Mother!, the title of Darren Aronofsky’s new film, is guaranteed to make horror fans sit up and take notice. Motherhood is almost as endemic a theme in the genre as the Big Two – sex and death. Indeed, in its most horrific manifestations, it co-opts those as well.
Most horror-movie mothers are very, very bad: either sexually repressed, over-possessive, insanely jealous, overbearing or – in the worst-case scenario – all of these things at once. Horror mothers are Freudian nightmares made flesh or, in some cases, ectoplasm. But bad horror mothers come in all shapes, sizes and dispositions. They don’t even necessarily have to be female, as the mother of all horror mothers reminds us. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde: all women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does, unless his name is Norman Bates.
In many ways, Mrs Bates is the blueprint for many a horror mother to come: domineering, possessive, jealous, homicidal and dead. In horror movies, mothers are the root of all evil. Even when they don’t actually get blood on their own hands, their bad mothering ensures that blood will be spilt, often by the children whose psyches they’ve twisted out of shape.
Freud reminds us that mythological mother goddesses were invariably creators and destroyers. Echoing Nyx and Echidna, who inflict all manner of monstrous and sinister offspring on the world in Greek mythology, Nola Carveth (Samantha Eggar) in David Cronenberg’s The Brood undergoes experimental psychotherapy that enables her to vent her inner rage by giving birth to homicidal mutant dwarves. They enact her subconscious desires, which basically means killing everyone that annoys her.
Horror mothers are nearly always angry – either about betrayal, or a failure to appreciate the sacrifices they’ve made – or, especially, when their evil children are harmed. And if there is anything more dangerous than a monster, it’s the monster’s mother, especially if she’s played by a scary mo-cap Angelina Jolie with snakily braided tail, gold stilettos and uncanny valley features as Grendel’s mother in 2007’s Beowulf. Smash those eggs in Aliens and you risk drawing the ire of the egg-laying xenomorph, who will get her own back by trying to co-opt your own surrogate child as an incubator.
Werecat Charles Brady (Brian Krause) dismembers a teacher in Sleepwalkers, but he’s a rank amateur compared to his mother (also his lover, since female werecats are apparently thin on the ground). Mary Brady (Alice Krige) outdoes Angelina by cutting a bloody swath through local law enforcement (stabbing one cop through the head with a corn-cob and a “no vegetables, no dessert” wisecrack) before dragging the town virgin (Madchën Amick) back to her house so Charles can suck out the girl’s purple essence, the ultimate gesture of motherly love.
But even when morphed into a reptilian-looking werecat, Mary cannot match Vera Cosgrove (Elizabeth Moody) in Peter Jackson’s Braindead for perverse un-maternal grotesquerie. Vera is a jealous and domineering Mrs Bates-type with a homicidal backstory even before she gets bitten by a Sumatran rat-monkey and turns into a zombie. Eventually, she mutates into a humungous mumzilla with pendulous breasts, who sucks her zombie-killing son Lionel back into her womb with the words, “No one will ever love you like your mother!” Which is true; even his girlfriend can’t do that. Lionel’s only recourse is to slice his way free of smothering motherliness with a DIY caesarean.
While real-life mothers valiantly struggle to assimilate the conflicting advice of parenting experts, the mothering instinct in horror films is all too easily perverted by tragedy into a biblical lust for vengeance. Bereavement, whether of husband or child, is a recurring motif that transforms women into vengeful slasher-movie furies. Sometimes they set their sights on the foetus in another woman’s uterus, such as Béatrice Dalle in Inside, slicing up everyone who gets between her and the embryo she has decided will replace the one she lost. Or they inveigle their way into a family, like Rebecca De Mornay in The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, who gets a job as evil nanny to the woman she blames for her own triple trauma of bereavement, miscarriage and hysterectomy.
De Mornay also deserves to win a Bad Mother of the Millennium award for Mother’s Day, in which she appears to be modelling herself on Tamora, Queen of the Goths, from Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, who revels in her sons’ atrocities. De Mornay has raised her boys to be bank robbers, rapists and killers and, possibly deferring to some vague idea that a mother should help shape her children’s hobbies, presides in person over their torture-happy home invasions. As the advertising for another movie had it, “The family that slays together stays together,” a tagline that could also apply to 1974’s Frightmare, in which mumsy Dorothy (Sheila Keith) encourages her daughter Debbie to join her in her favourite pastime, which happens to be cannibalism. Shakespeare’s Tamora was tricked into eating her own sons, baked in a pie, but Dorothy isn’t fussy and just chows down on everyone who calls on her.
The bond between mother and child is one of the strongest emotional ties in human nature, so it is hardly surprising that it’s such a regular element in the work of (mostly) male film-makers seeking relatable motivation for their female protagonists without having to think too deeply about metaphysics. Sometimes, though, it makes you wonder about the directors’ own relationships with their mothers. Psycho is not the only Alfred Hitchcock film to feature a domineering mother; Hitchcock himself admitted to having been traumatised by his own mum, who famously punished him by forcing him stand for hours at the foot of the bed, a personal memory he assigned to Norman Bates in Psycho.
In horror movies, maternal grief or jealousy is so amplified it can persist beyond the grave, particularly when it comes to ghosts whose very femaleness is judged (by men) to make them more emotionally unstable than their male counterparts, as though death has stopped their body clocks at the wrong time of the month in perpetuity. There is a monstrousness to motherly urges, which have a malevolent disregard for fairness or justice. Like Medea, who butchered her own babies to get back at her ex, all they want is revenge. And in their primal rage they don’t care who gets it in the neck.
In The Woman in Black, the phantom of Jennet Humfrye avenges the accidental death of her child by claiming the lives of children or lawyers who stray into her district. Likewise, the ghost mother in Mama is mourning her dead baby and doesn’t find it at all inappropriate that she should salve her grief by luring a couple of living kiddies off the edge of a cliff. Maybe she didn’t love her dead baby as dearly as she thinks if she’s prepared to swap it for the very next child she lays eyes on.
Another mother driven homicidal by bereavement is Mrs Voorhees (Betsy Palmer) in Friday the 13th, who hacks her way through a bunch of randy camp counsellors she blames for the accidental death of her son Jason (even though he’s not actually dead, since in the sequel he’s revived to inherit his mother’s love for slashing and hacking, and carries on doing it for another 10 films). If only Mrs Voorhees had been told of her error and reunited with her child in that first film, the whole thrust of the franchise might have turned out a sight less … stabby.
Horror mothers do not necessarily start out as monsters. Motherhood is one of the most taxing responsibilities any woman can be faced with, and even the most saintly real-life mum can be driven to distraction by sleep deprivation, financial worries and wilful toddlers. Horror movies simply amp up the pressure to an intolerable degree. Insecurity, guilt and resentment open a doorway to stressed mothers being possessed by the spirits of baby-killing witches, photosensitive ghosts or bogeymen from the pages of children’s books.
But, for all their susceptibility to the forces of darkness, possessed mothers do essentially have their children’s best interests at heart. One can also sympathise with the oblivious mothers, those workaholic grownups who fail to understand or even notice their children’s grim ordeals in films such as Let the Right One In or It Follows. At least their neglect stays on the acceptable side of child abuse, unlike Victoria Tennant in Flowers in the Attic, who doesn’t just keep her kids locked up but feeds them arsenic-laced cookies so she can deny their existence and collect her inheritance.
Stir religion and sexual repression into the mum-mix, and you have an even more poisonous recipe for murderous mayhem. Tallulah Bankhead as Mrs Trefoile in Die! Die! My Darling! doesn’t just hold her dead son’s ex-fiancee Pat (Stefanie Powers) prisoner in her mansion but blathers on about “vile bodies”, pelts her with endless Bible readings and throws a wobbly when Pat asks her to pass the salt. “God’s food should be eaten unadorned!” rants Mrs Trefoile. “We are vegetarian. For instance, this meat loaf is synthetic, compounded of bread, oatmeal and wheatgerm.” Which sounds almost as unappetising as the arsenic-laced cookies of Flowers in the Attic.
But a blind love of Jesus can be enough to turn horror mothers into child-abusing harridans even without bereavement. Poor Carrie is not half as scary as her mother, Mrs White (Piper Laurie), whose festering guilt about once having had sex makes her lock the fruit of that copulation in a cupboard and harangue her with deluded nonsense about sin, dirty pillows and the evil colour red (a trait she shares with Mrs Trefoile in Die! Die! My Darling!).
Mrs White may not be directly accountable for her daughter killing half her classmates with her deadly telekinetic abilities, but she sure as hell is responsible for warping Carrie’s character out of shape by withholding vital sex education and insisting everyone will laugh at her. If only Carrie had been more conversant with the facts of life she wouldn’t have been so traumatised by her period, and having pig’s blood tipped all over her at the prom might not have triggered that catastrophic psychic meltdown.
In the end, Mrs White is fully prepared to kill her own daughter for being, as she imagines, an evil witch – though by any standards it’s the mother who is the real monster here. Medea had nothing on these mums, whose attitude to sex has been so deformed by guilt they are prepared to sacrifice their own progeny rather than face up to their own tortured consciences.
In 2015’s The Witch, the mother’s unquestioning embrace of a misogynistic belief system redirects her own sexual shame towards her daughter, whom she tries to strangle: “The devil is in thee and hath had thee. You are smeared of his sin. You reek of evil!” It’s little wonder the daughter prefers the company of a horny goat and wanders off into the woods, where she can likely find herself a more supportive matriarchal figure among the baby-eating witches.
Possessive or neglectful, encouraging or abusive, horror mothers invariably get it wrong, even more so than their real-life counterparts. But it is hard not to feel sorry for genuinely well-meaning parents such as Chris MacNeil in The Exorcist, who does the best she can when Pazuzu makes her daughter puke pea soup. And there is at least one other horror movie mother who does everything right, in theory, but still ends up with the short end of the stick. When Rosemary (Mia Farrow) learns the truth about her pregnancy in Rosemary’s Baby, her maternal instincts trump her understandable squeamishness at having been forced to give birth to the spawn of Satan.
Rosemary is clearly a good horror mother. Who knows, maybe she can even raise her devil baby to be a good kid, though the history of horror mothers suggests it will be an uphill struggle, and that she’ll probably end up with a son who’ll make Norman Bates, Jason Voorhees and Carrie seem like paragons of selfless humanitarian benevolence.
Mother! is in cinemas now
