If you want to hear the unknown origins and abilities of the Other Mother that we don’t
see in the story, then stick around to the end of this video.
This lesson is sponsored by Audible.
[INTRO]
The Beldam is the dreaded seamstress that inhabits a realm used for luring in unsuspecting
children to feast on their souls.
Welcome to Horror History, last episode we talked about the history of Coraline Jones,
so today’s I’ll be covering her antagonist, The Other Mother, also known as The Beldam.
The story keeps the Beldam mostly shrouded in mystery, but it does leave little clues
that we can use to learn more about the creature’s past, it’s distinctive capabilities and
moreover its purpose in the twisted world it calls home.
So who is The Beldam and how did it come to be?
In order to understand, let’s take it back hundreds of years to the origin of the Other
Mother.
[HORROR HISTORY]
It’s never explicitly stated how old The Beldam is, but we can determine that by studying
the souls of the victims she has captured.
It seems she has been luring in children for hundreds of years if not more.
Perhaps her oldest victim is a little boy whose ghost is discovered by Coraline when
she’s locked behind the mirror.
When he first sees Coraline he asks, “Art thou—art thou alive?"
The phrase is derived from Old English, and it’s usage started to decline in the 17th
Century.
When Coraline asks if he’s a boy or a girl, he can’t remember, but he says he used to
wear skirts, but believes he was a boy.
He may be speaking of a style called breeching where boys younger than eight would be dressed
in articles of clothing known as breeches, and that practice was most common from the
1500s to the early late 1800s.
I researched the year by year usage of some of the other words the boy uses, like Governess,
Tain’t, Scullery and Peradventure and determined that the boy most likely lived between 1700
and 1760.
It is possible that the Beldam is older than that, but the boy is her first known victim.
The word Beldam as we know it today actually goes back to the 1660s, and refers to an old
woman or witch, a possible clue about the nature of the Beldam’s powers having something
to do with witchcraft.
The stone that Miss Spink and Miss Forcible give Coraline to help combat the danger that
she might encounter is an Adder Stone, which is also known as a Hag Stone or Witch Stone.
Coraline uses it’s magic to find the souls hidden by the Beldam, so it makes sense that
a witch artifact would need to be used to combat against a witch.
Additionally, the Adder Stone is said to be made from the head of a serpent, the word
“adder” actually refers to a type of snake.
The Beldam has many spider-like properties, and including the final form we see being
and arachnid creature, and spiders are said to be afraid of snakes.
At least that’s what Harry Potter taught me.
"It is an ancient creature we spiders fear above all others."
Witches are often portrayed with the ability to transform into an animal form, so it makes
sense that The Other Mother’s true form is a spider.
It seems that the Beldam has the ability to take almost any form it wants, so it’s possible
that it only took the spider form at the end because Coraline is afraid of spiders, however,
some of her more intrinsic attributes point to her true form being a spider, which
I will point out as we go through her story.
For example, the Beldam has been living in this other world for 100s of years and using
it to lure in kids so she can steal their souls, which is at one point compared to how
a spider weaves its web to capture flies.
It’s never explicitly stated why she needs these kids’ souls, but according to The
Cat, "She wants something to love... I think
Something that isn't her.
She might want something to eat as well.
It's hard to tell with creatures like that."
So it seems like she needs to lure in these children so that she can eat them, or possibly
capture their souls and slowly feast off them for 100s of years.
At the time Coraline’s family moves into the house, the Beldam has captured at least
three of these souls.
Her world seems to be anchored to this one particular house, because all of her victims
seem to be kids who lived there; she doesn’t seem to have the ability and travel to seek
out new victims, which may explain why she’s so desperate to capture Coraline.
She also has the ability to manipulate her world to make it more attractive to the kid
that she’s trying to abduct.
When Coraline moves in, she gets to work creating the perfect world so that Coraline will want
to stay there forever.
She seems to be able to fabricate her own realities, but “she couldn’t truly make
anything,” she only had the ability to “copy and distort things that already existed.”
So she spends two weeks studying Coraline’s behaviour and building a world that consisted
of three wonders designed to entice the young girl, like a theater that performs amazing
and thrilling displays to counter the boring old ladies downstairs, a spectacular mouse
circus in place of the strange man living above the Joneses, and home with delicious
food and attentive parents as opposed to Coraline’s real home, where he parents are always busy
and the meals rarely cater to her palette.
The Beldam built a gateway between the two pockets of reality behind a blocked off doorway
to another flat that had piqued Coraline’s interest upon discovering it.
There were other ways in and out of the world, which are used by The Cat, but we never end
up seeing any of them.
When the illusion is ready, The Beldam uses her magic to invade Coraline’s dream, making
her see dark shapes that gather under the moon and sing, probably to make her dreams
seem more interesting than her reality and make her appreciate the other world even more.
One day Coraline’s curiosity gets the better of her and she swipes the key to the unused
door and opens it to find the passageway, on the other side of which she meets her Other
Mother.
She is described as being taller and thinner than her real mother, which paper-white skin,
longer teeth, shiny black hair that drifts as if blowing in a wind or a current and large
black buttons in place of her eyes.
She tells Coraline to go get her Other Father, who is another creation of the Beldam.
It does seems that there are other life forms in the other world, but they are completely
at the mercy and control of the Other Mother.
The Other Father is the first example, but he doesn’t have the same origin as The Other
Mother.
It seems he’s more of a featureless blank slate life form that she has formed and manipulated
to look and act like Coraline’s father, and she’s given him black button eyes to
sell the idea that the two of them are a couple, just like Coraline’s real parents.
The fact that The Other Mother sews together these creations is another example of her
similarity to spiders, who weave webs using string, which they also use to wrap up their
victims.
The Beldam is the only life form of her kind in the other world, but there are two other
entities lurking in the dark whose origins have never been fully elaborated on until
now.
If you want to fully experience the dark twisted world of Coraline, the best way to do it is
by listening to the audiobook on Audible.
The audiobook is narrated by Coraline’s legendary author, Neil Gaiman.
I love listening to the story and knowing that every line is being told exactly the
way the author intended it.
But I use Audible for so much more than just diving deeper into Coraline.
Pretty much any book you can think of has a narrated version on Audible, but that’s
far from the extent of their offerings -- you can also listen to podcasts, comedy performances,
Audible originals that you’ll never find in print and so much more.
What I love about the service is that it can be so hard to find the time to read a book
in today’s world, but thanks to Audible, you don’t really have to.
It’s great for me when I’m making these videos because I don’t have to stop every
time I want to take notes, I can just have it continue reading while I'm typing.
And when I’m listening to a title for fun, I can turn it on in the car, while I’m cooking,
while I’m exercising, sometimes even while I’m working and I get to hear so many great
stories that I never would have had the time for before.
Just visit audible dot com slash czsworld or text czsworld to 500-500.
I’ll leave the link for you in the description.
Again, that’s audible dot com slash czsworld.
The Other Mother and Other Father tell Coraline that everyone has a second set of parents,
and this is all part of the lie created by The Other Mother to make Coraline feel more
comfortable staying in the other world.
She sends Coraline up to play with the rats in her bedroom.
The rats are basically like henchman that do all of Other Mother’s bidding.
They entertain Coraline and stack on top of one another to give a humanoid form to the
clothes of the man upstairs.
At first she thinks that this is simply The Other Mr. Bobo, just as she has an Other Mother
and Other Father, but by the end of the book it becomes clear that The Other Mother doesn’t
have someone to play that role, it’s actually just the group of mice pretending to be a
person.
But there are two more human-looking “other” forms that Coraline encounters in the Beldam’s
world, which she encounters when she goes downstairs to check out the theater that has
replaced the flat of Miss Spink and Miss Forcible.
Coraline learns that the performers did not actually look like the old ladies when they
take off the fat suits and reveal thin young women with black button eyes.
These would be the last two human characters with buttons sewn over their eyes.
So we have the Other Mother, who is the shape-shifting Beldam herself, the Other Father, who
doesn’t actually look like Coraline’s father, and these two women, who are actually
just wearing costumes to make them look like Spink and Forcible.
So who are these other life forms living in The Beldam’s domain?
We know that the Other Mother’s goal is to eventually sew buttons over Coraline’s
eyes, so what if these other people being manipulated by her the bodies of the children
she abducted over the years?
The idea makes sense, because there are only three of them, two female and one male, and
we later find that the kids’ souls have been removed from their bodies, and they continue
to exist only as ghosts who can no longer remember what they were like in life.
While Coraline is busy inside the theater, The Other Mother returns to the real world
and kidnaps Coraline’s parents.
She imprisons them inside of a snowglobe and hides it away on the mantle in the drawing
room of the other world.
At the end of Coraline’s visit to the theater, her other parents greet her outside of the
house and make the offer to let Coraline stay forever if she can sew the buttons over her
eyes.
Coraline promptly tells her she’ll be leaving now, and “her Other Mother’s hand scuttled
off Coraline’s shoulder like a frightened spider.”
They tell her to come back soon, and she leaves.
The Other Mother seals back up the doorway, likely to let Coraline’s anticipation of
returning to the world build before she reopens it.
Eventually Coraline returns to the Beldam’s world to try to find her parents and The Other
Mother tells her that her parents were bored of her, and it is here that we learn of another
magic ability she possesses for the purposes of deceit and manipulation.
She’s able to brush her hand against the mirror and create an image of Coraline’s
real parents.
They appear to be going on vacation without their daughter and boasting about how nice
it is not to have Coraline weighing them down.
Coraline doesn’t fall for the false image, so the Other Mother resorts to a less psychological
tactic by having one of her rats run into the real world and steal the key to the doorway
so that Coraline can’t get back out.
The other parents go to bed, commenting on how they’ll need their beauty sleep if they
aren’t going to have a midnight snack.
I’m guessing that snack was supposed to be Coraline, and this is the first suggestion
of the idea that The Other Mother needs to eat in order to keep using her powers or spells.
There’s some evidence of this the next day, then Coraline wakes up and goes into the Other
Father’s study, and he’s just sitting there not doing anything at all.
She also thinks “he looked less like her true father today.
There was something slightly vague about his face—like bread dough that had begun to
rise, smoothing out the bumps and cracks and depressions.”
The Other Mother is out in the garden during this time, working on patching up the other
passageways that exist between the real world and the other world so that The Cat could
not freely travel in and out.
The Other Mother does not like the cat and sees him as vermin.
I think this is because she is afraid of him and his wit, and going back to idea that her
true form is a spider, cats eat spiders, so it makes sense that she’d want to keep him
out.
The Cat claims there are passages that the Other Mother doesn’t know about.
Other Mother next encounters Coraline as she’s returning from a walk and offers to play a
game, which reveals another important trait of hers, her love of games.
It is likely that she loves games because her primary targets seem to all be children.
It seems she could have easily sewn buttons over the eyes of Coraline’s parents, but
elects not to, probably because they have no nutritional value to her.
She’s also a notorious manipulator, so games are an excellent way for her to strike deals
with her victims and cheat her way into winning them.
Coraline doesn’t fall for the idea of playing a game on The Other Mother’s terms, so The Other Mother
tries to convince her stay again, casually eating beetles as she does so.
"They're cocoa beetles from Zanzibar!"
This is the only thing we actually see the Other Mother eating during the novella.
She doesn’t eat any of the real food that she prepares for Coraline, and it represents
the metaphor of how she wants to consume Coraline’s soul.
And the Beldam needs that soul to continue to thrive.
Unable to get anywhere with Coraline, she gets upset and claims Coraline has lost her
manners by refusing to cave into her demands and locks her in the area behind the mirror
as punishment and keeps her there until the following morning.
During this time, Coraline meets the ghost children, which teaches us more about what happens
when The Beldam takes your soul.
The victims have forgotten their own names and identities; they are only able to remember
trivial details about their lives and the feeling of The Other Mother taking their lives,
their joy and their hearts and leaving them hollow.
While Coraline is locked away, The Other Mother scolds the creature she had created to play
the role of The Other Father for telling Coraline too much.
She strips him of any remaining identifying features and discards him in the dark in the
cellar below the abandoned flat next door.
She locks him in there and swallows the key.
The next morning she retrieves Coraline and brings her to the kitchen table for breakfast,
hoping today would be the day that she finally breaks her, but Coraline would surprise her
with a challenge in a scene that teaches us yet another secret about the true nature of
the Beldam.
Coraline challenges The Other Mother to a game of hide and seek.
If she can locate the souls of the dead children and her parents, the Other Mother is to let
her leave this world.
Other Mother never planned on keeping her word even though she swears on her mother’s
grave to go through with it.
We don’t know if a creature like The Beldam actually has parents of it’s own, or a grave
though, so this could be relatively meaningless.
Coraline seems privy to that fact, so she also swears on her right hand.
I think this is a strategic move by The Other Mother.
There are many references to her spider like hands throughout the story,
Her hand is caught in the closing door, causing it to break off
of the arm, and it continues to crawl around with a mind of its own.
What if the Beldam is actually just this hand?
We know that she has the ability to create false worlds and and false people, so it’s
possible that the arms, torso, legs, neck and head were all just for show to give Coraline
a false sense of security.
So she had no issue betting on her mother’s grave because she likely doesn’t have a
mother and no issue betting on her right hand, because that would really just be freeing
her from the rest of her body.
After making the deal, The Other Mother disappears until Coraline has found two of the three
souls of the lost children.
With each soul found, the world flattens, loses its form and contorts.
The once bustling theater becomes abandoned and derelict.
I think that without possession of those souls, which she slowly feeds off of for power, she’s
unable to keep up the illusion of the perfect world she had set up.
She starts to fear that Coraline will find all of the souls, and appears again to throw
her off course.
She regurgitates the key to the empty flat and implies that Coraline will need it in
order to find the final soul, which is of course, a lie, but Coraline goes to investigate
it anyways.
Inside, Coraline comes across a giant dead spider in the bathtub.
We don’t have any information on any possible other members of the Beldam’s species, but
I have to wonder if this is what happens when one of them doesn’t get children’s souls
to feed off of.
In the basement, she encounters the thing that was once The Other Father and the Other
Mother seems to be influencing his actions, trying to get him to hurt Coraline.
"Run, child.
Leave this place.
She wants me to hurt you, to keep you here for ever, so that you can never finish the
game, and she will win.
She is pushing me so hard to hurt you.
I cannot fight her."
More nervous than ever, the Other Mother sends her rat spies to go retrieve the final soul
from where it's hidden upstairs, but she's able to retrieve it and confront her back
in the other drawing room.
Other Mother plans to trick Coraline into forfeiting the soul, but Coraline tells her
she thinks she knows where her parents are hidden: in the passageway between the two
worlds.
Other Mother opens it to show her that she was wrong which would prove her to be victorious
and earn her the right to see buttons over Coraline's eyes, but when she turns back,
The Cat is flying though the air towards her face.
It scratches and attacks her just long enough for Coraline to slip through into the passage
The Beldam screams out, "No!" in an inhuman voice and reaches out to stop the closing
door, but it pinches her wrist and servers her hand, which I theorized could be the real
form of the Beldam.
The hand crawls around her Coraline's world in search of the key so that she would not
forever be locked out of the other world where the rest of its body remained.
That night it was unable to get into Coraline's room and instead goes downstairs into the
flat of Miss Spink and Miss Forcible and attacks one of their dogs, leaving a long gash in
his side.
The next day Coraline came to visit the old ladies and the hand heard her say that she'd
be playing out beyond theold tennis court, and it realized she have the key with her.
To be honest, I'm not sure how it heard what she said, because last time I checked hands
don't have ears, but the point is, it secretly followed her to the spot where it knew she'd
be alone.
It arrives to find a tea party with Coraline's dolls set up on a platform with the key in
the center.
When it went to go steal the key, it realized that the picnic blanket was on no platform
at all, it was stretched over the top of an open well, and the hand of the Beldam fell
into its depths before Coraline sealed the lid once more.
It's unclear if a creature like The Beldam would be able to survive such a fall, or how
long it would survive until the next person comes along and opens the well.
It seems reasonable that if it did survive, it would be able to scale the wall like a
spider, but it's unlikely that anyone would open the well again for several years.
The Beldam is mysterious but horrifying creature.
It reminds me a lot of the creature from IT, from it's shapeshifting abilities, to its
final form as a spider to its need to feed off of young children to sustain itself.
Another Stephen King connection relates to The Shining.
The actress who plays the young version of the woman in Room 237 is named Lia Beldam,
and she, similarly to the Beldam in Coraline, takes a pleasant form to try to win the love
of her victim before revealing her true nasty self.
This two-faced personality is yet another reason that stop motion was the perfect choice
to make the film version of Coraline.
The faces of each character had to be replaced in order give them a variety of expressions,
and over 15,000 faces were used.
If you want to learn all the secrets hidden within Coraline, check out the playlist on
the left, and don't forget to use my link in the description to listen to the audiobook
over on Audible. and if you love horror, remember to subscribe to CZsWorld world for new horrors
every week, ring that.
deathbell for notifications, and I'll see you in the next one.
Assuming we both survive.