the sacrifices of mothering in horror movies

Don’t Knock Twice centers on the relationship of Jess and the teenage daughter she abandoned nine years ago, Chloe. The film opens with Chloe and her boyfriend Danny being drawn to a house nearby where a woman named Mary Aminov used to live. Convinced that, years ago, she kidnapped and killed a boy who lived in their group home, Chloe and Danny harassed her long after the police decided they had no case. They drove her, it seems, to suicide, and now a legend has flourished that something demonic lives in her house. If you knock twice on the door, it will come to get you. Danny, of course, knocks twice. And then the demonic witch comes to get him. In terror, Chloe flees to her mother’s home—even though she had earlier brutally refused Jess’s plea that Chloe come live with her. But the witch pursues Chloe even to her mother’s house—and so Jess ends up fighting for her daughter’s life.

In Lights Out, the demonic entity, “Diana,” is actually the incarnation of Sophie’s depression, a force that came between her and her children. “Diana” destroys all Sophie’s relationships, making it clear how difficult those relationships were for her as she struggled with mental illness.

The Babadook tells the story of a woman named Amelia who is still reeling from the passing of her husband who died while driving her to the hospital for her to deliver their son, Samuel. Not fully mentally prepared to be a single mother, Amelia nonetheless does all she can to give the imaginative Samuel all she can, even though emotionally he’s a bit outspoken, training to hunt imaginary monsters that only he can see.

Thus (spoiler warning), after Amelia reads Samuel a new book which has suddenly appeared in his room called “The Babadook”, he appropriately starts freaking out, deathly afraid of the titular beast and suddenly causing even more of a ruckus with Amelia’s friends who are genuinely disturbed by the fact that this maturing little boy still believes in monsters. Yet even Amelia starts freaking out, seeing things on her own, losing her grip on reality as her son only dives deeper into his fear.

The Monster focuses almost exclusively on the journey of a single night as Kathy is driving her daughter Lizzy to her father’s: she’s been struggling with motherhood as well as with substance abuse—and the brutally destructive “monster” they meet on the road embodies all the demons that prevent her from taking care of her daughter.

Focusing on a mother and daughter besieged by forces both worldly and otherwise in a Tehran apartment block, Under the Shadow presents a gripping portrait of an independently spirited woman shackled by sharia law who becomes more scared of the demonic forces tormenting her daughter than of the lashes threatened by her rulers or of fire falling from the sky.