The monstrous feminine topic is something I am pretty unfamiliar with. It is not quite a classic sub-genre of horror films like the “slasher” or vampire movies, but I have learned it is still very scary. The three films we were required to watch for this section were Cronenberg’s The Brood (1979), Kent’s Babadook (2014), and Franz & Fiala’s Goodnight Mommy (2015). I really thought all three of these films were well done in their own way. The best thing about all of these films were the amount of tension throughout the whole movie. Every part of all three of the films were so tense and suspenseful. The topic “monstrous feminine” pretty much explains itself, it is a film that includes a female antagonist that is “monstrous”. Although they did not turn into a monster, all three of the female antagonists were evil in their own way. Babadook and Goodnight Mommy shared many similarities. Of course the first being that the mother in both films were seen as the antagonist. In Babadook though the mother was possessed by the Babadook so it was not her fault that she turned so evil. In Goodnight Mommy the mother was mean and abusive for the first half of the film until she was restrained by her son Elias and his dead twin brother Lukas. In The Brood the mother in that film was psychotic and pure evil, and the reveal that the mom was having all of these little monsters at the end of that film was very Cronenberg-ish and by Cronenberg-ish I mean shocking and disturbing.
There was a deeper connection in all of these films. That deeper meaning behind these films are that mothers are typically thought to be nurturing and caring, but in these films it was quite the opposite. These were all females that were physically and verbally abusive to helpless children. Seeing children be treated like that is sickening to me. I don’t care how irritating the kid is (like the one in Babadook) no one should ever lay hands on a child. When you are a child mothers are supposed to be the ones you turn to in times of destress and fear, not someone who treats you like trash. I also realized a thing that happens in almost every horror film, and that is that an animal always dies. I am sure I am not the first to notice this, but watch closely and you will see that animals die in close to every film we have viewed in this class. This is not as bad as child abuse of course, but still really terrible. These kinds of films get me more angry than scared honestly. Babadook, The Brood, and Goodnight Mommy were all films that had me on the edge of my seat though and I thoroughly enjoyed each of them.