The Bad Mother

Abstract

In this chapter I use the term Bad Mother to identify a number of character types and representations of motherhood in the horror film. In essence the Bad Mother is the source of friction within the horror text. At times she is the monster or the villain as in the case of Friday the 13th (1980) or The Brood, for example, where the mother’s behaviour is malevolent and violent. In other instances her prohibitive and overpowering nature produces violent tendencies in her children, such as with the mothers of Psycho, Carrie and Sleepwalkers (1992). At times she is neglectful or selfish (Sixth Sense [1999], The Exorcist [1973] and The Dark) or emotionally abusive (The Others). While the term Bad Mother will be used throughout the chapter, this does not suggest that these films are unified in their representations of motherhood. On the contrary, the textual analysis that follows will reveal that there is little conformity in terms of a mandate of bad motherhood. There is no single ideological project evident throughout these films in which, for example, the Bad Mother simply rejects her prescribed role within the dominant nuclear family model. The Bad Mother is, rather, a multifaceted and contradictory construct. In some instances she is indeed punished for rejecting her traditional function of self-sacrifice and devotion, yet at times the very horror of the film can be found in the mother’s fanatical conformity to the institution of motherhood (Rich, 1976).