Mother’s Day became an official holiday in the U.S. in 1914. It was conceived by Anna Jarvis, after her mother’s death in 1905, as a way of honoring the sacrifices mothers make for their children. It’s a holiday that was quickly commercialized to sell cards, flowers, and chocolates, and to encourage warm and fuzzy feelings.
Well, if you need an antidote to all that saccharine sentimentality then here’s a list for you. This Mother’s Day treat yourself to the 10 best films depicting the horrors of motherhood! From the terror of having some creature growing inside you to giving birth to a monster to mothering with a vengeance, it’s all here as the perfect anti-Mother’s Day viewing list.
Give mum a call or bring her up from the fruit cellar and enjoy!
(NOTE: This list does contain spoilers.)
10. Mother’s Day (1980)
No better place to start than with the film that commemorates Mother’s Day in its very title. Charles Kaufman’s film taps into the spirit of a boy who will do anything to please his demanding mom, even kill!
Three women come “to the wilderness for a weekend of fun” but what they get is kidnapped by a crazy matriarch (Beatrice Pons having a field day) and her demented sons. The trailer states: “Some say she spoiled her boys. Some say she drove them mad.” Whatever the case, bodies pile up, flesh is exposed, and Mother takes delight in all the chaos she wreaks. This is not for the easily offended or anyone looking for political correctness but it serves up an over-the-top schlockfest of ’80s fun. And remember: “When you know how to celebrate, every day is Mother’s Day… No one can escape on Mother’s Day because Mother’s Day never ends.” Not even the trailer knows where to end! There’s a remake but don’t bother with it, it’s a bastard child.
And just a piece of trivia: Kaufman retired from filmmaking to bake bread and runs the best bakery in San Diego, Bread and Cie. But occasionally there have been severed limbs found mixed in with the baguettes.
This pairs well with Peter Jackson’s Dead Alive in which the overbearing mum becomes a mutated zombie monstrosity that has to be seen to be believed.
9. Prevenge (2016)
Mother-to-be Ruth (played by writer-director Alice Lowe who was eight months pregnant) describes her pregnancy as feeling like “a hostile takeover.” She believes her unborn child is instructing her to kill bad people and she dutifully obliges.
Lowe, who was brilliant in the show Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace, wrote the film in a few days because no one would hire her in her very pregnant state for any roles. The darkly comic film plays on the fears and uncertainty of being a first-time mother and dealing with all the physical changes, with the idea of another person growing inside you, and then it intensifies it by having Ruth facing it all alone since her husband died on the day she found out she was pregnant. It also addresses the pressure women feel from society to behave in certain ways while they have no control over that thing growing inside them. Not everyone glows when pregnant and not everyone feels immediate joy at the prospect of being a mom.
8. It’s Alive (1974)
“There’s only one thing wrong with the Davis’ baby… It’s Alive!” That was the tagline for the 1977 re-release of the film. The poster depicted a baby carriage with a claw hanging out and set against a black background and that summed the film up well. The initial 1974 release gained little traction with audiences because it had a dull, generic promotional campaign of “Whatever it is, it’s alive and it’s deadly.” But once a killer baby was introduced as the monster, audiences embraced it and it spurred sequels.
The film was directed by movie maverick Larry Cohen and had killer baby effects by Rick Baker. Sharon Farrell is the shrill mom who doesn’t want to give up on her carnivorous, voracious baby even though it’s massacring folks in the neighborhood.
A mother dealing with a monstrous child can be found to a more elevated degree in The Exorcist.
7. Psycho (1960)
Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho is kind of the mother of the modern slasher film in the way it teased the idea of a serial killer, gave us an unseen predator stalking victims, unsettled audiences by killing the star in the opening half-hour, and gave us graphic murder. It also has one of the most famous mothers in all cinematic horror and ***SPOILER ALERT*** she exerts her influence completely from beyond the grave.
Mrs. Bates controls her son Norman (Anthony Perkins) even after she is dead. Norman is not merely a mama’s boy but a boy whose mother eventually takes over his personality. Without this film, we might not get Jason Voorhees’ mom and her killing spree to avenge her son’s death in Friday the 13th. Or the insane motherly love of Tallulah Bankhead in Die! Die! My Darling! who blames her deceased son’s fiancée for his death and attempts to murder her.
6. À L’intéieur/Inside (2007)
This film (part of a new wave of French extreme horror) addresses the theme of motherhood in a terrifyingly spectacular but incredibly intimate body horror tale. Directed by Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo, it stars Alysson Paradis as Sarah, a pregnant woman who recently lost her husband in a car crash, and the great Béatrice Dalle as a mysterious woman who shows up at her door and demands Sarah’s unborn child.
The film tackles the horror of motherhood on multiple levels. First, there is the fear or uncertainty of seeing a pregnancy through alone after the father has died (as in Prevenge), and then the next layer is the fear that something could go wrong with the pregnancy, endangering the fetus. In this case, the danger comes from the mysterious woman who stabs Sarah in the stomach, which stirs not just Sarah’s need for survival but her primal instinct to protect her unborn child at all costs. But then this reveals another layer ***SPOILER*** as we discover that the woman was the other driver in the crash that killed Sarah’s husband and she lost her unborn child as a result. So the mysterious woman is grieving over the fact that she was denied the joy of being a mother and now wants Sarah’s baby as a replacement. So in an odd and fiendishly clever way the film is pitting two mothers against each other in a fierce maternal battle – one trying to defend her unborn child and one trying to satisfy her need to fulfill being a mother.
The film ends with the ultimate maternal sacrifice as Sarah realizes that the baby is coming but is stuck so she asks the woman to perform an impromptu cesarean section knowing it will likely kill her. This is a brutal and amazing take on motherhood.
5. We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011)
Lynne Ramsey’s brilliant and disturbing film is an impressionistic portrait of a mother’s relationship with her son, a boy who knows exactly how to push mommy’s buttons while seeming the perfect child to his father. Tilda Swinton’s Eva is a reluctant mother who doesn’t seem to know how to interact with her child. Motherhood, we are told, is instinctual. Every woman should just take to it and immediately bond with her child. But what if that doesn’t happen? Is it the mother’s fault? The child’s? No one’s?
The film raises questions about nature versus nurture, and how responsible a parent is for how their child turns out. The film offers a portrait of motherhood that is far from feel-good. It’s a mother’s horror story.
At one point Eva, desperate for escape from her son’s constant crying, is shown seeking relief by standing next to a construction worker jackhammering and being soothed by the sound as if it were a lullaby. In another scene, Eva is trying to teach toddler Kevin how to roll a ball to her. He refuses but then decides to roll it back. This elates his mother. But then he goes back to refusing any interaction. In that brief moment, we see the whole dynamic of their relationship — how he toys with her, gives her a moment of hope, and then denies her even more forcefully.
When her teenage son commits a horrific act, there’s the issue of how much responsibility does a mother need to bear for the actions of her child? This is a disturbing portrait of motherhood because it tackles the paralyzing fear of not knowing how to deal with this tiny creature that cannot tell you its need, it addresses that sense of inadequacy a mother can feel, and the terror of wondering if your child might actually be evil and dangerous.
4. The Babadook (2014)
The Babadook has all the trappings of a boogeyman thriller. It plays on our universal childhood fears of something lurking under the bed, in the closet, or out in the dark just beyond the night light. But writer/director Jennifer Kent turns this horror formula into something much creepier and emotionally more disturbing because what her film is really about is a damaged bond between a mother and her son.
Young Samuel bluntly states that his dad got killed in a car driving his mom, Amelia, to the hospital to have him. The death of the father/husband is not something that Amelia wants to deal with but it is a hurt that is buried deep in her heart and colors her feelings toward her son, who is a child that could test even a saintly mother’s patience (kudos to Kent for allowing Samuel to be one of the most aggravating kids ever put on the screen). Amelia accuses others of not liking Samuel but it is Amelia who cannot stand her own son.
As a parent, it’s disturbing to consider a situation where a mother can turn on her son and ask him why he can’t just be normal or why he can’t stop talking. It is scary when people who should care deeply for each other can’t because grief and repressed anger are in the way. The bogeyman Babadook becomes a manifestation – perhaps real, perhaps imagined – of the dysfunctional relationship, and it gives Amelia and Samuel something to fight against instead of each other. As with We Need to Talk About Kevin, The Babadook addresses the very real horrors that can come with motherhood.
3. Rosemary’s Baby (1968)
It is delightfully incongruous that this slow-burn psychological horror film was produced by B-movie showman extraordinaire William Castle who was famous for such promotional gimmicks as installing electric buzzers in seats, offering fright breaks, and handing out insurance policies in case anyone died of fright. But Rosemary’s Baby was far from those schlocky films. Roman Polanski’s meticulously paced, moodily shot horror tale looks to a young woman who gives birth to the Devil’s child. Polanski’s approach was to root everything in the real world and make the witches and supernatural evil appear utterly mundane so that poor Rosemary (played by a mousy and frail-looking Mia Farrow) just seems insane as she comes to realize what’s happening.
There are a number of films that look to the horror premise of what if that thing growing in your uterus is evil (Devil’s Due, Still/Born, Hell Baby, Baby Blood) but Rosemary’s Baby tackles it with such elegant creepiness and casual matter-of-factness that it really gets under your skin. And in the end it asks if maternal instincts will kick in no matter what.
2. The Brood (1979)
I saved the most bonkers film for one of the top two spots: David Cronenberg’s The Brood. This film just goes off the rails as it delivers body horror like only Cronenberg can do.
Psychotherapist Hal Raglan (the great Oliver Reed) has developed a technique called “psychoplasmics” in which he encourages his disturbed patients to release their suppressed emotions through physiological changes to their bodies (you know that can’t be good). Nola (Samantha Eggar) is in a custody battle with her husband over their young daughter and Raglan discovers that she was abused by her own mother (so a mother as monster element in the backstory).
In addition, there are these weird dwarf-children going around murdering people. ***SPOILER*** Then Raglan reveals that the dwarf-children are the offspring spawned as an accidental by-product of Nola’s psychoplasmic sessions. Wait, what?! That’s right! Her rage over her own abuse prompted the birth (the reveal of how these creatures are formed in a kind of external womb is an amazing, jaw-dropper scene) of a brood of “children” who are driven by Nola’s rage and destroy whatever angers her without her realizing it. This hits the horrors of motherhood on multiple, deliciously perverse levels.
1. Mommie Dearest (1981)
This has to be the ultimate horror of motherhood film. It is based on the real life of actress Joan Crawford, who gave us some bonkers moms (from the sacrificing mom in Mildred Pierce to the murderous one in Strait-Jacket) on screen and her adopted daughter Christina Crawford claimed in her memoir Mommie Dearest that Joan was a sadistic mother. The film serves up high camp melodrama and I am not sure where the truth lies but who cares for this list.
The film famously added “No wire hangers” to the pop culture lexicon. That scene, in which Faye Dunaway’s Joan Crawford looks monstrous in her facial cream and arched eyebrows, beats her daughter with a wire hanger for daring to put beautiful dresses on them.
Mrs. Voorhees (Friday the 13th), Margaret White (Carrie), and Mary Lee Johnston (Precious) deserve mention here as well but Dunaway in Mommie Dearest deserves the top spot for the over-the-top, in-your-face, iconic encapsulation of the best anti-Mother’s Day mom ever.
Beth Accomando is the host of the KPBS Cinema Junkie Podcast and Blog.
