It was 2000 and my family, Grandma included, gathered around the TV to watch our Blockbuster rental of The Sixth Sense. While I remember “the twist” blowing my parents’ minds, there was one scene in the film that lodged a stone deep in the pit of my gut. The ghost of a young girl, Kyra, shows the protagonist, Cole, a young boy who can talk to dead people, a VHS tape. She’d filmed her mother, Mrs. Collins, in secret, the video camera inside of her dollhouse, which serves as frame to the macabre scene, emphasizing her girlhood and lost innocence. Mrs. Collins mixes cleaning fluid in with Kyra’s food while simultaneously declaring in a loving motherly voice that it’s time for lunch. The girl asks if she can go outside after she eats her food, to which her mother, who’s just poisoned her lunch, responds, “You know how you get sick in the afternoons.” It was a betrayal of everything a mother was supposed to be, and to me, at the age of ten, the greatest horror the movie had to offer, worse than any of the jump scares, the gore.
With Gypsy Rose Blanchard erupting into popular consciousness following her release from prison, I find myself revisiting the thought of the mother or mother figure who betrays her duty of care, not just through neglect, but with active poisoning, the way she has a stage on which to prolong her tormenting — both physically and psychologically — of her charges who are vulnerable, trusting and entrusted to her.
These mothers who exist in real life, mothers who twist and turn, who make up the episodes of Snapped, are reflected and refracted back to us in horror movie after horror movie. A man is always absent. Even horror movies like 2024’s The Deliverance play on our fear that a mother is “unfit” until proven otherwise at the very end. Even if the mother is in fact the hero, she isn’t treated as one, especially not in recent years. Sarah Paulson plays shades of Blanchard’s mother in 2020’s Run, a straightforward story of munchausen by proxy. We suspect the mother is evil because of our awareness of the real-life situation this movie mirrors, but when Paulson again plays a mother in horror, Margaret in 2024’s Hold Your Breath, she rekindles something of Nicole Kidman’s character in 2001’s The Others.
The Others relies on yet another complete twist of an ending, revealing to the viewers at the very end that the mother and the children have been ghosts for the entire film, killed in a fillicide-suicide by their mother in her despair when their father, her husband, did not return from war. Hold Your Breath keeps us guessing. It’s set in the Midwest during the Dust Bowl of the 1930’s, where no crops grow due to a devastating drought and most of the men have left their families temporarily in search of work, while mothers fend off starvation and care for children in a sea of dust storms, donning masks and tying ropes around their waists in the worst of it to keep themselves from getting lost completely. Soon, a mother in Margaret’s church circle succumbs to madness and neglects her children. Margaret says the word “unfit” first, but then she, too, starts to withdraw, to see things in the dust, in the night. Is there something else in the clouds of particles choking her children and gathering on every surface, a greater evil driving not just Margaret, but others of the mothers to madness? Is the Gray Man real, or is he the stuff of stories? The plot, with its storybook depicting the antagonistic supernatural character, recalls 2014’s The Babadook. But, soon, by the end, we come to realize, along with the two young girls trapped with their mother after she’s killed the town pastor, that it’s all in their mother’s head, that she is “unfit,” as the movie has called the mothers who abandon their children when psychosis overtakes them. During a storm with gray dust swirling around the house, making it an island in a sea of absolute bleak nothingness, the eldest daughter steels herself to save her younger sister. Margaret has threatened to kill the eldest, the youngest and herself with poison that they’ll take in the last of their preserved peaches, but after tricking her mother, pretending the youngest has fled the house into the storm so that Margaret will follow, the eldest daughter cuts the umbilical cord that ties her to her mother, the rope keeping her mother from dying in a dust storm, leaving a woman who’s succumbed to insanity, a would-be family annihilator, to die of suffocation, alone.
Hold Your Breath isn’t the only film that plays with family annihilators, with murderous mothers, to grace us in 2024. Longlegs, set in the 1990’s, also keeps us guessing as to who is killing the families falling prey to a Satanic killer who leaves no signs of forced entry or clues behind at the gruesome murder scenes in these once happy family homes, blood spattered over family photos and symbols etched into the walls. There are signs that the parents may be the ones responsible, but how could it be happening over and over again, then?
In Longlegs, the cause of the murders is attributed to a somewhat loose procedure whereby a man who is the conduit of The Devil (Longlegs) makes dolls, who the mother of the protagonist delivers to the homes of these families while disguised as a nun. A flashback reveals that rather than allow her daughter to be a victim of Longlegs, the mother makes a deal with Longlegs and dons a habit, posing as a nun in order to infiltrate the homes of unsuspecting families. Much like the daughter in Hold Your Breath, the daughter in Longlegs has to kill her mother to stop her from harming yet more people. Her mother is also “unfit,” shown throughout the film living in a house stacked with hoarded items, and also unable to resist supernatural evil.
In The Deliverance, we’re similarly asked to play a guessing game along with the people that surround a family. A Black single mother of three in Pittsburgh moves into a dream house for a fresh start. Soon, her children start to experience possession in all the traditional ways — levitating and misbehaving and hurting themselves — but also, the mother’s a recovering alcoholic, under scrutiny from the state and the patriarchal forces choking in around her. After fighting off the doubts of literally almost every other person in the movie, the mother succeeds in exorcizing the evil, saving her family. But the tension in the movie clearly plays on the audience’s fears — and expectations — that the mother will abandon her care. Whether the causes are psychological or supernatural, one thing runs through all these movies: Mothers are prone to psychological weakness, to deviousness, to turning on their children and hurting them the second they’re out of the close watch of father figures, whether those are literal fathers, the church, or CPS — all of which we know to be dubiously protective forces in actuality.
Horror films have long tread into this territory. The Brood, Carrie, The Baby, and many others have threatened us with terrifying mothers, mothers who’ve descended into madness, for decades. The line of mothers who betray their duty of care continues unbroken, while the pool of bad fathers is shallow.
Don’t get me wrong — there are plenty of male tormentors, torturers, killers, slashers, demons and ghosts in horror. But with them, there is not the same pedestal to fall from as mothers or teachers or caretakers do. Truly, where are the fathers and fatherly figures who turn against their families or charges? Even our contemporary Chucky is a good dad to a nonbinary kid. In 2024’s Abigail, vampire father and daughter have a strained relationship, sure, but he doesn’t try to kill her. In 2024’s Speak No Evil, once again, even the evil father doesn’t turn his murderous sites on his own family. They’re always, somehow, safe. Depictions of fathers as violent toward their own families are noticeably, significantly absent in the current horror landscape.
Family annihilators are actually equally likely to be any gender, with a 50/50 split between mothers and fathers, and True Crime media, which caters to white women as a genre, does reflect real anxieties around men who kill and men who turn on their families and those in their care. But the horror genre shows us few men and fewer fathers occupying this murderous role. We have a few, the classics, as in The Shining or The Amityville Horror. We have evil dads who exteriorize their harm, but who don’t touch their families, as with the father in Get Out. But this year, aside from the possessed fathers in Longlegs, secondary to the cat and mouse, mother and daughter, and stranger danger that occupies the main plot, fathers are absent, and so is any anxiety over the potential violence that coils inside American homes and institutions. How many violent fathers, or ones who subject their families to daily terror, do we see in horror films? I’d say, maybe, that it hits too close to home, but if that were the case, wouldn’t it hit too close to home to show us the betrayal of mothers and caretakers over and over? In real life, if we look at cases like the Watts murders, when a mistress enters the picture and the family becomes simply inconvenient, a barrier to a man’s newest desires, we see fathers engage in brutal, horrifying acts. If horror movies don’t just entertain, but also offer us ways to safely process anxieties and feel fear in a controlled setting, then why are male family annihilators so absent?
This absence of discussion is not just taking place in the horror genre. Though the perpetrators of filicides are split evenly along gender lines, there is a disproportionately greater amount of psychological literature focusing on mothers who kill, with fathers who murder their families going under-studied. The survey of psychological literature points out, rightfully, that fathers who commit filicide need to be studied in order to help prevent future tragedies. This preoccupation with only the mothers isn’t logical, it’s coming from somewhere else. It’s unnerving to live under the thumb of something, to hear about predatory fathers, pastors, politicians, judges and cops, and to wonder where the mirror is. Why does contemporary horror, a genre I’ve turned to time and again to find catharsis, absent, have so little to say about cis men abdicating their roles, not as protectors, but as decent human beings? There is no shortage of material for inspiration.
More present in the horror of recent years than the past, it seems, too, is a reverence for god and religion. Prayer and the saving power of the Christian god has left the purview of Carrie’s mom and instead spread through 2024’s movies as a whole, especially where motherhood is involved. And among 2024’s films where themes of religiosity that intertwine with family, nuns feature heavily, whether legitimate, impersonators, or somewhere in between faithful and heretical. The mother in Longlegs poses as one, but nuns who’ve actually taken vows appear in abundance.
Many horror films set in all women’s spaces, whether they be girls’ schools or convents in the case of holy horror go like this: A young American woman travels to Europe. She barely speaks the language, but she is welcomed into the echoing, storied halls of a long-standing institution by the women who run it who will become her caretakers and her teachers. Maybe there’s a more experienced girl who takes the naive transplant under her wing, who speaks the language and selectively translates. Perhaps there’s another who jealously protects her status as the favorite, which the newcomer, our protagonist, threatens to upset. The women and girls live together as a family, following their profession, but it’s more like a calling. Yet, at night, the shadows of these hallowed halls whisper secrets. Closed doors creak open under the protagonist’s hand, offering glimpses into a dark underbelly. There is hierarchy, though, and ritual, and the pursuit of perfection to keep her in line. She dismisses her doubts until evil and violent things begin happening that are too obvious to ignore. Then, she goes in search of answers, (in more than one case, past a secret door disguised by a mural) only to realize she’s a part of a plan, a pursuit of power and domination, which her teachers and peers conspire to bring to fruition. Anyone not already in on the conspiracy has perished, usually, by the time our protagonist faces this darkness, before she must struggle for her life, her autonomy, her freedom.
This could be Suspiria, either 1977’s original or 2018’s version. In 2018, still following the line from The Babadook, where the origin of evil was arcane and fairy-tale-like, this institution was a school, occupied by witches. In the 2018 remake of Dario Argento’s 1977 film, Suspiria, a girl from the American midwest arrives at a prestigious dance school. In both the original, and the remake, the school is run by witches who target our protagonist. In the remake, the subtextual sapphism of the original becomes overt, with the older witches hitting on the young girls during a night of drunken carousing. Here, the young protagonist becomes one of the witches in the end, their new leader, standing tall and bloody, dispensing her own justice, powerful and evil — a rebellion that, though horrifying, is fun.
This summary, where a young, American woman arrives at a European institution staffed by women could also describe Immaculate (2024), one of a pair of 2024 nun-centric horror movies out this year. Immaculate and its sister movie, The First Omen, mirror each other intensely.
In the opening of Immaculate, a young nun travels to Italy to join a convent. The customs officers comment on her appearance. “What a waste,” they say, mourning over her loss to them as some kind of communal sexual property, implying, too, that her having agency over her own life is a slight. Cecilia soon encounters strange artifacts, noises in the night, disturbing dreams and visions. Like the protagonist of Suspiria, she falls ill, but she’s in fact fallen pregnant. Priests and doctors question her and the nuns about her chastity, with a doctor confirming that an exam showed her hymen was intact on her arrival. The horror really begins when her body is suddenly not her own, a vessel.
“Suffering is love” an older nun tells Cecilia while she’s holding what is supposed to be one of the actual nail’s that impaled the hands of Jesus Christ. For mothers, self-sacrifice is the rule, the expectation, and so, too, for people with bodies that are viewed as potentially being mothers’ bodies. In real life, as people who’re capable of pregnancy suddenly find themselves reduced to their wombs in the U.S., on screen, Cecilia is robbed of her personhood when she’s put on the pedestal of immaculate conception and otherworldly motherhood. Her body is meant to serve a higher purpose, to give birth to the returned Son of God, to bring the Catholic church back into power and relevance. When a jealous rival attacks Cecilia, she’s rescued and hurried off to the infirmary where a doctor confirms that the embryo is “okay.” Cecilia counters, “But I’m not okay.”
The movie progresses along the expected beats. Allies die, secrets are revealed, we are led down dark corridors and into ancient rooms with evil purposes. Cecilia runs, pregnant, for her life in the end. There is nothing supernatural here, only some perverted IVF, a young woman who never wanted to be pregnant used to make a baby she does not want.
Immaculate shows us a sacred motherhood accompanied by church-sanctioned rape for a “higher purpose,” a purpose our heroine then defies. She’s surrounded on all sides by priests and doctors and the nuns who she was supposed to find safety and sisterhood amongst.
Instead of sisterhood and escape, service caring for the sick and dying and a real “higher purpose,” Cecilia is instead subjected to torment and torture for our entertainment, crosses burned into the bottoms of her feet, a priest slashing at her contracting stomach with a scalpel. She’s forced to carry the fetus to term, only to find it’s non-viable like the other clones. She screws up her courage for one last effort to bludgeon it to death in the woods. That’s the heroism she’s left with in 2024. She’s neither a defector from patriarchy, a self-possessed witch, nor a slayer of evil. The church still stands and the world is still as it is, and all she is ruined and alone in the Italian countryside. Sure, she sets fire to a religious institution, but just one room, and she’s a single person fleeing. These movies never imagine an end to systems, and the women in them might escape, but they still suffer wholly, completely, to term.
In The First Omen, an American nun in training who is also chosen and stalked for her place in The Church’s machinations — this time since birth — visits Italy, again. An instrumental version of “Some Velvet Morning” plays in the background as she’s driven through Rome by her handlers: men, priests. It’s just a few years after Rosemary’s Baby takes place, the early 1970’s. Protesters menace their car, hit the windows. An older nun once again calls our protagonist beautiful in Italian upon meeting her.
In Immaculate, the nuns care for aging and terminally ill sisters. In The First Omen, they care for, presumably, orphaned or otherwise foster girls “babies to eighteen years of age.” They also take in unmarried women about to give birth, are contracted with the state to do so, and have birthing facilities for this caretaking purpose. They’re in the business of caring for mothers who have found themselves outside the realm of socially acceptable motherhood. Margaret, our protagonist, will make her vows and take the veil among these nuns, opting out of the ranks of secular protesters and of her peers who are choosing college and career over the habit and “tradition.”
But the plans of evil men require an army of complicit women to victimize each other. Margaret soon sees her first truly dark secret, a pregnant woman, tethered to a bed. The protagonist faints as she sees the woman go into labor and an inhuman, clawed hand emerge from her vagina.
Margaret then embarks on her own Suspirianic investigation, creeping around doorways, exploring literally hallowed halls or those of learning, peering into the ancient, secret, crevices that contain some answer to the power held by whatever cigarette smoking priest.
Institutional sexual violence, we also know, certainly affects girls, but is actually the single area where boys outnumber girls as victims of sexual abuse, and yet, what horror movie takes place in a boy’s school, in a monastary? When I think of movies with boys, orphaned or boarded or otherwise, their stories are of boyhood and growing up — not without sorrow, as in Dead Poets’s Society or A Separate Peace — but, unless it’s a war movie, typically without the kind of visceral bone-breaking, gut-wrenching, sexually violating horror of the spaces where young, unrelated girls congregate with the women who are to care for them, guide them, mold them.
The end of The First Omen mirrors the end of one of the most famous pregnancy horror movies of all time, Rosemary’s Baby. We find out Margaret has been raped and impregnated by The Beast, that she’s carrying what the church hopes will be The Antichrist. With her rape, her unwanted pregnancy, her body horror, and her sabotaged attempt at what would be a world-saving abortion, Margaret finds herself also strapped to a table, her legs in stirrups, forced to give birth. Those who’ve awaited the Antochrist coo around him and Margaret asks to hold “her son.” Then, it takes a twist, or a half of one. Once again, a young nun-mother takes murderous control, bloodied, stabbing, her belly freshly cut with a scalpel, fighting her way out, not toward a win, but to a Pyrrhic escape, one where her tormentors still get what they wanted and the Antichrist lives with them.
Our latest pregnant mothers in movies are rape victims forced to carry to term, medical experiments, the punished and penalized female bodies of women who wanted to opt out of the world of dating, of sex, of heterosexual partnership. They’re not quite lesbians, with their absence of sapphic desire, but they begin their stories seeking safety and solace in a community of women, only to be betrayed by the women’s pursuit of power and collusion with male leaders to get it. Bumble’s notorious ad from earlier this year, “YOU KNOW FULL WELL A VOW OF CELIBACY IS NOT THE ANSWER” chided and mocked women and non-cis-men for thinking they could or should opt out of a dating scene that was not serving them, that was, at times, actively harming them, rife with danger, while living in a country where reproductive freedoms wither by the day.
Before Suspiria, a family upholding Patriarchal Christianity, too, loses the battle to a pagan-coded witchcraft in A24’s 2015 film, The Witch. The girl protagonist is her family’s annihilator. Whether driven to madness by her mother’s disdain and her father’s fanaticism that isolates their family or actually a witch, it doesn’t matter, because according to her worldview, she claims herself, naked and sensual and full of power in the end. Even Gretel & Hansel, released in 2020, while a fever dream almost music video of a film, took place in a witch’s cottage, where a witch attempted to school a young girl in her art, to corrupt her, but in a way aesthetically aligned with the empowerment of women and queers, of those independent of a patriarchy, who would dispose of a boy without a second thought. Osgood Perkins dropped a pagan-coded witch for direct dealings with the Devil when he moved from Gretel & Hansel to Longlegs, from tattooed witches to nuns and Satan.
Our protagonists across all these films go from flirting with The Devil, claiming their power and place in powerful circles, as leaders, as witches to fighting for their lives post-childbirth, struggling against bleak surroundings and powerful oppressive forces — poverty and racism and demons, the Dust Bowl, chronic illness.
When the women in these movies have children, the films ask us to doubt their abilities and their judgment as mothers. Our latest horror movies depict mothers spiraling when left alone, in the absence of a father figure, even when ensconced in the “safe” container of a house. These films betray our fears of losing oneself to motherhood, to alcohol, to encroaching evil or dust, to The Devil or strange men or a duplicate family who knock at the door. They, too, indicate a sense that women are just always on the verge of abandoning the role they’ve been placed in. Don’t leave for work for too long, or your wife will kill your children. In The Deliverance, the mother is haunted by the father’s repeated attempts at obtaining custody, trying to prove she’s “unfit.” Children are possessed, terrorized, threatened, but the children protagonists always survive, though, whether the mother does or doesn’t, whether she’s good or evil, even if the children have to kill her, even if the child is literally The Antichrist. The only “child” to die is Jesus’ clone, and it wouldn’t have survived anyway. Cecilia of Immaculate is left alone to defend herself, a vulnerable and isolated person after she tries to “waste” her potential. Margaret of The First Omen also has her dreams dashed, her world upturned, is shoved roughly off her life path and into the role of a woman on the defense, armed with a scalpel, a gun.
The vibe has shifted. We are not watching Gretel or Thomasin become witches of the woods, nor Susie become Mother Suspiria. We’re watching young women getting chewed up and spit out when they try to enter sisterhoods, they find them infiltrated already, just tools for upholding patriarchy. When these young women declare their celibacy, they’re punished with pregnancy. They’re cared for to the point of giving birth, nothing more than a womb. Once they enter the realm of motherhood, they’re untrustworthy, unstable, belittled with the low expectations held by the characters around them, and the audience, too. There’s a horror in watching that again and again. A noncompliant person can be forced to give birth, and then, the children can just be taken away if the birth parent doesn’t fall in line. We’re living each day while people die from pregnancy complications that an abortion could have prevented, and at the same time, parents who help their kids to seek gender affirming care risk being investigated or having their kids taken from them by state protective services. These recent films reify the horrors all around us. Though, in and of themselves, they can certainly be a good watch, the landscape of movies overall does little to challenge, to push forward into new territory. We’re watching the same bodies and societal roles receive their punishment, be vilified, and be discarded. There’s something lacking besides just evil fathers, too. Because it’s horror, because this can get bloody, I think I know why these stories all feel so incomplete. They’re missing the part that comes next, where these women get their revenge.
HORROR IS SO GAY is Autostraddle’s annual celebration of queer horror.
So, I was recently researching lesbian boarding school horror films for an article that never materialised, and part of that was looking at the contrast between boy boarding school and girl boarding school films. And while there were male boarding school films that centred violence, sexual or otherwise, these were almost entirely straight dramas. And I think that that speaks to how desensitised our society has become with male violence and how “fatherhood” as a concept has become inured to the point of obsolescence. Deadbeat, absent, or abusive fathers are rife within the popular consciousness, and men being inept at childrearing is such a given that instances of them trying to do ordinary parenting and failing is an actual trend on social media. So for fathers to suddenly go “bad” is a lot shorter a fall and doesn’t contain the same visceral shock that comes from a mother’s neglect. It doesn’t contain the same “horror” if you will. And that goes for the entire gender in the spooky genre: gone are the days that Michael Myers can simply exist and slash up teens. Now he either needs a shoehorned elaborate backstory ala Rob Zombie’s remake, or decades worth of cultural weight behind it like 2018’s version. Even poor Freddy Krueger was felt that his entire “dream killer” persona wasn’t enough for modern audiences and so they had to add some seriously gross and unnecessary tendencies to his origin story. True Crime adds that horror sharpness to it by being ostensibly “real”. But even then we have become so desensitised that they have had to have done some truly heinous stuff to warrant that Ryan Murphy series. Men need to have a gimmick, women just need to be. And that’s not an endorsement.
Such a good exploration- really hits on the way society is repulsed by the mother and her failure to perform duty – in total juxtaposition to the maiden archetype of the Final Girl. Not to be too “A24” about my choices but Charlotte Gainsbourgs punishment for “prioritizing” pleasure over motherhood is played out very viscerally in Lars Von Triers’s “Antichrist”, as does the frightening occult conspiracy of matriarchs in Ari Aster’s “Hereditary” both of which I suppose really *go there* regarding the child. As did Guillermo Del Toros ghost+institutional horror flick “The Orphanage”…yeesh.
The really tense psychological horror of Tilda Swinton as the mother in “We Need To Talk About Kevin” also plays out horror in such a non-supernatural context that juxtaposes the spectral horror of failing at motherhood with the material rupture of horrific male violence on such a grounded level. Really sticks with you. :(
Also so glad you mentioned the Babadook as not just a ghost story but a frighteningly ambiguous riff on Munchausen-by-Proxy neglect horror. Watched that one with my partner the other day and felt so bad we had to put on Texas Chainsaw Massacre II to lighten the mood….
Antichrist, Hereditary and We Need to Talk About Kevin are all on the spreadsheet I made for this but unfortunately were left on the cutting room floor for this essay. BUT YES. There are just far too many examples and I want to dig into them alllll.