ABSTRACT
This chapter explains the trajectory through a woman's normative, culturally sanctioned sexual life to consider the presentation of mothers and mothering in the horror film. The analysis of mothers, motherhood and the maternal in cinema has been largely shaped by appraisals of the maternal melodrama, with a particular emphasis upon psychoanalytic film theories. Importantly, Norman Bates' imagined Mother – controlling, infantilising and abusive – has come, over time, to be a template for the popular representation of maternal overbearance in horror films. The dissonance and interplay between idealised and transgressive motherhood is emblematic of the way that discourses of motherhood are negotiated in the horror genre. Grace is unusual because it highlights the generational differences between two mothers. The monstrous-maternal's gynaehorrific double bind is that it is the construction of essential motherhood – motherhood as innate, as natural, as desirable – and the compulsion to conform to ideal, ideologically complicit motherhood that firstly facilitates such horrendous actions.
