Contemporary Mothers in Horror

 

Contemporary Mothers in Horror

by Kristin Battestella

There's a difference between depicting scared mothers and daughters facing horror versus just showing the horrors to the audience. Two international tales here placing characterization above scary visuals make for effective familial scares. Unfortunately, the over-stylized American production is more interested in making viewers jump then telling the household horrors.

Matriarch – Creepy creeks and murky swamps begat the concrete city, jogging, and minuscule peaches for Jemima Rooper (Hex) in this 2022 Hulu Original. The first finite sound we hear is the bulimic bitter over the toilet before alcohol and the Monday morning business suit barely hides the drug fueled hookups and unstable drinking alone. A bloody nose, smeared lipstick, an overdose collapse, and black ooze encroaching into the mouth make for a fine mix of realistic consequences and a reaching out from beyond death chilling. Awkward phone calls from her “evil narcissistic bitch” mother Kate Dickie (Prometheus) remind each why they're estranged, and the villagers are frank about never having liked Laura when she returns to her mother's redecorated home. All things pink Mom is looking fancy, too, and their painful history comes out in the shattered tea cups, crushed pills in the pancakes, and recollections of how she called Laura a pig and threatened to tape her mouth shut. One on one conversations layer the character drama while eerie moonlit silhouettes, bruises, and black goo on the pillow and in the panties keep the horror simmering beneath the surface. Mom tells her to drink her water and watches her sleep before dragging the unconscious Laura out to the greenhouse. Rather than some shocking revelation withheld from the viewer, the fountain of youth suspicious is upfront thanks to whispering neighbors, effigies tied to trees, and a spooky book with weird sex symbols. The supple beauty that a woman sacrifices for an ungrateful daughter interferes with the village quid pro quo, and the drunken old minister – part of the lone biracial family going against the spooky happenings – argues with the obsessed townsfolk over these misused old ways. Who's dying, why cancer takes one but not another, and parents gone willing versus those taken too soon anchor the twofer debates. Our daughter wonders if spirits of the deceased still in the black bog revived her while her increasingly adamant mother tries to hit Laura on the head with a plant. The mother nature life, death, worms imagery and earlier, corrupted goddess worship are shrewdly withheld until the finale as smeared, dirty goo and gory rituals reveal how this mother's milk that goes against nature cannot last. Greedy charlatans in any religion are the same – poisoning the hymns, kneeling, and communion with nudity, suckling, flesh, blood, and “squelching” closed captions. Those expecting American horror cliches will be disappointed at this slow burn. However the realistic contemporary characterizations and well paced throwback British folk horror herein deserve more audience attention.

Surrogate – Making sure there are no monsters in the closet opens this 2022 Australian parable. Of course the fun uncle jumps out from under the bed, and it's the best genuine jump scare I've seen in a long time. Unfortunately, our single mother nurse Kestie Morassi (Wolf Creek) helps a freaky retching lady in the car park, and now Natalie's the one in pain, vomiting, and bleeding in bed. Her daughter has to do a video for school on her family tree – an interesting new way to introduce mom, uncle, grandma, dog, cat. There's no dad but the emergency stirrups and bloody gauze point to not just a recent pregnancy but a delivery and family services caseworker Jane Badler (V) wants to know what Natalie has done with the newborn. Rather than wasting time on gory labor horrors, the dialogue gets to what's what. Our nine year old daughter Rose wants to sleep in mom's bed because a girl keeps pinching her and the caseworker spots the bruises – adding real world complications amid the supernatural without any stereotypical ghostly roars coming at the camera. Cutting away rather than showing preposterous action adds to the mystery, and realistic conversations anchor the fears that something else is in the house as their dog is poisoned and someone pushes Rose down the stairs. They spend a few nights with grandma, but more pet perils and ladder mishaps lead to eerie, quiet scares and a tearful funeral where our daughter hides under the tablecloth because “she came with us.” A psychic little girl at the playground interacts with their now phantom, invisible dog. She uses mirrors to see a spirit's true nature, and the audience waits for something to appear as the camera pans across our innocent medium and her flanking reflections. Ava asks our ghost if she will be friends or hurt her and make her look where she shouldn't, and the in camera tension is palpable– no extra shaky shocks or special effects laden filming required. We as audience voyeur have no choice but to see the clinging reflection that makes them scream. Viewers are left to notice her increasing gray hair without any scary emphasizing moment, and we see Natalie watching the news video of a missing girl instead of the footage playing for us. It's creepy how she knocks on the real mother's door feigning car trouble and casually snoops around before being caught in another natural jump scare. Inquiries on if she's a true crime podcaster add horror self-awareness as the foolish investigation realistically fails. Natalie returns to the research, deducing and using her nurse connections – leading to the morgue, an abandoned house, the dark basement, and graffiti answers. Our caseworker says Natalie needs help, but she knows that child services aren't the ones to help her now. Whether it was a low budget necessity or an old school choice, the ghostly hand reaching out and leaving deadly little fingerprints is simple, scary, and effective compared to today's invisible whooshes and womp womp crescendos. Well done foreshadowing recalls where we started as creepy resolutions and warnings to never turn your back on your child escalate to the sacrifices mothers make for their daughters once they promise to never leave them. Several times I thought I had this figured, and it's refreshing that I didn't.

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Umma – Mom Sandra Oh (Grey's Anatomy) does the best she can in this 2022 supernatural tale with time wasting credits eating into the eighty-three minute runtime and disjointed montages showing the happy beekeeping, no electricity life on the farm. Flashes of past electrical torture have relegated old lamps and microwaves to the cellar, leaving only candles during the storms when something ghostly might be sitting in the chair. The nighttime blue saturation, however, is too difficult to see, even deliberately obtuse for the viewer. Rather than really meeting our family in conversation, the forced exposition is cryptic for the sake of it with confusing character motivations. Our clingy daughter is secretly inquiring about going away to college, and Mom has denied teaching her about their Korean heritage because of her claimed allergy to electronics. She's upset when a car approaches – we know because up close cuts to ominous objects and fist clenches hit the audience over the head. Her uncle has brought her recently deceased abusive mother's ashes, but the bumps in the night and past painful pleas were already there before the tainted effigies. The isolated house setting is almost immediately broken with redundant exposition as the handyman arrives to sell their honey online and our daughter rides her bike to his general store so they can again talk about honey and meet his visiting niece. Such outside points of view asking if she really thought her daughter was going to stay there forever are unnecessary, and voiceover echoes repeat dialogue we heard moments before – underestimating viewers while trying to distract us with eerie slow motion and ominous crescendos. We don't need more electrical torture flashes and echoes at every encounter, either. The titular apparitions are just fake outs for the audience, and the overemphasis on beekeeping, honey, and not even actually liking bees never factors into the horror. More incidental spooky vignettes happen just so our mother can tell her daughter nothing is wrong, yet she tells the white man handyman her suspicions while our daughter snoops anyway. It's impossible to tell what is actually part of the story or just a spooky effect, making for an extremely frustrating viewing. By time the daughter demands to be told, her mother just repeats everything the uncle said as if there is no story to the past abuse and her lying all this time. Our daughter turns on the electricity once she realizes her friend had a smartphone that never bothered her mother, but mom insists she doesn't believe in all their cultural robes, ceremonies, and superstitions yet reacts weirdly just as an excuse for more ghostly echoes and eerie zooms. I was ready to tune out in the first half hour and started fast forwarding over the invisible whooshes through the crops before the angry spirit is somehow easily quelled in the final fifteen minutes. The fears of growing old alone and becoming our parents and the strain of the solitary rural living would have been horror metaphors enough without anything ghostly at all. Unfortunately, this does a disservice to the intriguing Korean motifs because it's more interested in being a stereotypical scary movie.