Wicked Mothers: Horror Movies for Mother's Day
Got mommy problems? Celebrate Mother’s Day with a movie marathon featuring horror’s most terrifying moms. This article was originally posted at www.whatsleepsbeneath.com and has been edited here.
Laura’s picks
One of the many blessings of both the horror genre and writing about it within a collective is how much lateral movement there is when we think of “horrifying mothers” to motherhood in horror. Beginning in the adjacent camp to the feminist reading of Frankenstein as an analogy for the horrors of pregnancy, I’ve continued to be fascinated by what horror has to offer in discussion about the creation of life, the role of mothers, and the relationship between parent and child.
THE EYES OF MY MOTHER
Edited and directed by Nicolas Pesce, The Eyes of My Mother (2016) is a black-and-white arthouse affair that explores the shadow of generational trauma, and how isolation can erode, make sick, and ultimately destroy the family unit. On a rural farmstead, Francisca (Olivia Bond plays the young version of this character, and Kika Magalhães plays the older) learns how to raise animals and how to remove eyeballs from said animals, taught by her trained surgeon mother. Trauma overtakes the family in the form of a stranger and murder. Francisca, once older, tries to fight off loneliness and isolation in taking on the role of the mother that she lost when she was a child. In The Eyes of My Mother, the murderer is turned monstrous pet, and the role of mother becomes horrifying through child kidnapping as Francisca seeks to fulfill her desire for connection at any cost.
What remains, for me, the most powerful facet of Eyes is what is left unsaid: shots that linger on bloodied hands and broken bodies. What goes unsaid or undone by a parent in their relationship with their child(ren) has just as much of an impact as what happens in physical reality. Like most arthouse films, Eyes is both moving and disturbing in equal measure, and this is certainly a film you should check the content warnings on before diving in. Pesce is certainly not afraid to examine the darker sides of motherhood and the legacies our mothers leave behind through us, and what we become ourselves.
THE FINAL GIRLS
On a distinctly lighter note, The Final Girls (2015), a comedy-slasher flick directed by Todd Strauss-Schulson, features mother-daughter duo Amanda (Malkin Åkerman) and Max Cartright (Taissa Farmiga) as Amanda focuses on trying to resurrect her acting career after one bad slasher movie she did in the ’80s derailed everything. Three years after her mother’s death, Max is asked to attend a double-feature of her mother’s movie Camp Bloodbath and its sequel. When a terrifying fire breaks out in the theater, Max slashes through the movie screen with a machete to get her and her friends to safety, only for them to wind up stuck in the repeated hell of Camp Bloodbath. What’s worse, the younger version of Amanda does not recognize Max, nor can she.
The Final Girls does an excellent job of exploring coming-of-age through the lens of how we relate to our parents as we get older. It’s only as we begin working and spreading our wings do we truly begin to understand how much they’ve accomplished and sacrificed to raise us, and how much, most importantly, we still have in common. Max gets to know Amanda as the character she plays in Camp Bloodbath first, but she also catches moments of her mother’s real personality and tenacity. In this way she’s also able to say her final goodbyes, and, in some ways, move on with her own life.
Destiny’s picks
HEREDITARY
There is no doubt that Annie Graham, played by Toni Collette, is a force to be reckoned with in Ari Aster’s horror film Hereditary (2018). Besides being the daughter of an otherwise private woman, Annie, alongside viewers of the film, later discovers her family’s true calling—or curse—in that they are witches and devil worshippers of sorts. However, much like her own mother choosing to sacrifice her family for the practice of her craft and King Paimon, Annie, too, has sacrificed her family in other ways.
While not performing seances in the attic, Annie has quite a different form of art that’s focused on and filmed over throughout the entire movie: the creation of houses and miniatures. Quite meticulous, detailed, and a hobby to some, this appears to be Annie’s life work and even a form of coping for her when faced with the tragic loss of her daughter, Charlie. To others, the artwork is seen as more of a “craft,” meaning that the work can be easily interrupted, whether it be for announcing dinners or asking for car keys—it is not important enough for Annie to simply be left alone while in the studio. I like to attribute these inconsiderate acts to the fact that Annie isn't respected as an artist because she’s already a mother and therefore, her talents and responsibilities end with motherhood.
Tested, tried, and true, after Charlie’s disturbing death scene, it is very apparent that after her death, Annie no longer wants to be a mother, and certainly doesn’t want to be the mother of the child who accidentally killed her youngest baby. From escaping to her small studio to the absolutely raw stages of grief Collette portrays on the screen, she very visually shows us the otherwise more complex and dark sides of parenthood—the need to step back, the anger and guilt. I applaud Collette for her ability to successfully capture these emotions and twist the characteristics associated with motherhood into such a force we are only left to fear after undergoing such horrific events.
PET SEMATARY
In sticking with grief, I wanted to expand on the character of Rachel Creed, played by Denise Crosby in 1989 and by Amy Seimetz in 2019. While some things have changed from Stephen King’s novel to director Mary Lambert’s, and later Kevin Kolsch and Dennis Widmyer’s adaptations, I feel like the horrors that Rachel was forced to experience as both a child and again as an adult, go beyond the power of the Pet Sematary itself.
Don’t get me wrong, the story’s origin and the legend of the wendigo are both quite terrifying, but deep inside the depths of my own mind and experiences, trauma as a source of horror will always win. For most of her life, Rachel was haunted by the tragic loss of her older sister Zelda to an accident that occurred when she was just a young girl. However, it wasn’t just the accident that haunted Rachel, but Zelda herself, having suffered from spinal meningitis, the disease contorted her body to an horrific extent.
As if things couldn’t get worse, Rachel is later tasked with explaining death and the afterlife to her daughter, Ellie, when the family cat gets hit by a car and again, when depending on what version of the film you’re watching, one of her own children gets struck and dies on the same country road. While we don’t get a rundown of the stages of grief like we do with Annie, the scene in which Rachel shines the most is her muddy return from the burial ground to kill her husband, reminding us all that sometimes being dead really is better.
Theresa’s picks
US
What is more horrifying than finding out your mother is not who you think she is? Us, written and directed by Jordan Peele and released 2019, follows Adelaide Wilson (Lupita Nyong’o) and her family as they are hunted and attacked by a family of their own doppelgangers. Us is a fantastic film in so many ways: the script, the visuals, the cinematography, the costuming, and the plot twist ending which is some of the best writing I’ve experienced in a long time.
Lupita’s performance as Red is second to none, making her story of motherhood one to pay close attention to. Red’s story is a typical one in some ways: She describes the internal battle of maintaining herself while loving for and caring for her children. And yet, in other ways, Red goes much deeper. What makes the story so remarkable is that we get to follow Adelaide throughout parts of her childhood, getting glimpses into the expectations of becoming a caregiver figure at an early age—something that is so common for young girls and not often talked about. Part slasher, part mystery, Us is an instant classic for the horror genre. I won’t say much more because if you haven’t seen this film, you absolutely must.
ROSEMARY’S BABY
Another classic is Rosemary’s Baby, directed by Roman Polanski and released in 1968. The film follows a young couple, Guy (John Cassavetes) and Rosemary (Mia Farrow), as they move into a Gothic-style apartment in New York City. The neighbors are quick to become too friendly, and while Guy takes to them quickly, Rosemary finds them annoying and suspicious. After the death of another tenant, she begins to suspect they are part of a satanic cult and grows fearful of their activity.
Rosemary is drugged at a dinner party with the neighbors, raped by her husband, and then spends nearly the remainder of the film in a pregnant and paranoid state, not knowing whether or not she and her baby are safe from the satanic presence in the apartment building. Eventually, she is unable to avoid the fate set by her neighbors and their evil plans, and succumbs to it. What makes this film truly remarkable is the effectiveness in which the horrors of pregnancy are portrayed. The fear, protectiveness, uncertainty, and fierce love that are all part of becoming a mother are vibrantly shown through Farrow’s performance. Known as one of the great hallmarks of art film, Rosemary’s Baby expertly brings together themes of the occult, gender, and motherhood.
Ande
A QUIET PLACE
For my money, one of genre’s most shining examples of bravery and devotion from a mother is Evelyn Abbott, played by Emily Blunt in 2018’s A Quiet Place, directed by co-star John Krasinski. Set in a strikingly atmospheric apocalyptic world where the smallest of sounds can mean death, the Abbott family spends much of the film in silence, eking out a life as scavengers, communicating in ASL. When tragedy steals one of Evelyn’s children from her on their way home from a supply run, Evelyn’s mettle as a mother is put to the test as she tries to hold her pain together in the most unforgiving of environments.
Many of the film’s events however, take place more than a year later, and the Abbotts are still noticeably shaken from their loss. Complicating matters is Evelyn’s quite visible pregnancy, leaving the nagging question in viewers’ minds, “How is she going to take care of a child in this world?” This question bears fruit in one of the film’s most pivotal scenes, as Evelyn, home alone while the others are out, goes into labor. What follows is a jaw-dropping display of determination and strength as she fights for her life and the life of her soon-to-be born son, knowing full well that his birth will be only the first of countless hurdles to their survival in the years to come.
POSSESSION
Just to make sure we cover the full spectrum of what motherhood might look like, though, I’d ask that you turn to Andrzej Żuławski’s elusive 1981 masterpiece, Possession. Soon to be celebrating the 40th year since its release, Possession is set in Cold War-era West Berlin and stars Isabelle Adjani as Anna, who opens the film by asking her husband Mark (Sam Neill) for a divorce. Days after he reluctantly assents, Mark returns to their apartment to find their young son, Bob, seemingly neglected and abandoned. When Anna eventually returns, Mark refuses to leave her alone with their son again. Anna’s behavior only increases in erraticism, and Mark’s quest to figure out what is happening to his wife uncovers a chaotic madness that threatens more than he could ever imagine.
Adjani’s truly unhinged performance as the embattled mother earned her the award for best actress at the film’s debut at Cannes, and though most critics can see Possession as, at least in part, a venomous account of Żuławski’s own divorce, the film is rich with deep and resonant layers, not the least of which is Anna’s abandonment of her family (as well as an infamously disturbing and gory miscarriage she suffers) as symbolic of the Eastern Bloc which had expelled Żuławski from his native Poland around that time.
Possession’s release and reputation were marred by substantial edits from its distributor, which cut nearly a third of the film’s runtime. Its inclusion on the U.K.’s list of banned “video nasties” didn’t help either. But if you’re willing to do a little digging, I’m sure you’d be able to appreciate Anna’s inclusion on any list of wicked mothers.
