, what do you guys think?
Is there anything scarier than a horror movie mom, and what does that mean about us as a
society?
Let us know what you think in the comments.
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----- Thanks for watching guys.
Peace.