[Editor’s note: this list was originally published in May 2023. It has since been updated with new entries in honor of the release of “Longlegs.”] Movies offer an excellent excuse to ruminate on your deepest fears , and they’re certainly cheaper than therapy.
So if you’re struggling with some deep mommy issues, why not cue up a matriarchal tale of terror and sort through some of that trauma in style? Auteurs have been hashing out their issues with their mothers on the big screen for decades, to varying degrees of success. Consider mother-centric horror as its own subgenre, and you’ll notice there’s a tendency among filmmakers to take more than one stab at the thorny subject matter. Alfred Hitchcock used the real crimes of serial killer Ed Gein and added a profoundly morbid murder of a mother at a motel to brilliantly realize Norma and Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) for his exquisite “Psycho” in 1960, of course.
But he’d whipped up something just as insidiously spectacular with Leopoldine Konstantin for his earlier “Notorious”: a 1945 spy thriller set against the wreckage of World War II and centered around the duplicitous relationship between an aristocratic mother and son (Claude Rains). More recently, Ari Aster busted onto the indie filmmaking scene with 2018’s “Hereditary”: a head-spinning Toni Collette triumph about reckless driving, generational grief, and Pagan cults. It’s a motherly nightmare so disturbing it accidentally kicked off the .