Evil Dead Rise, now available to rent on streaming services, plays with the fear-inducing extreme of a mom being possessed by a demon. Other films let the dynamic between mother and child carry the drama. Zach Cregger’s Barbarian (2022) also turns breastfeeding into a spectacle, not from an inviting yet depraved sexual partner as in Infinity Pool, but from a monstrous maternal creature who forces her victims to feast. The gap between expectation and reality becomes fruitful territory for a good scare. And these things are very hard to separate,” he said. “We all have real mothers, just the way we have real constructs about motherhood that we subscribe to. Part of what makes the maternal bond such a fertile one for exploring psychological trauma, Lowenstein said, is that it is so universal and freighted. 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. In it, the infamous Norman Bates of the Bates Motel develops a split personality after killing his controlling mom and her lover out of jealousy. Perhaps the seminal example of mommy issues in a horror film is Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960). “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.” “Horror is, at its core, a very primal genre,” he said. While the genre has often been dismissed as low-brow, Adam Lowenstein, a film and media studies professor at the University of Pittsburgh who specializes in horror, said it is well-suited for grappling with these kinds of deep-seated, psychological issues. In one talked-about scene, Gabi ( Mia Goth) exposes her bare chest to James (Alexander Skarsgård) in an invitation to breastfeed, revealing a complicated tension between his actual mother and his understanding of Gabi as his new one. The director, after all, has surely learned a thing or two from his filmmaker dad and giant of the genre, David Cronenberg. It’s no surprise it was replete with disturbing moments. Take, for example, Brandon Cronenberg’s Infinity Pool, which became one of the buzziest films to come out of this year’s Sundance Film Festival. Since the genre’s 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-honored tradition. If you’re stumped for how to spend this Mother’s Day, consider relishing a good scare.
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