“Mother!”, reproduced with permission. Source: Wikimedia Commons
Female Physiology, Fraught Relationships, and Horror
Mums. You can’t live with them. You can’t live without them.
In her seminal work the Powers of Horror: an essay on abjection, Julie Kristeva defines abjection “a traumatic confrontation with an object that, though somehow familiar to the viewing subject, is envisioned as defiled due to its existence outside of the symbolic order”.
In the context of horror films this means: Children are scary. Toys are scary. Mothers are scary.
As many horror films do. I think it’s an often overlooked characteristic to the genre – particularly gothic – that the real horror comes from within.
Menstruation and childbirth are examples of life-giving, ‘salvation’, but also the literal breaching of the physical body. Horror is the perfect genre to explore this physical breach, in the literal and figurative senses. No horror does this as effectively as the Alien franchise. The article Queen Mother gives you the full blow-by-blow of how Alien has manifest feminist principles into its storytelling and exploitation of genre.
In an article for Bloody Disgusting, Meagan Navarro notes that “there are countless genre movies that explore the horrors of giving birth, of child-rearing, of maternal sacrifice, and simply how being a mother can affect one’s sanity.”
Outside the obvious riffs on pre-partum anxiety and grief in films like Prevenge and Baby blood, it’s the intimate and interminable pressure of films like Hereditary that make the conventions of horror story-telling so affecting when it comes to motherhood.
In the case of Hereditary, the horror is matrilineal. A grandmother, then a mother, and her daughter, set in train a series of unfortunate events that culminate in the family’s demise. Not without unpacking the horrors of mental illness, responsibility, and motherhood on its way down.
Hereditary held up a mirror to our faces and forced us to look inward.
Julieann Stipidis, One Year of ‘Hereditary’: Its Personal Impact on Me and its Cultural Impact on the Horror Genre. Source: Bloody Disgusting.
According to Dorothea Lasky in the Paris Review, “Hereditary is really about the power of art-making… Their artwork is craft-based, works that have long been associated with female labor.”
And yet, despite its feminist agenda, to the untrained eye – Hereditary is just a really scary movie about women, and insane mothers, which could be perpetuating the Patriarchal ‘word’.
I recall a line in David Cronenberg’s iconic 1979 horror The Brood, where Juliana Kelly, played by Nuala Fitzgerald talks about the aspect of motherhood that wore her down – powerlessness in the face of your childrens’ imagination – “thirty seconds after you’re born you have a past, and sixty seconds after that you start to lie to yourself about it”.
The Brood is another tale of motherhood – a woman begins to reproduce murderous clones of her daughter, after years of physical and psychological abuse at the hands of her own mother.
Nola is literally monstrous – described as psychoplasmics’ “queen bee” – her ability to give birth parthenogenetically makes her a literal manifestation of the monstrous feminine. Her monstrous children are atavistic: intergenerational trauma passed down and repeating itself, “they’re the children of her rage”.
Nola in the Brood falls into one of several motherhood tropes that recur in horror cinema the shrew who births an evil antagonist – see the likes of cinema greats such as Psycho (1960), and Carrie (1976). The other being the shrieking victim, incapacitated by fear. Leila Latif, in her article Mommie Dearest identified the absent mother as another trope in ‘mayhem ensues’ films like Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984).
It’s wonderful that modern films such as Hereditary, A Quiet Place, The Babadook – critically successful or not – are giving horror fans, particularly female ones, the opportunity to writhe in psychic pain, and provoke conversations at the same time.
The Trap Door 
