The Child (The Babadook, 2014)
The Teenager (Hereditary, 2018)
Adulthood (Psycho, 1960)
The horror scholar and critic Robin Wood once wrote that the source of all horror is family. There is plenty of evidence for this, from the attempted ‘child’ of Victor Frankenstein to the family in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre; from the creepy kids of Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist and The Omen to the ominous grandparents of The Visit and Relic. In Mums and Sons: An Examination of Relationships, Rebecca McCallum delivers a fascinating study of horrific families, paying close attention to three very different films. Two debut features, Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook (2014) and Ari Aster’s Hereditary (2018) are discussed as is Alfred Hitchcock’s classic Psycho (1960). All three films have their own type of horror and, arguably, fit into different sub-genres – haunting for The Babadook, occult for Hereditary and slasher for Psycho – yet McCallum argues that all three present comparably complex mother/son relationships, relationships that help to fuel the films’ horror.
Using this central conceit of mothers and sons, McCallum provides intriguing insights into the films’ engagement with such topics as grief, secrets, jealousy, repression and doubling, through discussion of the twisted love/hate relationship between Amelia and her young son Samuel in The Babadook, the distance and lack of communication between Annie and her teenage son Peter in Hereditary and the dual personalities of Norman and his mother within a single body in Psycho. McCallum identifies key motifs in the spaces of these films, such as the basements in both Psycho and The Babadook and the treehouse in Hereditary. McCallum’s reference to these motifs resonates with Freudian psychoanalysis that may spark the reader’s interest to investigate further, as well as her identification of duality and the liminal spaces occupied by the various mothers and sons.
Indeed, the intriguing ideas serve as a fine stimulus, as McCallum raises as many tantalising questions through her observations as she does answers. Her analysis of Norman’s inability to say certain words (24), highlights the repression of expression through speech, as does the following discussion of Anthony Perkins’ performance that highlights the two personalities vying for dominance. Observations like these are likely to send the reader back to these films with a renewed interest and a taste of the passion that the author shows for her subject.
Perhaps this passion accounts for the nature of the zine, as the various interesting ideas are only mentioned briefly and in isolation, making the zine feel somewhat disparate. But that makes it the start of an enjoyable journey, as there is so much more to be read into and discussed. The zine is likely to appeal to many a devoted horror fan, who can make connections to wider horror tropes and developments in the genre, especially due to McCallum’s closing sentence that summarises the “finding which serves to illustrate just how timeless and unchanging these motifs are” (33). Psycho has been fascinating viewers, critics and scholars, for over sixty years and yet writers like McCallum still find new material to talk about. Perhaps in another sixty years, discussions like this one will continue over The Babadook and Hereditary, in no small part thanks to authors like McCallum.
Rebecca McCallum
Rebecca McCallum is an established writer of horror think-pieces that utilise feminist thinking for close film analysis. She is Assistant Editor at Ghouls Magazine where she has published several articles and has also published with Rue Morgue, Dread Central, Evolution of Horror, Zobo with a Shotgun and Jumpcut Online. She published print essays on women in horror for Grim Journal and for Hear Us Scream-Horror Anthology, Volume 1. Her work can also be found on Moving Pictures Film Club where she has an ongoing series on the ‘Women in Hitchcock’s Films’.
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