Mother as monster
Hey horror hottie.
Ever wondered why mothers are so often the villains in horror stories? Heck — they don't even have to be the ones holding the bloody knife to cop the blame. What terrors lie within the maternal relationship to inspire such fertile horror material? Honey, we're about to get into it 👇🏻
'Mother' is the name for God on the lips and hearts of all children
As The Crow's Eric Draven (by way of William Makepeace Thackeray) once said, mother and God are one and the same through children's eyes. Both hold the power to create life. Both shape reality and form the foundation of their creation's beliefs and worldview.
In theory, a mother who acts in discord with this nurturing, natural vision of motherhood stirs a primal fear in us. Many of us know what it is to be born from or raised by a 'mother' figure, making it oh so easy to project ourselves into 'mother as monster' narratives. And as we all know, good horror takes a relatable fear and turns it up to 11.
What happens when the person who gave you life, the person you trust above all others, uses that power to hurt you?
Passing on trauma
Horror has made gory icons of women who bring their trauma into the parent-child relationship. And lord, does this toxic inheritance hit us with a one-two punch of tragedy and terror combined. Enter Carrie’s Margaret White, who so thoroughly believes her daughter is hell-bound that her religious beliefs spiral into child abuse.
Margaret's hard life and personal trauma are so potent that she can't help but bring them into her relationship with Carrie, causing social isolation and humiliation by denying her daughter basic health education (we all remember that brutal shower scene) or the freedom to join her peers in teenage activities or self-expression. When the blood-soaked prom night offers Margaret a chance to finally mother her broken child, she instead reaches for a knife, cementing Carrie's transformation from victim to vengeful force of nature.
Hereditary's Annie is a poster child for generational trauma. She's both the linchpin of the family and the instigator of its core tension. Annie's complicated grief over her mother's death and the lifelong trauma she holds impacts the relationships she has with her own kids, Charlie and Peter. Eventually, her fragile composure fractures under the pressure of a literal and figurative hereditary curse (we'll circle back to Annie again in a sec!).
Abuse of power
Abuse of power is another motherhood horror trope we frequently see on our screens, most notably in cases where our horror protagonist is a young child — someone vulnerable, voiceless, and unable to exert any control over their situation.
The People Under the Stairs (very loosely based on a true story) is a wildly lurid example of parental power abuse. "Mommy" and "Daddy" twist familial archetypes into nightmarish caricatures while they terrorise captive children, smack-dab in the middle of an affluent American suburb. At one point, "Mommy" even weaponises her female softness to shield herself from police investigation — a chilling affirmation to kids that adults are in a club of their own.
Cobweb plays with the notion of parental power abuse in the form of harsh punishment for breaking seemingly nonsensical rules. The protagonist, Peter, can tell he's being deceived but can't understand why. We watch Peter's mum, Carol, battle an inner conflict between her motherly instincts and a silent pact she keeps with her husband. Her fear meshes with desperation, resulting in a frighteningly hollow imitation of motherly love.
For some of us, Cobweb stirs memories of the suffocating childhood anxiety of being trapped in a house under the heavy tension of adult secrets. You know something's wrong, but no one will tell you what and, somehow, that's more terrifying.
Fear of motherhood (or your own kid!)
Monstrous motherhood swings both ways. Films like We Need to Talk About Kevin and The Omen are built on the fear of not having that fundamental 'natural' bond between mother and child. Instead, their kids feel strange, distant, and even intentionally malicious. Rosemary's Baby touches on this, with the added horror of medical and societal gaslighting during a time when women didn't have the power to escape domestic danger.
The Babadook and Hereditary show us the shame and self-hatred experienced by people who cannot embody society’s vision of parental perfection due to mental health challenges like grief, generational trauma, and exhaustion.
The Babadook director, Jennifer Kent, told Vice how vital it was to cast sympathy on grieving widow Amelia, who is struggling to raise her troubled young son. “I wanted us to not judge her — it’s a real taboo. When I was trying to do research and find articles on women who didn’t love their kids, I didn’t find anything. It just doesn’t get talked about, but the point with Amelia was to go in feeling empathy, and we do. Hopefully, anyway, we feel for her.”
The compassion we feel for Amelia and Annie as they struggle under the pressure to love a child who exists as a painful reminder of a traumatic event cranks up the dread factor. These films strip away horror's simplistic villains to expose something far more disturbing: the quiet tragedy of mothers whose love and resentment are one and the same. They force us to witness a heartbreaking reality that society would rather pretend doesn't exist.