Feeding the Monster: Why Horror Has a Hold on Us by Anna Bogutskaya

Author:Anna Bogutskaya [Bogutskaya, Anna]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Literary Collections, Essays, Art, Popular Culture
ISBN: 9780571385782
Google: rHT5EAAAQBAJ
Amazon: B0CX68NJMB
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2024-08-12T22:00:00+00:00

Since motherhood has been set as the default expectation and ambition for women, horror’s ordinary woman is often a mother. Maternal anxieties, be they of daughters or mothers, or both, are a recurring theme. The idea of a less-than-perfect, less-than-idealised mother figure remains a fundamental taboo. (I am hesitant to even type out the words ‘bad mother’.) The pressure of becoming and being a mother, the suffocating responsibility to not make a single mistake (or at least the wrong kind of mistake), the requirement of a complete surrender to child-rearing, the transformation of a body and a woman’s relationship to it: it’s all prime material for horror melodrama.

‘Traditionally, maternal horror is associated with the monstrous mother who loves too much, whose possessive, suffocating attitude towards her infant threatens to inhibit, even destroy the child’s development as an independent subject,’ writes Barbara Creed in her 2022 update to her own classic book of horror scholarship, Return of the Monstrous-Feminine.7 Horror, like all narratives, is at risk of flattening the experience of motherhood, as am I. Not being one myself, my reading of mothers comes from my experience as a daughter.

Contemporary horror, I’d argue, has given us a diversity of experiences of motherhood, interpreting it as a complicated, deeply individual experience that is governed by a set of impossible expectations, as well as flawed structures. In horror, the women experiencing motherhood are often left alone, institutionally gaslit, and made to feel either monstrous or delusional. Or both.

Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook, one of the films that ignited the new attention directed at horror (and which inspired a thousand headlines about women in horror), imagines one woman’s unhappiness as a literal monster. Essie Davis plays the recently widowed Amelia, mother of an exceptionally annoying child, Samuel, who screams and kicks and demands more and more and more of her, until she is but a depleted face, her voice barely a whisper, her eyes unblinking from the strain. Amelia’s partner died in a car crash while driving her to the hospital to have Samuel, an event that inexorably weaves together her son’s birth and her partner’s death, leaving her in the dual role of widow and mother, laden with the double burden of grief and rage. Mister Babadook first appears in the pages of a book she reads to Samuel, then as a physical being that stalks mother and son, preying on Amelia’s grief. Mister Babadook, one of the few original monsters of the past decade, is a shadow propped up by unresolved issues. ‘Like Frankenstein,’ Creed writes, ‘Amelia brings forth a monster who takes on a life of its own,’8 pointing out that Mister Babadook is both a representation and a creation of Amelia’s psyche.

Horror explores another taboo of maternal narratives: not the ‘bad mother’, but the ambivalent one. Mothers who don’t always love or like their children; who are angry at them, and might even resent them. Umma (a familiar term for ‘mom’ in Korean) sees a grown woman become possessed by the restless spirit of her mother.

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