This is another installment of the Spooky Season Special of this newsletter, where I’m exploring/meandering through my own ideas about horror, creepy stuff, and the relation to mental health and illness that pervades the genre. Most of these will be free but some will not be! So! If you don’t want to miss others like this, go ahead and sign up now. If you’re light on cash, I get it. Here’s a lower rate.
As a person with a.) a real need to feel borderline overstimulated at all times and b.) a deep and abiding love of controlled emotion, I’m very into horror films. Opting into something scary on purpose is pretty liberating, especially since, you know, **waves arms** this is all pretty overwhelming. But I’m also selective about them. Like, I want one that is either going to be so campy that it’s fun or it needs to actually make me look over my shoulder when I’m in the dark kitchen getting a snack. One of the best scary movies, I think, is the 2014 Australian film The Babadook.
Not only is the visual language super-creepy — unusual, bleak lighting and little hidden scary things every dang place — but it’s also one of those really excellent scary movies that also manages to be about something other than like, gore. Which, don’t get me wrong, doesn’t preclude a movie from being good (I fuck with gore as much as the next SAW-era desensitized millennial), but it does help when a movie is both really eerie and well scripted, acted, and edited.
Every scary movie is, if you boil it down, about something that we’re collectively afraid of — whether that’s the result of a moral panic (teens with loose morals) or an actual danger (teens in cars post-Son of Sam), or just anyone who is even remotely Other to us. But The Babadook brings it to a different level, exploring the things inside of us that cause us to fear for ourselves and others.
The thing that I like the most about The Babadook is that while there is an actual monster in the film, the real ghosts are familial. It’s a movie about book with a terrifying, cloaked character that leaps off the pages and it’s also a movie about grief, about generational torment, and about moms.
Moms — and the relative sanity of moms — is a pretty common throughline within both therapy and the scary movie genre. Which isn’t surprising, since literally every single person was born out of someone else’s body, which means every has a mother, at least technically. And it’s what happens to us when we’re kids that sets us up to succeed or fail — often, what happens to us is determined to some degree by our mothers. Isn’t the oldest trope about therapy that we all lie down on the couch and talk about how our moms messed us up?
On the other hand, being a mother is (I imagine) its own kind of terror. What if I mess this kid up? How much can I guide them? Is is OK that they just took a bite out of a houseplant?
In a thoughtful New York Times piece reviewing the recent spate of mom-centered horror films and shows, Amanda Hess described it like this:
In pregnancy, birth and young life, the horror tropes abound. Growing another human being inside your body is a natural human process that can nevertheless feel eerie, alien and supernatural. Also, gory.
When the photographer Heji Shin began taking unsentimental photographs of babies at birth, “I looked at them and I was like, This is literally ‘The Exorcist,’” she told T Magazine.
Bringing life into the world also brings death viscerally close. Thousands of infants die unexpectedly in the first year of their lives. Giving birth in the United States is more than 20 times as lethal as skydiving. Even the most desired and successful of pregnancies (let alone the kind that anti-abortion laws would require be carried to term) can conjure themes of shape-shifting, disfigurement, possession and torture.
Combined with the forces which can bring on terrifying new emotions, like postpartum depression and even psychosis, and yeah, the whole ethos around mothers is pretty scary.
And we know that it’s scary, because it’s right there in our horror media, from “Oedipus” to Hereditary.
Mommy Issues in Horror
Obviously, one of the most classic examples of a guy with mom issues is Norman Bates in Psycho. His mom did such a number on him that she continues to haunt him from beyond the grave. But it wasn’t really her, of course - it was Norman’s perception of her, his version of her after her death. In a 2014 paper, David Greven coined the phrase “dead-mother” as a specific embodiment of this kind of projection.
The death-mother—which relates to the varieties of femininity on display but exceeds their specific aspects and implications—is an effect produced by the film text and can only be understood through an analysis of the work as a whole. Exceeding the specifications of the Mrs. Bates character, the death-mother maps onto tropes and preoccupations in Hitchcock’s oeuvre but, more importantly, indicates the aesthetic implications, for the male artist most commonly, of the dread of femininity.
Phew! That is ACADEMIC.
But it is hard to ignore that our fear of moms also tends to map onto a fear of women, more generally. Women were locked away on frigid rocks like Blackwell’s Island for decades just for displaying such “dangerous” characteristics as sexuality, independent thought, and rejection of patriarchy. This isn’t that different that the way that many a horror movie mother is rendered frightening not because of her actual mental illness or terror she brings to the household, but because she represents a kind of unruly woman. “Overbearing” moms like Mrs. Bates (who is literally dead, sorry to spoil), are often caricatures of the kind of stereotypical women you might expect to see in anti-suffrage postcards.
We see this also in Carrie, too, wherein the titular character’s mom stunts her child with an excessive adherence of evangelical teachings and an ample dose of shame about her body. Carrie is made vulnerable at school by her mother’s unhinged control and obsession with her, ultimately leading her to develop special powers to compensate.
You know, like some of us developed senses of humor to deflect from our own feelings of being less-than. Just as an example. You get it.
But in recent years, there’s been a turn away from the archetype of the rolling-pin-wielding, red-faced, domineering Mommy Dearest. Because horror, as a genre, always closely kens to what’s happening within the culture more broadly, it shouldn’t be a surprise that the new horror movie mom is dealing with a different kind of crazy altogether.
Hereditary, for example, is one that flips the script on this idea. This explanation from Little White Lies is interesting:
In the case of Hereditary, it is the evil shrew archetype that is ingeniously reimagined. The first feature from writer/director Ari Aster, whose earlier shorts Munchausen and The Strange Thing About The Johnsons also explore the darker side of family, Hereditary tells the story of the Graham family with Toni Collette giving one of the most committed performances in modern horror cinema in the role of the matriarch. Collette’s Annie is a rich, tragic and complex character who has more in common with Medea and Hedda Gabler than Pamela Voorhees or Margaret White.
An overall extremely scarring film — seriously, I don’t really recommend Hereditary, even though a lot of people like it. It’s just…a lot — it is true that it confronts the standard role of mothers in horror. It also presents one of the most compelling visual versions of haunting/schizophrenia (who can ever know if you’re under spiritual attack or if your brain is the one mounting the assault? No one! That’s part of what’s so scary!) in recent memory, so I guess it’s got that going for it.
It’s not always the children of crazy moms who are the victims. Sometimes, it’s the moms themselves, unable to find relief from the self-created prison that was supposed to bring them joy and wholeness.
The Rise of the Mombie
In the real world (or on TikTok, anyway), new moms who are wading through the challenges of family, work, life, societal pressure to Keep It Tight and get their kid into the most perfect bilingual preschool program, have a funky fresh nickname: Mombies.
This is a term used by both mothers who feel completely zonked and childfree people to describe women who have become so consumed with their role as a mother that they’re incapable of doing or feeling anything else. Either way, it describes a frightening and crazy-making mentality that a.) motherhood is the best thing a woman can do ever in her whole life and b.) if motherhood does not completely fulfill her, something is wrong with her, and c.) a mother may be dealing with more now than at any point in the past but she must shoulder it with the amount of grace, love, tact, and empathy that the people around her expect, whether that is realistic or not.
So, you know, perfect for scary movies. Because what could be more terrifying than being set up to fail at the only thing you were expected to succeed at doing?
Again, Amanda Hess for the New York Times:
There’s something frustrating about this relentless construction of motherhood as a horror show, and not just because mothers experience the full range of human emotions (some of which are more faithfully explored in a Hallmark movie). By breaking a taboo, the genre has created a new cliché: of the exhausted mother pushed to her psychological breaking point. Though the lack of support for mothers is a structural problem, it is reframed as a personal one, with a narrative resolution that resembles a postpartum therapy session or an invitation to collectively scream. Mothers are made to suffer, and then they are flattened into a long-suffering mother persona.
I think it’s interesting that motherhood is still at the heart of the horror genre, but the challenges have been updated for the modern era. Whereas the Scary Moms of Cinematic Yore were mostly controlling, burdensome, and abusive, today’s moms and kids are haunted by a different set of scary problems, like sleep deprivation, mountains of laundry, and work-life balance. The question, though, is often where the empathy lies — who is the bad guy? And why is it never, ever capitalism?
While we’re exploring and uncovering ideas around family dynamics and things that we’re all scared of, there are a couple of areas where I’m hoping horror will explore. I would love, for example, an Instagram Mom movie where the terror comes from balancing a negative home life with the picture-perfect presentation, for example, because I think parsing this newly-created icon of motherhood would be interesting.
What I fear is that, instead, as we collectively regress backward in time, that we’ll instead see a resurgence of the domineering, evil, suffocate-you-by-the-apron-strings mother.
One of the reasons that I like The Babadook as much as I do is that the mother role is neither passive nor aggressive. She isn’t the villain and she isn’t a victim. She is a mother, doing her best, given a lot of really shitty circumstances that the film doesn’t try to erase. She confronts two of the actual scariest things most people could imagine: Their spouse dying and their child being in grave danger. And yet, she doesn’t revert back into any of the existing stereotypes that we see in horror movies.
As a childfree person, I can only approach horror films with the perspective of a person who has a mother. But from that vantage point, it makes sense why so much of the horror genre has been defined by people (let’s be honest, men) working out their mom issues and related neuroses on film. It also makes sense to me that with a more diverse range of people in the writer’s room and behind the camera, we might start to see a different kind of mother in horror.