The 2013 supernatural horror Mama, which was co-written by Barbara Muschietti, depicts what initially appears to be a malevolent paranormal creature threatening two lost children. But now, we’re stripping away this idea and exploring the difficulties – what it actually means to go through it.” “Parenthood has been seen as this golden, kind of heavenly, moment in life. Isaacs adds that much of what we see in the monstrous mother today is an honest confrontation with how traumatic motherhood can be, an admission considered taboo in the past. Through deceit, threats and conditional love, she robs her son of his independence and creates a reality where nothing feels safe beyond the metaphorical “womb” (with his mother).Įssie Davis (left) and Noah Wiseman (right) in ‘The Babadook’. More recently, the mother in Beau Is Afraid is the epitome of the suffocating mother.
The mother/grandmother in Hereditary (2018), Ellen Leigh, is exposed as an evil cult leader who uses her grandson as a sacrificial lamb. Though much more contemporary, Aster’s films often depict similar patriarchal anxieties around the mother. In Brian De Palma’s Carrie (1976), the mother locks her daughter in a closet as a form of irrational punishment, forcing Carrie to repent for all of humanity’s sins. The mother in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), for example, convinces her son that any sexual desire is sinful and forces him to remain by her side through life.
“To hasten the process of the mother letting go, society tended to demonise the mother as clingy, obsessive, cannibalistic,” Creed says.
One of these fears included a mother’s tendency to cling to a child, thus starving them of independence.
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