The Inevitable and Well Documented Horrors of the Mother-Daughter Relationship
Words: Katarzyna Skiba
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“We are all chimeras. We carry the genetic and emotional traces of our mothers and our daughters — as will our daughters after us.” These are the lines spoken by a lawyer in French filmmaker Alice Diop’s Saint Omer, who is charged with defending a woman who left her infant daughter on the beach during low tide to float away and die. The film explores an interplay of race, generational trauma, and mother-daughter relationships through the lens of the courtroom, and it is within the lawyer’s words that the film arguably reaches its emotional climax, as sociology and body horror combine into one.
The lawyer’s argument is biological: during pregnancy, a woman’s body exchanges cells with those of their children, those parts of the child always remain embedded within her organs, and in her DNA. Mothers, in this view, are as much a product of their children as their children are of them. The relationship between them is more symmetrical than it is traditionally hierarchical, and, like a chimera, it is terrifying.
Diop is not the only filmmaker in recent years to explore the grotesque when showing the interconnectedness between mother and child. A similar phenomenon presents itself in Yorgos Lanthimos’s latest release, Poor Things, culminating in one of the final scenes where the tortured scientist Godwin Baxter reveals that lead character Bella is the Frankensteinian result of a woman’s dead body being embedded with her unborn child’s brain.
“Well, technically you are your baby. And also I suppose you are your mother. But also neither”, Baxter explains, after Bella discovers the procedure that allowed her (re)birth to take place. Although Godwin later goes on to note that “No memory survives. No experiences survive” from Bella’s past lives, the character is permanently marked both by the c-section scar on her abdomen and a similar scar at the back of her neck, the incision via which her baby’s brain became her own. Although the film revolves around Bella’s journey to find autonomy, she is still the sum of both parts, continuing to exist simultaneously as mother and child.
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The trope of mothers, daughters, and horror - in cinema, in literature, and in folklore - also has direct connections to biological and psychological phenomena. People born female undergo meiosis while in utero, meaning that the egg a woman comes from was carried inside her grandmother too, before her mother was even born. The generational connections coming from this are historical, biological, and epigenetic, and the experiences a woman undergoes while or before becoming pregnant can impact both future generations.
“The trope of mothers, daughters, and horror - in cinema, in literature, and in folklore - has direct connections to biological and psychological phenomena.”
Such is the case in 2022 horror Barbarian, where main character Tess encounters an unnamed figure known only as the “Mother” in a dingy AirBnB in Detroit. The mother/monster who lurks beneath the tunnels of the home is the result of decades of rape, childbirth and forced incest at the hands of Frank, a serial killer who lives further below the home. The result of the years of trauma and abuse that the Mother and Frank’s countless other victims experienced is physically manifested in her monstrous fury. Though the Mother can only express herself through grunts and shouts rather than speech, she knows the duties of motherhood very well, offering her victims milk from a baby bottle and forcing one of them to breastfeed off of her.
“This is a time for us to bond. To share this tender intimate moment with each other”, a new mothers’ training video plays from a dingy VCR in the pink-painted room where the Mother was likely born, abused, and forced to learn to raise her own children. In a way, her violence is a misguided form of protection. Though the Mother is the typical horror movie villain, playing into the hag trope of the genre, she is not the “Barbarian” the film alludes to in the title. In the end of the movie, when Tess kills the Mother, she does it not only out of self-defense, but also as an act of mercy, to put an end to the cycles of pain that the Mother represents.
The element of horror as a part of mother-daughter relationships is not a newly-explored phenomenon, either, and has roots in folkloric tropes, including variations of the nearly universal “Snow White” myth. As Harvard University folklorist Maria Tatar writes in her book The Fairest of Them All: Snow White and 21 Tales of Mothers and Daughters, the horror present within mother-daughter relationships is “a tight discipline that is endlessly repeated and remade in cultures all over the world”, and one which embraces “the mix of the sublime and the grotesque”.
In every variation of the Snow White tale, the mother, or in some cases, stepmother’s offspring is her undoing - her beauty is a source for rivalry rather than pride, their relationship is one of competition rather than love. For the mother, the younger, more beautiful woman's birth symbolises her destruction, the continuation of her lineage is the end of her own carefully-crafted legacy of regal beauty.
While Barbarian, Saint Omer, and Poor Things all involve some form of explicit violence, the horror in mother-daughter relationships isn’t limited to the physical. In Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan, ballerina Nina Sayers is infantilised by her mother Erica to her detriment. The film implies that Erica was once a dancer herself and that her career was cut short when she became pregnant with her daughter. In Black Swan, Nina is critiqued for a lack of passion and darkness while dancing the titular role of the Black Swan - the dark lead of the ballet Swan Lake.
After trying to embody the role in rehearsals, she comes back every day to her childlike bedroom, full of stuffed animals and a mother waiting to dote on her. When Nina comes back late after a night of taking drugs, her mother slaps her across the face for misbehaving. In pushing her into the role of the “good, sweet girl”, her mother limits her ability to play the opposite on stage, and unknowingly drives a dangerous obsession with being able to embody the Black Swan character. Taken at face value, their relationship blurs the line between smothering care and malintent, and begs the question if Erica secretly resents her daughter for impacting her own career, which is so contingent on youth.
Whether through folklore, literature, or film, blending mother-daughter relationships with elements of horror can conceptualise the legacies of trauma - and add nuance to the mental health struggles - that mothers and their daughters experience due to the consequences of a society that prizes youth above all else in women. As much attention is paid to absent or abusive fathers, the mother-daughter horror trope offers an extreme representation of the complicated feelings found between all mother and daughter relationships that have occurred due to external pressures to be young, beautiful, and appealing to others. It examines the violence and pain that can occur from female caregivers and begs the question of what the cause of this violence is.