From fear to maternity
Since the genre's LOS ANGELES inception, horror movies have tapped into the psychological trauma and terror that can only come from a mother, and a number of recent films are embracing that time-honoured tradition.
Consider Brandon Cronenberg 's Infinity Pool, one of the buzziest films to emerge from the Sundance Film Festival and replete with disturbing moments. In one provocative scene, Gabi (Mia Goth), exposes her bare chest to James (Alexander Skarsgård), to breastfeed, revealing a complicated tension between his actual mother and his understanding of Gabi as his new one.
While the genre has often been dismissed as lowbrow, Adam Lowenstein, a film and media studies professor, said it's well-suited for grappling with these kinds of deep-seated, psychological issues.
“Horror is, at its core, a very primal genre,” he said. “It makes absolute sense that things like family, sex, death would all be things that the horror film is constantly mining because those are primal fascinations and experiences.”
Perhaps the seminal example of mommy issues in a horror film is Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960).
Norman Bates of the Bates Motel develops a split personality after killing his controlling mother and her lover out of jealousy. His grief and guilt cause him to keep her corpse stashed away, and assume her personality when he commits violence against women he becomes attracted to. Part of what makes the maternal bond such a fertile one for exploring psychological trauma, Lowenstein said, is that it's so universal and freighted. “We all have real mothers, just the way we have real constructs about motherhood that we subscribe to. And these things are very hard to separate,” he said. The gap between expectation and reality becomes fruitful territory for a good scare.
Evil Dead Rise plays with the fear-inducing extreme of a mom being possessed by a demon. In Ari Aster's new Beau is Afraid, the central theme is the fear and pain that can come from the mother-child bond. The movie — about a man trying to get to his mom's house — is as much a surrealist epic as it is a horror movie.
“We think horror and we think fear and dread and haunting,” said Lowenstein, “but we don't necessarily think guilt, shame, humiliation ... and the connection between these things.”