Horror and Mother/hoods in Global Cultural Imaginaries: Representations Across Literature, Film, Television, and Art

Literature, Film, Television, and Art

Sarah Revilla-Sanchez, Cristina Santos, Rachel D. Davidson i

• Publisher: Demeter Press
• Year: 2026
• eBook ISBN:
  9781772586077
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Television

Motherhood has long been idealized as a site of unconditional love, sacrifice, and renewal, yet the horror genre reveals its darker undercurrents— the spaces where fear, violence, and survival converge. This collection embraces horror as an interdisciplinary lens to examine the cultural contradictions and emotional realities of mother/hoods. Our contributors explore how maternal figures are imagined, troubled, resisted, and reclaimed across cultures, time, narrative forms, and genres.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Contents
• Introduction The Maternal as/in Horror
• PART I Decolonizing Mother/hoods
• Chapter 1 Broken Resurrects: Reanimating Mothering in New Indigenous Horror Cinema
• Chapter 2 A Black Mother’s Mixtape: Exploring Sonic Representation of Black Motherhood in Black Horror
• Chapter 3 Breaking La Maldición: Borderlands Theory, Motherhood, and Racialized Violence in Madres
• Chapter 4 Protesting through Horror: From Silence to Resistance in the Contemporary Puerto Rican Birth Story
• PART II Cinematic Horrors of Mother Blaming
• Chapter 5 Responsibility for the Devil: Monstered Mothers in We Need to Talk About Kevin, The Babadook, and Hereditary
• Chapter 6 “Baby Knows Best”: Furies, Fetuses, and Feminist Resistance in Prevenge
• Chapter 7 Like Mother, Like Daughter: Artificialized Femininity, Transmisogyny, and the Mother-Child Relationship in Psycho, Sleepaway Camp, and Seed of Chucky
• PART III Politics of Care and Beyond Human Mothering
• Chapter 8 “The Nature of Care”: A Creative Practice Exploration of Object as Mother in Horror
• Chapter 9 Adopting the Forest: Mothering the Arboreal Other
• Chapter 10 “I’ll Tuck the Children In”: Bodily Rights, Cyborgs, and Posthuman Motherhood in Ridley Scott’s Prometheus and Alien: Covenant
• Chapter 11 Mrs. Jaws at the Edge of the World
• PART IV Monstrous Mothers: Vampires, Witches, Werewolves, and Other Creatures
• Chapter 12 Mothers Suck: Three Centuries of Vampire Narratives
• Chapter 13 “That Ugly Witch Has Raised the Very Divil!”: Feral Mothers, Ecosemiotics, and Witchy Biologies in American Dime Novels
• Chapter 14 Defanging the Werewolf: Domesticating the Monstrous-Feminine in Nightbitch
• Chapter 15 Gyeongseong Creature, the Monster/Mother, and the Monstrous-Feminine: Exploring the Horrors of the Japanese Occupation in a K-drama Series
• Chapter 16 Oh Things I Have Slept Through: Artist Statement
• PART V Bodily Autonomy, Reproductive Labour, and Motherwork
• Chapter 17 The Cult of Motherhood: Fertile Bodies, Bodily Autonomy, and the Horror of Complicity in Anne Heltzel’s Just Like Mother
• Chapter 18 Interrogating the Normalization of White Motherhood in American Horror Story
• Chapter 19 Mother for Hire: Exploring the Neogoverness in M. Night Shyamalan’s Servant
• Chapter 20 Quisiera ser un pulpo (I Wish I Were an Octopus)
• PART VI Traumatized and Traumatizing Mothers
• Chapter 21 The Ghosts That Surround Us: Maternal Trauma and Alienated Motherhood in the Works of Mike Flanagan
• Chapter 22 The Horror of Mothering in Ireland’s Magdalene Laundries and The Devil’s Doorway
• Chapter 23 The Monstrous Mother: A Personal Journey through Motherhood, Loss, and the Psychological Haunting under the Gothic-Jungian Lens
• Notes on Contributors
• Deepest appreciation to Demeter’s monthly Donors