This weekend is Mother's Day. Let's celebrate by honoring the creepy mothers of horror!
What is it about mothers that are so frightening? Much more frightening than fathers are (my apologies to Jack Torrance still in his frozen tomb at the Overlook Hotel).
In my own life my mother was the disciplinarian. Dad couldn't stand the sight of seeing his children unhappy, so if there was ever something unpleasant that had to be done, it was Mom that had to deal out the punishment.
Sometimes punishment was necessary. My relationship with my mother is certainly a positive one, and for the most part the times where I was disciplined I deserved it. However I have one memory as a child that has stuck with me that involved my mother, and it scares me to this day.
I was a young boy maybe four or five. The memory I have is a haze, because it is one of my earliest recollections, so I can't even be sure if it was a dream or if it had actually happened. I remember my mother giving me a hair cut and suddenly I felt a sharp pain and heard a sound that resembled meat being cut at the deli. My mother had nicked my ear lobe with the scissors. I remember there being a lot of blood as blood does collect in the ear lobe and even a small cut can bleed profusely, and my mother frantically apologizing as I was crying. Though I vaguely remember the pain, what I remember more was the blood as my mother tried to stop the bleeding with paper towels and rags. So every time as a child when it was time for my hair to be cut I would insist that I go to a barber and would tell my mother adamantly, "I don't want my ear to be cut off." To this day I am unsure if this actually happened or if it was just a vivid nightmare fueled by a child's fear of being betrayed by his parents, a common fear of many young children.
The strange thing is I don't have such fearful memories of my father. I have had nightmares concerning my father, but I vividly remember them as dreams and not as something that might have actually occurred. I think it's because fathers are supposed to be a little harsh. They are supposed to instill discipline at a young age, with that rugged "tough love."
A mother on the other hand is supposed to be the caregiver. Mothers protect us, first within their womb and then as kids and even into early adulthood. While fathers engage in horseplay that can cause skinned knees that scab over creating an armor that toughens us up, mothers keep us safe and fret over our antics. They made us lunches for school and helped us with our homework when we got home. They ensured that we always had a coat on when we were cold and had a glass of milk waiting for us when had a bad day. So when we witness a mother go against her nurturing nature and turn into something vicious, the situation is terrifying.
One of my favorite conversations about horror was with a friend of mine who is an evangelical Christian. Two vital questions about the human condition and thus about the genre of horror came up. The first one was "What is evil?" The answer was "Evil is the perversion of good." It turns love into rape, ownership into theft, life into suffering. and tells us that when we die we do not go to a better place, but instead we become worm food decomposing in a cold wooden box.
The next ,vital question was, "How do we know evil when we see it?" The answer was "It has to smile." In a horror movie there are few things as unsettling as a mother's smile after she's done a wrong. The mother in "Psycho" for instance, sitting in a cold jail cell asking for a blanket and thinking to herself with that all-knowing smile as she accepts the linens: They are probably looking at me...let them. Let them see what kind of person I am I never hurt a fly, I hope they're watching, they'll see.. They'll see and they'll know she couldn't hurt a fly. Then of course she smiles at the screen and the movie ends. That smile is unforgettable. Hitchcock slyly interposes a skeleton's skull into the face of "mother" as we transition to the last scene of the victim's car being dragged out of the lake. That smile is confidence incarnate. It is all knowing and it has very intentional plans for you. It is that perversion of unconditional love we as children crave from our mothers. When we get sadism and cruelty instead, what could be more terrifying than that?
Thinking on it yes there have been horror movies made about evil fathers and evil mothers, but the fathers seem less frightening for some reason. Stanley Kubrick's "The Shining", Stephen Kings "It", Bill Paxton's "Frailty" and Stuart Rosenberg's "The Amityville Horror" being notable exceptions. But even one of these movies ("It") the point isn't the father. In "It" the creepy dad is a side plot concerning the abuse Beverly receives in the home. "Sometimes I worry Beverly. Sometimes I worry a lot."
Beyond these examples I'm sure you can come come up with numerous other examples of creepy fathers verses creepy mothers, however I would argue that most of these characters are not seen from our point of view as the child of the bad daddy. Take these classics: "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Hills Have Eyes, The People Under the Stairs." They all have sadistic fathers but these fathers are cannibals who are feeding their families. We, just happen to be the main course. Movies like "Night of the Hunter" and "Stepfather" have evil stepfathers who violently shove their way into a broken family environment for nefarious reasons of their own that would do harm to us, but they are not our blood kin. Even in one of the before mentioned examples "Frailty" the father figure turns out to actually have been a good righteous man who slayed human demons at the whim of God, which we find out wasn't delusion at all in one of the better twists at the movies of the last twenty five years.
Yet the number of movies with evil or neglectful mothers are vast in the history of horror: The Babbadook, Carrie, Mama, The Brood, Black Swan, Nighmare on Elm Street, Mommy Dearest, and Aliens to name a few. So what two gems are we watching this weekend? A recent (2014) art house elevated horror flick from Austria "Goodnight Mommy" and the immortal Alfred Hitchcock classic "Psycho."
It's been called many names: elevated horror, high brow horror, art house horror. What it comes down to is a horror movie that is heavy on theme, typically independently made and often has subversive content that makes it difficult to be rated by the MPAA rating system. This kind of horror has always been around since the pre code days of films such as: "The Man Who Laughs" and the original "Frankenstein", starring Boris Karloff. There were always a few in each decade, such as: Jacques Tourneur's "The Cat People," Roman Polanski's "Rosemary's Baby," William Freidkin's "The Exorcist," Kubrick's "The Shining," "The Changeling" starring George C. Scott in one of his later roles, Jonathan Demme's "Silence of the Lambs," Bill Paxton's "Frailty," Ti Wests "The House of the Devil". However the last decade has seen an upsurge in this kind of horror with directors such as: Ari Aster (Hereditary, Midsommar), Robert Eggers (The Witch, The Lighthouse), Daron Aronofsky (Black Swan) as well as masterpieces such as "It Follows", "Nightcrawler," "Nocturnal Animals," "Daniel Isn't Real", "We Need to Talk About Kevin," and "Under the Skin." These are films that were not only loved by audiences but critics as well. It's also a genre that seems to be slowing down since the Covid-19 Pandemic.
This is due to the fact that some of these movies have had big name stars attached to them (Jake Gyllenhaal, Scarlet Johannsson) and a budget in the neighborhood of 10 million dollars, which is low budget to Hollywood but is still a big chunk of change for the average person. With all the regulations and rules right now still surrounding Covid-19 that have been imposed by insipid unions who refuse to move on and attempt to help the industry they claim to support, independent film making has become an even more expensive endeavor that many independent companies simply cannot create in. It's more expensive than it's ever been and unless something gives in this department I'm afraid high brow horror may take a hiatus for a few years or more.
Now the horror we are seeing during and post pandemic are nostalgic films that have been with us since 2016 as well as micro-budget horror films that are under a million dollars to produce.
A couple of exceptions to this are the new Eggers film "The Northmen," as well as the Barbara Crampton produced "Jacob's Wife," not to mention the brilliant "Midnight Mass" mini series on Netflix directed by the philosophical dark theologian Mike Flannigan. Yes there are a still a few high brow horror films coming out to streaming services and now even theaters, but for a while in the mid 2010s it seemed there were several of these excellent films being produced each month. Goodnight Mommy was one of these films.
The plot surrounds two twin boys, played by real life twins Elias and Lukas Schwarz. And guess what? That's there names in the movie too! These two kids are inseparable. They run through cornfields, they collect a menagerie of large disgusting bugs, tie up and torture their mother. You know typical kid stuff.
In the kids' defense the mother here does act strangely. Played by Susanne Wuest (A Cure for Wellness, Lore) she plays the character who is simply known as "mother." She has just returned from cosmetic plastic surgery and the two boys are convinced she is a doppelganger, an intruder pretending to be their mother, a classic fear of most children.
Mother is down right cruel at times and ignores one of the twin boys entirely. The two children come to the conclusion that their mother would never treat them like this and hatch a plan to get the intruder to admit that she's not their mother and find out where their real mother is.
This is not a movie for the squeamish. It has very few jump scares, but it's horrifying in other ways and stays in your head as your lie in bed thinking about the loved ones in your life and if you truly know them, if we truly know anyone for that matter. There is a sense of dread this movie creates that is rare and extraordinary. It's anchored in the realistic performances of the twin boys. The events in the movie continue to swim in your brain landing firmly in your gut long after the credits have rolled.
Goodnight Mommy drills down into those deep thoughts and fears of those we loved being replaced by an imposter such as in the marvelous "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" from 1956. It's emotionally subversive and though the gore is minimal it is one of the few movies I watched while peaking through the fingers that were covering my face in shock. At times you don't know who to root for and who is correct. The movie really has no moral center and just shows you what is and demands that you make a judgement and what a hard judgement it is! This was one of my runners up in the best horror films of the last decade. A stomach churning emotional rollercoaster and quite different from our second feature.
This brings us to Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho. This film is so deeply immersed in pop culture I don't know where to begin. I also don't know how much to spoil if someone in the group this weekend has yet to see this work of art. To recognize how engrained this movie is in our daily lives, go to a playground and watch kids run around and. play tag, inevitably one of them will start making that iconic note from the Bernard Herrmann score that played in the now infamous shower scene (EEE--EEE--EEE!). I don't think ten year old kids are all watching Psycho at home, and yet that score is somehow a part of our every day lives.
Hitchcock made Psycho right after his enormous success with "North By Northwest." "North By Northwest is everything Psycho is not. It was classy (especially thanks to a debonair performance by Cary Grant); it had a sense of fun and adventure; it was suspenseful but in a very fun lighthearted way; it was mainstream; it had a major studio financial backing; it was the epidemy of success in Hollywood. Hitchcock was on top of the world thanks to that film. "Psycho" was none of these things.
Psycho has elements of the trash pulp novel and the cheaply produced film noir genre that had it's hay-day in mid and late forties but was all but dead by 1960. It was shot on a very economic budget of $800,000 in black and white. Hitchcock used his crew from his successful television show "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" as opposed to his usual film crew for his movie in order to save money as no studio in Hollywood would finance this nasty story. He financed much of the movie himself, and luckily made a lucrative sum maintaining a large percentage of the profits and rights-- 60%--in lieu of his usual director's fee so that Paramount would at least distribute the film that the movie executives there called: repulsive. This made Hitchcock a very wealthy man. The movie made fifty million dollars and Hitchcock's later films became more brazen as he continued to be indifferent to the whims of studios and created the films he wanted to create. You can see this fact in his later films where he told stories with more transgressive themes verses the more main stream entertainment that preceded it. Before 1960 Hitchcock directed great suspenseful adventures such as "The Man Who Knew Too Much" and "Rear Window" but following 1960 boundary pushing films such as "The Birds", "Marnie", and "Frenzy" became the order of the day.
The amount of profit money which Paramount negotiated themselves out of as well as how Hitchcock felt he'd been treated by the company would cause them to part ways after "Psycho," and Universal (who has always been the mainstream home for great horror) would become Hitchcock's home for his last six films, including the magnificently gruesome "The Birds" and the erotic thriller "Marnie" and the underrated spy thriller "Torn Curtain."
Hitchcock not only could hold a grudge as was evident with his departure from Paramount, but he was also the constant obsessive. The famous shower scene that happens a third of the way in Psycho took a full week to shoot and though it's been disputed somewhat, somewhere between 60 to 75 shots were taken for less than five minutes of film. Hitchcock was at his best here, but he was also at his most controlling.
The transgressive nature of the film, including being the first movie to show a toilet flushing onscreen in a bathroom (gasp) the questionable sexuality motifs (adultery, transsexualism), the violence and perceived nudity (by the way there is none) made this a difficult movie to get through the censors of the Hays Code at the time. Eventually Hitchcock told the censors he would make the appropriate cuts. Hitchcock did precisely nothing, brought the film back several weeks later and asked if these cuts were acceptable and the board nodded and thanked Hitchcock for his compliance. Hitchcock's answer was a simple "Thank you."
Love it or hate it Psycho would go on to critical fame, being nominated for several Academy Awards. It would be a part of our pop culture for years and come and would also be the pre-curser and inspiration for the Slasher genre that would saturate the horror films from 1978 with the release of John Carpenter's "Halloween" and end in 1991 with the release of "Silence of the Lambs" which would usher in the 1990s craze of serial killer thrillers.
I've avoided the plot for a reason. If you haven't seen this film it's meant to be experienced with very little knowledge of what happens. If you have seen this film there are no new insights in terms of plot that can help you. The mastery here is not in the performances (though some are quite good) but from the director's chair and the editing room and how Hitchcock takes the basic story and gives us three different protagonists to follow to finish this story.
The plot concerns Marion Crane played by Jamie Lee Curtis's mother Janet Leigh (Manchurian Candidate, Night of the Lepus, The Fog) who steals $40,000 from her work in order to start a new life for her and her boyfriend Sam Loomis played by John Gavin (Spartacus, Thoroughly Modern Millie,) Trouble ensues when she meets lonely hotel owner Norman Bates played by a seemingly naïve Anthony Perkins (Friendly Persuasion, Catch-22, Murder on the Orient Express) and of course his overbearing clingy mother.
In honor of the creepy mother's of horror we will be serving a mother's day style brunch. Expect some kind of eggy casserole, some kind of pastry, probably a salad in there some where. We will also be serving cocktails in the form of bloody Marys and Mimosas.
Oh and just remember in the words of Norman Bates "A boy's best friend is his mother."
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