I was a mother once. Until I wasn’t.
I never had children of my own. But I co-parented a child for three years—three of the most torturous, bittersweet years of my life. Nothing has ever hurt deeper. And no cut has felt ripe and exposed as that child that I mothered getting ripped out of my life. Or, to be more blunt, flaying myself off that child’s life to escape an abusive relationship.
Being motherless and experiencing motherhood in a way that I couldn’t find a proper definition for has made me hungry for any sort of connection, relatability, or a sense of solidarity with fellow women who have gone through crazy, inexplicable bursts of motherhood experiences, ones undefined by law or religion.
Motherhood is sacred and scary, a talisman for every woman until she tries it. Like the Vestal Virgins guarding the holy fire in the Temple of Vesta in Rome, each woman waits for her turn to guard that fire. Many women are crushed when the maternity train passes them. They feel excluded and lonely, as if there is a private club whose secret membership a woman obtains with difficulty, and later feels ostracized if her friends talk in front of her about the membership’s advantages (or disadvantages).
In my community’s motherhood club, I was an only child. My friends talked about breastfeeding, so I talked about my morning cappuccino. They talked about clothes stained with puke, and I spoke of cat fur on my cashmere sweater. I found myself locked in a cinematic shot from the protagonist’s POV, like a scene in Roman Polanski’s Tenant, and everyone sighs dramatically, explaining, “You don’t know how hard it is to be a mother,” their eyes are hostile and unkind.
I find my release in horror films where mothers are evil and controlling. Even in the way they love their children, they are by no means perfect. They are cruel or violent in more than one instance without trying to embellish this. Horror films often portray a bleak, neurotic mother figure, stripped of any angelic grace or sacred aura of motherhood—her fragile, innate essence left exposed and vulnerable, inviting threats rather than reverence.
In films such as Carrie And Psycho, the mother pushes her child into the abyss and causes them to go crazy with her domineering personality and her authoritarian religious manner. In Friday the 13th, Pamela Voorhees (Betsy Palmer) creates a little monster by constantly protecting Jason from the outside world, exploiting his illness to control all the details of his life.
Horror films also overthrow all theoretical values and ideals—nothing is perfect, inviolable, beautiful, or infallible from criticism and ridicule. The mother appears in many of them as a symbol, in which the dark side expands until it swallows everything in its path; the mother does not behave as she should and does not love her children as nature dictates.
The mothers I prefer have always been in horror movies.
As I have worked to process my own complex relationship with motherhood, I turned to horror films. As a source of comfort and an escape, but also as a resource to help me understand this beautiful, twisted bond between mother and child.
I have chosen to analyze films from three points of view: the relationship between the mother and the mothered, my connection to how motherhood is portrayed in the film, and how the aesthetics help elevate the storytelling from monster design to lighting, hair, and makeup.
Mama: The Monster of Loss
In Mama, directed by Andrés Muschietti, motherhood comes in the form of the wild energy of nature with its opposite poles: cruelty and tenderness, indifference and pity. It is cruel to those who take shelter from it to teach them life lessons while expressing kindness and refuge in those who lean into its chaotic energy. This is the case of the two girls, Victoria (Megan Charpentier) and Lily (Isabelle Nélisse), whose father is trying to kill them after he’s lost his mind and killed their biological mother. “Mama” is a woman from whom they snatched her child, sent to a psychiatric hospital, and after she tried to escape with it, kills the father and takes them both in.
In this film, Mama is not kind or affectionate. She is unrestrained and untamed, like motherhood, when it turns into a crushing monster that swallows everything that stands between it and what came out of its womb.
She is also a surrogate mother, the role I’ve played before, and I find myself sadly repeating in most of my current romantic relationships. Mama, like me, has been cursed with that eternal hunger for a child that’s not hers, abandoned or neglected by the biological parent, so she steps up to fill in the role that the original mother should have occupied. In that child’s eternal hunger for a mother’s tenderness and nurturing embrace, Mama overpours, but because she is a soul of a forest, a creature, no more no less, she does that in ways that only showcase her savagery.
Prosthetic Supervisor Montse Ribé’s makeup and hair for Mama fascinates me. Her emaciated form, her distorted figure, her jerky and twitchy movement—very fitting of a woman formerly spending a portion of her life in a mental asylum—and her disheveled, wild, uncombed hair, the way she flips it around her head as she swiftly moves, crawls, and creeps into the corners of the house where the two girls reside with a “false” other mother, then suddenly jerks and attacks, she has a mix of a wild animal’s physicality and a sleek ghostly movement.
The Babadook: Depression as a Monster
How far will a mother go to love a child? How does a mother know her child won’t swallow her entire existence? What if a child is born into the world to bring their mother misery instead of light?
The Babadook is a feature about motherhood and the ghost of depression, specifically postpartum depression. In the film, the mother Amelia (Essie Davis), lives with her son Samuel (Noah Wiseman) alone after her husband died in a car accident while driving her to the hospital. She has a guilt complex for losing her handsome, loving husband in favor of giving birth to her boy. Her toxic feelings petrify in the form of severe depression, which grows until they break free from her and become a monster in the name of Babadook that takes her and Samuel as hostages in their house—the Babadook ensnares them both in a vicious cycle that feeds itself backward.
Extreme closeups trap me in Amelia’s world and force me to react to her isolation in motherhood while raising her son. It makes me wonder if motherhood is, in fact, suffocating and could sometimes bring misery to the mother rather than pride and joy. What if I become one of those sad, depressed mothers? What would I do if the maternal outpouring of emotions work in reverse, and instead of happiness and joy, I feel pain and bitterness? The camera focuses on Amelia’s face, which lacks a single hint of a smile, and my insides curl in repulsion, especially when the camera pans to a shot of her son, small and annoying, as the camera’s POV is her viewing her son. As I eye him, donning the gown of Amelia, I wonder to myself, “What’s worse: not having a child entirely, or being unable to love my child?” Amelia and Samuel’s home is shrouded in mystery, dimly lit and morbid, like a funeral home. Large frame sections are obscured in pitch darkness, ending any hope in sight. The Babadook is a physical manifestation of Amelia’s postpartum depression and the feeling of secretly hating her son, a sin that she cannot face. The resentment enlarges inside of her until it becomes an actual monster in the form of The Babadook.
Lights Out: The Monster of Untreated Mental Illness
Lights Out shows untreated mental illness as a familiar ghost, one that haunts the living and refuses to leave. Diana —the half-demon, half-human— is a manifestation of Sophie’s (Maria Bello) mental illness; psychosis and schizoaffective disorders come to mind due to the nature of Sophie’s behavior, but also severe clinical depression. Diana is Sophie’s untreated mental illness, but she is still afraid to lose her, even though she has caused the collapse of all other aspects of Sophie’s life, including her relationship with her children. Sophie desperately clings to her deteriorating mental state in an attempt to rebel against the destruction of her identity as a mother.
Depression has been the only thing that allows the mother to feel that she is just a woman and not a vessel for giving birth, nursing, and watching over the child who comes out of her uterus to take over her existence and threaten her identity. I understand Sophie’s plight, even her adherence to her mental illness, refusing treatment. A warped mind can sometimes wrap itself around a disorder or a disturbance to create an identity. Surrounded by many mothers, I often hear their complaints about how it has become only about the baby that they sometimes wonder, “But who am I? Where have I gone?” To Sophie, Diana, in all her darkness and oppressiveness, is a testament to her individuality against the pull of her role as a mother.
Cinematographer Marc Spricer plays with varying degrees of light and shade. In every lit room, there is a dark corner or two. It is a testament to the elusive nature of the mental illness and when trauma is triggered. Sophie’s children live in the tiny spots where the light stays as opposed to their mother’s pitch-black room. To them, their mother becomes a source of alienation, an uncanny presence rather than a source of nurture and warmth. The film is shot in ways that place Sophie always in the darkened corner or the door’s opening, a silhouette rather than a fully-fleshed human, a ghostly presence rather than a supporting, loving figure. Even to the viewers, she appears untrustworthy. I wonder, as a woman with multiple diagnosed mental disorders, had I decided to have children, would they have seen me as Sophie hiding Diana? Would I have become a trustworthy figure in their lives or a source of fear and misery?
The Others: Motherhood As a Sin
What is a mother’s greatest fear? To accidentally cause the death of her child. We hear a lot about negligent homicide, so what about a mother who accidentally killed her two children in a fit of raging madness? Enter Grace (Nicole Kidman) in The Others, who dealt with one of the greatest taboos in the world of motherhood: a mother murdering her child. In a moment of utter despair, Grace kills her two children after hearing the news of her husband’s death in World War II. Then, she self-punishes to cleanse her great sin (she is a religious mother who raised her two children on Christian teachings) and commits suicide.
As someone with mental and behavioral disorders, this fear has always walked by my side like a shadow; what if, by some unimaginable burst of darkness inside me, I hurt the ones I love? It’s one of the reasons I refused to have children and not even once tried to seek to get pregnant. It’s why I always picked complicated and far-from-stable relationships. Part of my commitment-phobic personality has been a fear of what commitment may bring: devotion, compromise, and the possibility of motherhood as a sacrificial other self. But what if the caregiver, the kind, nurturing soul in those children’s lives, is the threat they should be protected from?
Director Alejandro Amenábar and cinematographer Javier Aguirresarobe drew inspiration from German Expressionism while shooting the film. Playing with shadows and lighting, the contrast between darkness and light has contributed to the atmosphere of burying Grace’s ultimate sin, her denial of the murder of her children. The way she imprisons herself with the children in a large mansion devoid of light is also expressed through the use of sheets, drapes, blinds, and monochromatic coloring in the costume design department. The contrast between the warm light of the candles, the opaqueness of the fog scenes, and the blackness that absorbs every color in its wake work to enhance Grace’s deteriorating mental state after ending her children’s lives, and her clinging to a nonexistent hope of “righting an irreversible wrong”. Her silly motherhood dream of “all can be fixed to protect my child” haunts me.
Aliens: Tokophobia and Monstrous Motherhood
From an outsider, non-avid sci-fi fan perspective, the first four Alien movies are about one central theme: the intense dynamic between Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) and the Queen Xenomorph. All of the sci-fi special effects, the intricate plot details, the masterful direction, and the brilliant cinematography mean nothing without the face-off between two mothers, a mother who never had children of her own (Ripley), and another who has had an abundance of them, so much so, she keeps planting them in other people’s bodies so that she can procreate more (Queen Xenomorph).
I fell for the Queen Mother just as I fell for Ripley: two women, their motherly instincts being tested. Ripley is always escaping the insertion of the xenomorph tails and tentacles inside her. But at her core, she is evading that inevitable destiny of getting pregnant. In every one of the first three Alien films, we get an uncomfortable scene of Ripley and an attempted insertion, possible fertilization of a baby xenomorph inside her. What does that communicate, not just about Ripley but also the generalized fear that women experience of pregnancy, conception, giving birth, and losing a child? The Queen Xenomorph, on the other hand, is the queen of a hive, so she has no sensitivities about having thousands and thousands of children. She goes as far as using other people’s bodies —unwilling surrogates— to carry the burden. Her ferocity and merciless violence make her a mother in the wild, a Mama Bear protecting the cubs from intruders, a lioness grabbing people’s necks and sinking her fangs into their carotid. Even though Queen Xenomorph is a predator, I don’t love her any less than Ripley. In her hive, she has her reasons for going after human intruders, using their bodies as incubation pods for her hatchlings. When tables are turned as in Alien: Resurrection, humans don’t prove any better than her when they capture the xenomorphs and execute torturous experiments on them. From her point of view, she is not a real villain, but a misunderstood hero of her own tale.
Swiss Surrealist painter H.R. Giger created a monstrous mother by designing the Xenomorph. He left many birth, intercourse, and pregnancy symbols in the spacecraft, and the landscape of the Xenomorph lair, because, at its core, the spaceships and the Xenomorph hive—a dark cavernous, spacious colony occupying the cooling towers of a terraforming station— are the tenebrous inside of a mother’s womb. So Ripley, who is a mother not biologically but through mothering another woman’s child, enters the womb of another mother —the Queen Xenomorph— to get rid of this other woman’s fetuses, eggs, and full-grown children, the xenomorphs. Is there anything more poetic than this? As I watched the first four films of the franchise, I felt a sense of exposure therapy, having genitalia that are eerily similar to mine. The xenomorphs’ mouths are vaginal openings, and the Facehuggers insert their penile-like zingers in the victims’ mouths to eject their eggs. The alien derelict is a giant vagina, an erotic being, an entry into Giger’s twisted mind, but also a fascination, a world where humans need to be swallowed for xenomorphs to come to life. A hidden, latent fear of fertilization and pregnancy resurfaced in me; to bring a child into the world, who has to be swallowed whole for this new creature to be born? Is it the integrity of my vaginal wall? Is it my womb? I hear stories of multiple births causing women’s vaginas to look distorted and morphed, losing that tightness and firmness that a woman prides herself on as she grows older and begins experiencing her body in full. I remember the cavernous space opening of the Alien vassal and Kane getting swallowed whole to be impregnated and carrying the baby xenomorphs and I wonder about the physiology of the womb and the body and how it carries birth that may sometimes bring death on the carrier.
The Curse of La Llorona: Motherhood As a Punishment On the World
Bringing a child into the world is sometimes a woman’s greatest pride and joy. But what if it’s also her greatest nightmare? In the case of La Llorona (Marisol Ramirez), it’s an entirely different narrative than Grace in The Others, because La Llorona mourns her children by wanting to harm those of others. She drowns her children in a fit of jealous rage against an unfaithful husband, and when she wakes up from the mess she made, La Llorona rages against the world. She searches for other mothers to punish for her crime.
La Llorona represents the wild side of motherhood, unrepentant grief, and animalistic loss. If people talk about moving on and living, finding grace and bliss in everything, La Llorna objects. She demands an unforgivable, wild, and unruly state of mourning. She roams the earth, trying to find solace by depriving other mothers of their children so that they can all create a circle of lamenting women in solidarity. She commits an act of violence because she can’t bear the fact that she brought the dark omen on herself. She killed her children with her own hands and thus has been cursed forever. To pass on the curse, she has to kill as many children as she can and create more vengeful mothers— angry spirits that find no rest just like hers. It’s the antithesis of suffering in silence like good women do. It’s the antithesis of a good, religious woman accepting loss with piety and faith. It’s how I like my women the most, especially mothers. Raging and messed up. Violent and unforgiving. It aches me to see people in sorrow controlling their gigantic feelings of misery and despair, I never resonate with that. As I left a family in which I was a co-parent, I didn’t grieve in silence. I didn’t shut up about it. I was a walking ball of rage and despair. That’s why I admire La Llorna’s monstrous anguish and distress.
Special Effects Makeup Artist Gage Munster constructs a tapestry of a face. La Llorona’s black silicone tears pour down constantly looking fresh, thick, and gooey. Munster also creates a wet look with a pale face that showcases her endless state of drowning, a mourning mother never finding peace or rest so her drowned corpse is as white as starch but also glazed like she has been in the river for decades but seeming like she has just fallen yesterday. Grief is tricky, and La Llorona’s look captures the marks it has left on her. Those cheeks, tear-stricken, and engraved with her constant wailing look like cracked porcelain. It scares me, how suffering eats at the soul and the body of a dying woman. And what worse heartache than taking the life of her child? There is no word to describe the regret she must have felt then. La Llorona’s face and her black, tarry tears sum it all.
Splice: Will a Modern, Accomplished Career Woman of Science Love an Imperfect Child?
In Splice, Elsa (Sarah Polley) creates a creature using her hybridized DNA with other species. The result is Dren (Delphine Chanéac), a human-animal hybrid that resembles a modern Frankenstein monster. Splice is a cautionary tale -like Mary Shelley’s story in the past— of science gone too far, of motherhood, and how a modern, successful, and highly judgmental woman bearing a child can let her disappointment with her creation -her offspring- get in the way of her maternal love. What Elsa has been aiming for with Dren is slightly ambiguous. Has she been seeking perfection and scientific excellence? Was she playing god? If that is the case, then why has she been accepting of Dren’s earlier stage of development with her less human features and rejecting Dren’s more feminine evolution into a sexual entity? Why did that threaten her?
The relationship between Dren and Elsa compels and fascinates me. I’ve seen it everywhere. Mothers and daughters fighting and loving each other. Beauty queen mothers reject daughters who fall short of their impossible standards or relentlessly push them toward unattainable ideals of perfection. Brilliant mothers distancing themselves from less gifted daughters piling up bitterness like excess stomach acid in their souls. From the moment Dren develops signs of rebellion and stubbornness, Elsa takes some drastic measures and their relationship quickly escalates into pure feminine antagonism. Both women aim to assert control and dominance, leaving the sole male of the story, Clive (Adrien Brody), isolated and helpless. This sounds familiar, like my complicated relationship with my mother whom I have always revered and worshiped, and yet as I grew older, our dynamics shifted. It scared me to think one day I would have a daughter, beautiful and brilliant like my mother saw me in my childhood and young adult years, only to turn into a raging mid-thirties woman, as she struggles now trying to navigate our relationship.
Director Vincenzo Natali designed Dren after a hairless mouse, a product of a scientific experiment that fascinated him. For some reason, the character design: hairless, nude, with a stingy zinger, and animalistic clicking sounds, along with the gender metamorphosis at the end disturbed me. There is something vulnerable about Dren. It’s inexplicable but Natali describes her as a product of many fathers, but it’s not that simple. Dren carries a sensitive ethereal presence about her like she has just come out of the womb but never grew out of that fetus status. The moment I see her, something tugs at me and I want to wrap her in a swaddle and carry her to safety. Then I remember her lethality and that scares me away from her. Dren’s physicality works for and against her, which makes her an even more haunting character. She can hurt others viciously, but they can also easily shift the power balance and hurt her more.
Immaculate: Motherhood As a Way to Control Women’s Bodies
In one scene from Immaculate, Sister Cecilia—a role where Sydney Sweeney plays another manifestation of the Madonna/Whore complex for the audiences— discovers that she is pregnant, despite being a virgin. As she is interrogated about her sexual past and her claim of celibacy, the scene becomes increasingly uncomfortable. A beautiful, young, innocent-looking girl with zero makeup on, dressed in a nun costume that makes her appear eerily virtuous and saintly, is humiliated, embarrassed, and angry. A group of men; old, powerful zealots group on the girl and question her like detectives. In the next scene, she discovers the lack of agency and ownership over her body which suddenly becomes a vessel for what she is being told is God’s seed implanted in her; a pregnancy without sexual intercourse. Cecilia is thrust into a forced state of adoration and worship, her body becomes a sacred temple that she dares not abuse or harm. Motherhood becomes a tool of oppression, a way to control a young woman’s body and force her into an existence that she no longer wants to partake in.
I identify with Cecilia like every young woman I’ve known or met who had to endure an unwanted pregnancy. The state of worship that a pregnant woman undergoes, disregarding her discomfort or her doubts about her state and the changes that happen to her body, forces her to continue a pregnancy she is otherwise doubtful or unsure of. Cecilia’s dissonance with her body and her position is gaslit by everyone around her, she is not allowed to object or express concern or unease, even though the body probed, examined, and protected is hers. Yet external forces of men and women allies, those protectors of the feminine body in all its reproductive mystique, don’t seem to let it go. They don’t want to allow her access to the one she should completely have control over; her body, and her decision to be a mother or not. I sympathize with her loneliness and helplessness, it frustrates me —a woman childless by choice, unwilling, stubbornly, to seek medicated ways to make her reproductively challenged body more accepting of alternative pregnancy choices—to see her struggling against those forcing her to accept her fate and indulge in the celebrations submissively.
Elisha Christian’s cinematography is haunting and fascinating, yet what makes the movie more relatable and intimate is Sweeney’s innocent face and beautiful features framed through the lens. Director Michael Mohan creates a halo around her face so that, in some scenes, she is more of an iconic religious female figure rather than simply a young girl devoting herself to a convent.
Production designer Adam Reamer talked about the religious symbols surrounding Cecilia. The way I observe her walking through long, dark corridors stands out. Long shots and wide angles frame her as a little girl trapped in vast spaces, confined within gigantic institutes. These spaces exert fear in her heart—not just of institutionalized religions where individuality doesn’t matter, but also of her own body and what it harbors, bears, or delivers. If any actress other than Sweeney had been picked for this role, it wouldn’t have been that effective, as her ability to shapeshift between a coy seductress and an innocent fair maiden is incomparable to the modern talent of her generation.
Conclusion and Afterthoughts:
Motherhood is scary for a woman who has not crossed the dark tunnel of childbirth, so what motivates women like me who have not experienced pregnancy and childbirth to write about motherhood? What motivates any female filmmaker to capture a fleeting topic that has never been part of her life on the screen? I approached motherhood as Icarus approached the sun, analyzing horror movies, and looking for clues in between the lines. But after the end of the experience, I felt empty. Motherhood is something no longer on my radar. Polycystic Ovary Syndrome has accompanied me all my life, walking side by side like a shadow, and unlike many women who suffer from the same disorder, I didn’t freeze my eggs. I never even wanted to. It felt bizarre to me that something I feared so badly would be something I would go to extreme lengths to preserve. Unlike my mother who married young and had me a year after marriage, I never even got married. And as she enjoyed a young motherhood, mine would’ve been what they scientifically call geriatric pregnancy, as I navigate the final years of my thirties.
I can’t even fathom how that makes me feel. My emptiness has no root in regret but rather an otherness that surrounds me and suffocates me with a knot so tight that sometimes it leaves me unable to breathe. I tried every trick up my sleeve to be a normal woman, to have normal relationships, and to take the safe route of work, marriage, and children. But all my pursuits failed. I ended up the dark, raging, lonely poet with all kinds of bizarre feelings and relationships, mothering myself rather than my nonexistent children, and failing to find a catalyst for the aching in my soul.
