From ‘Psycho’ To A New Crop Of Horror Movies in 2023

(LOS ANGELES) –Horror If you’re stuck for ideas on how to spend Mother’s Day, consider enjoying a good scare. Since the beginning of the genre, horror films have delved into the psychological anguish and terror that can only come from a mother, and several contemporary films are carrying on that time-honored legacy.

Consider Brandon Cronenberg’s “Infinity Pool,” one of the most talked-about pictures to emerge from this year’s Sundance Film Festival.

It’s not surprising that there were frightening moments. After all, the director has undoubtedly learned a thing or two from his filmmaker father and genre titan, David Cronenberg.

Gabi (Mia Goth) exposes her bare chest to James (Alexander Skarsgrd) in an invitation to breastfeed in one memorable scene, indicating a delicate tension between his original mother and his understanding of Gabi as his new one.

While the genre has been derided as low-brow, Adam Lowenstein, a cinema and media studies professor at the University of Pittsburgh specializing in horror, believes it is well-suited for dealing with such deep-seated psychological difficulties.

“Horror is, at its core, a very primal genre,” he explained. “It makes perfect sense that family, sex, and death are all things that the horror film is constantly mining because those are primal fascinations and experiences.”

Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho” (1960) is perhaps the definitive example of mommy concerns in a horror film.

In it, Norman Bates of the Bates Motel develops a dual personality after murdering his tyrannical mother and her lover out of jealousy. His anguish and shame force him to hide her body and adopt her personality when he conducts violence against women he is drawn to.

How horror films investigate motherhood difficulties and psychological trauma

According to Lowenstein, one of the reasons the maternal bond is particularly fertile for investigating psychological trauma is that it is so ubiquitous and loaded.

Since the beginning of the genre, horror films have delved into the psychological anguish and terror that can only come from a mother.

“We all have real mothers, just as we all subscribe to real constructs about motherhood.” And these things are quite difficult to separate,” he explained. The gap between expectation and reality is fertile ground for a good scare.

“Barbarian” (2022) by Zach Cregger similarly makes breastfeeding a spectacle, but this time from a hideous parental creature rather than an inviting yet twisted sexual partner, as in “Infinity Pool.”

Other films let the mother-child interaction carry the drama. The terrifying extreme of a mother being possessed by a demon is explored in ” Evil Dead Rise,” which is now available to rent on streaming sites.

“I think it’s very terrifying to imagine somebody so familiar to you in your world becoming a subversion of that, and becoming something really dangerous and evil,” filmmaker Lee Cronin said. “It just lent itself to this exploration of maternal fears and what it might mean if your mother was to turn on you.”

The major premise of Ari Aster’s latest film, “Beau is Afraid,” is the anxiety and pain that can result from the mother-child bond. The film, about a guy seeking to reach his mother’s house, is both a surrealist epic and a horror film.

While Aster’s third picture is admittedly less frightening than his previous two, “Midsommar” and “Hereditary,” all of which exploit the terrors of family relations and mother-induced trauma, it is reasonable to infer by the conclusion that Beau’s fear of his guilt-inducing mother was justified.

“When I left ‘Beau Is Afraid,’ I heard a teenage woman leaving out of the theatre ahead of me saying to her friends, ‘That just made me want to call my mum and say I’m sorry for everything,” Lowenstein recalled. “We think horror, fear, dread, and haunting, but not necessarily guilt, shame, or humiliation.” And Ari Aster clearly sees the link between these things.”

It’s no coincidence that almost all of these frightening films about protagonists’ relationships with their moms are directed by men.

But, according to Lowenstein, the genre’s mommy issues began with a woman and long before the film: Mary Shelley’s classic 1818 horror novel, “Frankenstein,” is widely regarded as the origin of contemporary horror.

“Her story is about a man who wants to be God but also a mother.” “He truly wishes to create life without the intervention of women,” he stated. “What Mary Shelley shows us is how bad this idea is, and how male hubris really does monstrous things with motherhood.”

SOURCE – (AP)