Maternal Horror Film

Melodrama and Motherhood

S. Arnold

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781137014115
• eBook ISBN: 9781137014122
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Film e video

Maternal Horror Film: Melodrama and Motherhood examines the function of the mother figure in horror film. Using psychoanalytic film theory as well as comparisons with the melodrama film, Arnold investigates the polarized images of monstrous and sacrificing mother.

1

The Good Mother

In this chapter I explore constructions of the Good Mother or good mothering in post-Classical horror cinema. In the wake of Psycho and the emergence of family horror in Western cinema the mother has been a regular fixture of horror cinema, whether she is monstrous, absent, neglectful or defensive. In this chapter I use the term Good Mother to refer to a particular and popular discourse of motherhood that valorises self-sacrifice, selflessness and nurturance. As I suggest, certain patterns of representation and motifs emerge in which an idealised form of mothering takes shape. The concept of the Good Mother, while it is by no means a stable construct, reappears in various eras and cultures. She is an archetype (Neumann, 1963),¹ albeit a shape-shifting one. Discourses of good motherhood act as a template for the practice of good motherhood. This chapter argues that the horror film, on the one hand, attempts to deconstruct dominant ideological embodiments of self-sacrificing motherhood, but, on the other hand, often reproduces some of the fundamental aspects of ‘good mothering’. Regardless of whether the Good Mother is reproduced or questioned within these texts, these maternal horrors persist in constructing a correlation between maternity and utter devotion to childcare. Similarly, the Good Mother is more often than not overshadowed by a more powerful agent: the father, who either threatens or secures the family. The Good Mother retains certain core elements such as selflessness and sacrifice, yet she is always determined in relation to a paternal figure. Her ability to nurture is dependent upon the third term of the father. The Good Mother is rarely, therefore, a powerful agent within the patriarchal family and the maternal horror film struggles to find an alternative position from which she can speak.

The melodrama genre, in particular, has been preoccupied with the figure of the mother and much theoretical exploration of ‘cinematernity’² has focused on this body of films, rather than on horror. Discussions of the mother as a sanctified, rather than vilified, figure have been limited to general discussions of the family in contemporary (post-1960) Western cinema.³ However, while she is often a source of fear and anxiety within the horror film, she is equally a source of comfort and reassurance. Similarly, while a number of approaches to the maternal horror emphasise the mother as attacker (as bad mother), she is equally, if not more often, a figure that is subject to attack within the text. By this I mean two things: the Good Mother character is attacked and must save herself and her children (thus fulfilling her patriarchally inscribed role of good mother) or the very concept of the good mother is attacked (in which the nurturing and devotion are incompatible with the assertiveness necessary for survival). A wide range of films will be discussed, including The Hills Have Eyes (1977) , Poltergeist, Night of the Living Dead (1968), Invasion and An American Haunting (2005). What is immediately apparent from these films is that the mother ideal or Good Mother remains a contested and ambivalent figure. She is utterly bound to a duty towards her child/ren (indicating that the horror film offers few alternative modes of articulating good motherhood), yet the horror film repudiates and advocates this in equal measure.

The horror film perpetuates dominant representations of ‘mother-love’ in which a certain type of motherhood is culturally valued. While some of these films engage with feminist or gender discourses of motherhood, they are limited in the extent to which they address the needs and desires of mothers themselves. Often the Good Mother is defined by ‘lack’ in both the psychoanalytic and narrational sense. There are sometimes contradictions between social and psychoanalytic readings of the Good Mother in these films; in other words, between the mother as an agent within the text and the maternal as a site of unconscious fantasies. While the figure of the mother may seem socially progressive (for example, she may be a working mother), she is often still defined by self-sacrifice. This self-sacrifice is justified through the horrific elements of the text. The horror of the films often relates to the attempt to split the family and, more particularly, mother from child. The recuperation of this relationship can thus be compared to the tradition of the melodrama, which, in contrast to horror, finds the break-up of this bond in normative social situations. Where the maternal melodrama valorises the mother’s sacrifice of the child to the Law of the Father, the Good Mother of horror offers continuing plenitude and nurturing to the child. In this sense, then, the horror film offers different pleasures to the spectator, even while framing horror within the mode of melodrama. The pleasure offered is the mother’s sacrifice for the child, the sacrifices she endures to maintain wholeness with the child. This sacrifice echoes the concept of ‘essential motherhood’.

Patricia DiQuinzio, in her account of the various feminist and historical debates about motherhood, sums up the naturalisation of motherhood in the term ‘essential motherhood’. She explains it as follows:

Essential motherhood is an ideological formation that specifies the essential attributes of motherhood and articulates femininity in terms of motherhood so understood. According to essential motherhood, mothering is a function of women’s essentially female nature, women’s biological reproductive capacities, and/or human evolutionary development. Essential motherhood construes women’s motherhood as natural and inevitable. It requires women’s exclusive and selfless attention to and care of children based on women’s psychological and emotional capacities for empathy, awareness of the needs of others, and self-sacrifice. According to essential motherhood, because these psychological and emotional capacities are natural in women, women’s desires are oriented to mothering and women’s psychological development and emotional satisfaction require mothering.

(1999: xiii)

Thus, what DiQuinzio terms ‘essential motherhood’ marks the culmination of a range of maternal discourses (historical, scientific, religious) all of which produce images and representations of idealised motherhood. It establishes mothering as an exercise in self-sacrifice, which is in turn an inevitable consequence of biology. The Good Mother has, thus, a ‘natural’ inclination towards extensive childcare (rather than simply giving birth). To the physical dimension of giving birth is added a psychological dimension, which associates a mother’s self-worth with her capacity to care for children. Not only does she suffer for her children, but she derives satisfaction and pleasure from doing so. Hence, mothering is largely figured as a masochistic exercise. Essential motherhood is then reproduced in narratives of good motherhood, for example stories and myths, as well as images of good motherhood, such as art, photography and film. That the Good Mother begets meaning both outside of and within the text (whether literature or art) suggests the need for a dual approach to understanding her significance. Meaning is both pre-textual (what the reader/spectator brings to the text) and textual (how the text constructs meaning in the language of the medium). Psychoanalysis, therefore, provides a useful tool in negotiating both approaches. As a cultural discourse, it accounts for how essential motherhood is circulated within dominant Western patriarchal society. As cine-psychoanalysis it contributes to accounting for how these discourses are manufactured in the medium as well as how spectators acquire meaning from and attribute meaning to screen texts.

Psychoanalysis, horror and the Good Mother

The aim of psychoanalytic theory is to trace the psychological, social and sexual development of the child/subject/adult. Over the last century this school of thought has produced many varied and often contradictory theories and, as a result, a number of alternative psychoanalytic strategies have emerged. Often, these theories aim to understand the family dynamic produced in the wake of industrialisation: the nuclear family.⁴ They also investigate how parents, in particular mothers, influence the development of the subject. The mother is often the most crucial participant in the child’s life. A mother who has been ‘successfully’ (in accordance with the patriarchal project of essential motherhood) reared by her mother will in turn successfully bring up her own child/ren.⁵ What is deemed ‘successful’ is of most interest to me for the purposes of this project, since I wish to determine whether the horror film identifies ‘essential motherhood’ as the most successful mode of mothering. For example, is there a correlation between horror films’ representation of the Good Mother and psychoanalytic accounts of the Good Mother; in other words, between processes of identification on screen (in terms of how the spectator identifies with the Good Mother) and processes of identity formation in the subject (in terms of how the infant identifies with the mother)?

Such questions may lead to an understanding of Good Mother horror texts, many of which detail a mother’s desperate attempts to find her missing child, perhaps an effort to regain her only access to power: the child. The masochistic selflessness displayed by women in search of their child/ren may be comforting to both male and female spectators. Women’s achievements are determined by their success in mothering. For men, there may be satisfaction gained in witnessing and experiencing the overwhelming love of the mother. When the mother carries out the masochistic fantasy of self-sacrifice she firstly confirms her role as subservient to the masculine principle (in which such self-sacrifice is not required), and, secondly, like the image of the Virgin Mary, she positions herself at the beck and call of the child, as in Leonardo Da Vinci’s paintings of the Virgin Mary, who gazes lovingly at her son (Kristeva, 1990). Narrative strategies of the maternal horror are often constructed around the play between separation and union of mother and child. Texts that do not problematise or question the mother’s wish to re-establish this union with the child as well as those which construct women’s fulfilment as being through mothering seem to uphold both Freudian and Lacanian accounts of the Good Mother. In other words, maternal horrors, in which the mother enacts a reunion with the child (symbiosis) followed by submission to the third term of the father (taking up her proper place in the Symbolic universe) correspond to popular psychoanalytic accounts of good mothering.

While this concept of maternal self-sacrifice is, I argue, a common trope of the horror film, it has been theorised more fully in relation to the melodramatic tradition. I draw from psychoanalytic theories more commonly applied to the melodrama. In doing so, I suggest that horror films offer dual masochistic fantasies rather than sadomasochistic ones (as typically argues about horror). Firstly, masochistic fantasies are situated in the body of the mother who is faced with an antagonist (the sadistic attacker). The spectator is encouraged to identify not with the sadistic attacker but with the mother, in a similar way to Clover’s treatise on the Final Girl. However, unlike the Final Girl, who acts as a point of temporary identification for the male spectator, the mother maintains a position of otherness. The spectator identifies not with her but with the sacrifice she carries out for the child. The mother’s masochism, in the maternal horror, is not simply a result of the threat she is faced with (where she is put in the position of masochist by another figure), but is also a facet of essential motherhood, in which she is ‘naturally’ masochistic in her role as a mother. She undertakes the role of sufferer for the sake of her children; she volunteers herself as victim for the child’s sake. Similarly, the horror film can enact masochistic identification with the mother (with mother–child symbiosis), by offering visions of plenitude (for example in the reuniting of mother and child, such as with Poltergeist, The Shining, and Invasion).

Understanding maternal self-sacrifice as a theme common, but not exclusive, to the melodrama genre allows for a broader understanding of the maternal self-sacrifice motif outside of specific genre or gendered spectatorship readings. In her article ‘Melodrama Revisited’ Linda Williams (revising some of her earlier work) suggests that melodrama, as a cinematic ‘mode’, pervades most Hollywood genres and films. She argues,

It is not a specific genre like the western or horror film ... it cannot be located primarily in women’s films, ‘weepies’ or family melodramas – though it includes them. Rather melodrama is a peculiarly democratic and American form that seeks dramatic revelation of moral and irrational truths through a dialectic of pathos and action.

(1998: 42)

For her, any film that poses moral dilemmas, provokes sentiment, embodies excess and encourages sympathy with a hero is melodrama. Indeed, although often understood as a specific genre, melodrama is, according to Greek etymology, drama infused with music. While music no longer signifies this ‘excess’ (drama/story with music/excess), non-representational qualities, such as pathos, have taken the place of song or score. As Peter Brooks suggests, the melodrama is a ‘drama of pure psychic signs’ (Brooks, 1976: 35). For him, the melodrama extends from musical theatre, specifically pantomime, which offers unambiguous moral universes, the promise of virtue and the sensationalistic performance of personal crises. This form of exaggeration (expression, emotion, situations, coincidences) signifies the melo of contemporary melodrama. Brooks adds,

The emotional drama needs the desemanticized language of music, its evocation of the ‘ineffable,’ its tones and registers. Style, thematic structuring, modulations of tone and rhythm and voice ... are called upon to invest plot with some of the inexorability and necessity that in pre-modern literature derived from the substratum of myth. (47)

Emotion itself becomes an element of plot, in which the fantastic outpourings of characters either drive forward or hinder the story. In this sense, then, pathos and action may be interconnected.

Following this logic, this exaggeration of the theme of maternal self-sacrifice can be understood as a melodramatic mode that operates across a wide range of genres. More specifically, maternal self-sacrifice finds a unique place in the horror film through this ‘dialectic of pathos and action’. The maternal horror offers dramatic moments of sentiment (a mother losing her child) but situates this pathos in the context of action (she is chased, or she encounters ghosts/villains). As Williams suggests about the Hollywood film, ‘it can consist of a paroxysm of pathos (as in the woman’s film or family melodrama variants) or it can take that paroxysm and channel it into more virile and action centred variants of rescue, chase, and fight (as in the western and all the action genres)’ (58). Here Williams suggests that the ending of the film, where the ‘moral good of the hero’ is revealed, determines what direction, pathos or action, the film will take. However, the horror film, I would suggest, makes no such clear distinctions. In particular, the contemporary horror offers little resolution, nor does it offer the clear moral boundaries that Williams speaks of. Yet these films continue to oscillate between pathos (excess exhibited through the loss of the child) and action (trying to secure the child’s return/safety). What emerges in the analysis of the Good Mother in horror cinema is that pathos is the determining mode of maternal horror which can be considered more complicit with the dominant ideology of essential motherhood. In those texts which resist idealising maternal self-sacrifice, pathos is less prominent than action. Those films which attempt to revise the social structure of the nuclear family and resist conforming to the maternal self-sacrifice ideal avoid or limit the use of pathos. There is a distinct lack of sentiment (towards all characters), there is limited scope for identification and a tendency towards clinical detachment in terms of mise en scène or the emotional scope of the characters.

With this in mind I will move on to a discussion of the family horror of the 1970s and 1980s, paying particular attention to the melodramatic narrative, as well as the social context of these films. In these films, a reappraisal of the patriarchal family, including the devoted mother, is accompanied by a distinct lack of pathos. In other words, emotional identification with the mother is limited if not actively discouraged. These family horror films populated the horror genre from the late 1960s to the 1980s and mirrored a general trend in familial representations in American cinema. If the family melodrama is said to elicit sentiment around domestic situations, parent–child relationships, the experience of personal loss, the family horror of these years can be seen to elicit horror around these same themes. During these years, there is perhaps a clearer polarisation of the pathos/action dialectic. If the maternal melodrama is figured as circulating and reproducing dominant patriarchal idealisations of maternal self-sacrifice (even while certain texts may ‘resist’ it), the family horror may be read as an antithesis to this. In other words, it challenges the nuclear family and the maternal self-sacrifice motif by destroying it from within (the family, the home). Nevertheless, while the family continues to be a dominant theme in horror cinema, social criticism of the nuclear family and of maternal self-sacrifice has declined in the past two decades. Instead, pathos has increasingly become a function of the horror film, particularly the maternal horror. The family continues to be a site of crisis yet the mother now offers a solution to this crisis. As in the maternal melodramas, her sacrifice offers a way out of the terrible, horrifying bind (whether it is a ghostly haunting, or an attack by aliens). In the maternal melodrama, maternal sacrifice enables the social or personal promotion of the child. In the horror film, it enables the survival of the child. In direct contrast to the family horrors of the late 1960s–1980s, the contemporary horror film reinstates and reconstitutes the patriarchal nuclear family (even when it offers moments of resistance). The next section examines the family horror during the 1960s–1980s. It traces the progression from outright vilification of the Good Mother to her reinstatement as a maternal ideal in films from the 1980s onwards. This will demonstrate that, while horror films tend to be overtly critical of patriarchal institutions and, in particular, paternal authority, they maintain the association between maternity and self-sacrifice. In other words, these horror films find no alternative to self-sacrifice and maternal devotion, no other means of representing positive images of the mother outside of essential motherhood. Although it may seem counter-intuitive to begin with a group of films that question the very notion of maternal self-sacrifice and the patriarchal family model, what is particularly interesting is the point at which this scepticism emerges, as well as the failure to provide any positive or progressive alternatives in terms of maternal representation. As a consequence, later horror films retreat into tradition and attempt to recuperate the trope of maternal self-sacrifice, perhaps echoing the conservative turn in 1970s America.

Family discontents: Questioning the function of the Good Mother in post-classical horror

George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead is often cited as the point at which the contemporary or postmodern horror emerged.⁶ Given the ‘period of intense transition’ in society that Kaplan discusses as well as the turn in the economic practices of American film-making at this time, it is perhaps no wonder that the nature of the horror genre (and cinema in general) transforms in this period. The end of the studio system allowed for the possibility of independent films being made and distributed, while the replacement of Motion Picture Production Code with a ratings system allowed for risqué and provocative narrative material. For a film that is credited with introducing gore and splatter to the horror genre, it is remarkably conservative in terms of violence. The ‘living dead’, while causing mass social chaos, carry out few of the murders in the film. Tension comes predominantly from within the surviving group, including a family of mother, father and daughter. Because the group cannot resolve their differences and organise themselves, they all die. The film constructs the ‘normative’ family structure as inept and beyond redemption. The family struggles with the outside force of the zombies, but more importantly from within. The film finds little to salvage in the nuclear family and by the end all have been destroyed from within both the domestic space and the family itself at the hands of the zombie daughter. Isabel Cristina Pinedo sees this denial of narrative closure as an emblematic feature of postmodern horror (1997: 17). Order is never restored because order never really existed in the first place. The film constructs safe or sanctified places or institutions as either corrupt or corruptible. As such, the graveyard is occupied by the living dead, the house provides little shelter from the zombies, the sheriff accidentally kills the remaining survivor and the family are consistently argumentative and abusive towards each other.

This emphasis on dysfunctionality within the American nuclear family persists throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Regardless of the causes of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. The Good Mother
• 2. The Bad Mother
• 3. A Comparative Analysis of Motherhood in Recent Japanese and US Horror Films
• 4. Pregnancy in the Horror Film: Reproduction and Maternal Discourses
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Filmography
• Index