Steve
This year’s Mother’s Day is long past. Still, with Rob Savage’s Other Mommy hitting theaters this Friday and Linda Cardellini taking on the role of Pamela Voorhees for Peacock’s Crystal Lake on October 15 (read our review here), we thought we’d go out to the garden and gather a beautiful bouquet for the most unhinged mothers ever to grace the silver screen.
Before we get started, I want to give a shoutout to all the hardworking moms out there. Your work is never done, and your feats of maternal fortitude are rarely recognized to the degree you deserve. The challenges you face daily are limitless, and if there’s any justice in this world, someone special will draw you a nice bath alongside a chilled glass of wine at the end of an impossible day.
With only five spots on this list, not every mother worthy of mention will make the cut. My heart goes out to psychopaths like Beverly Sutphin (Serial Mom), Joan Crawford (Mommie Dearest), Ma Barker (The Goonies), and The Other Mother (Coraline). You are all queens here, but I feel like mixing things up. You have my condolences. Please don’t poison my tea.
5) Amelia Vanek (The Babadook)
I want to start by giving a kiss on the cheek to one of my favorite movie mothers ever, Amelia Vanek, played to perfection by Essie Davis in Jennifer Kent’s psychological masterpiece, The Babadook. While not a traditional pick for a list like this, Amelia’s slow descent into madness puts other “scream queens” and final girls on the back burner for me. Driven by repressed trauma, maternal exhaustion, and an all-consuming grief after the loss of her husband, Amelia’s transformation into a murderous banshee throughout Kent’s story is the stuff nightmares are made of.
Amelia is a widowed mother living in suburban Australia, working as an aide in a nursing home’s neurocognitive unit. Considering the emotional toll of that responsibility, it’s almost impossible to think Amelia would be capable of fending off a monster born of her own grief while raising a troublesome young child alone. When you combine her deeply buried resentment toward her son, Samuel, her continuous struggles with insomnia, and life-draining physical and mental exhaustion, it’s no surprise that she’s driven to the ragged edge by the film’s final act.
In the end, Amelia and Samuel embrace the grief made manifest in the beast that lives in their basement, going so far as to feed it rather than starve it to death. They know their collective pain is unending, and the only way to move forward is to make the Babadook a member of their twisted family.
4) Annie Graham (Hereditary)
In Ari Aster‘s Hereditary, Toni Collette combines raw emotional pain with animalistic ferocity in this disturbing tale of cults, generational trauma, and manipulation. Annie is a miniaturist who transforms lasting psychological wounds into diaramas of pain, each piece lovingly recreated by reliving the worst parts of her lamentable life. When Annie’s son, Peter, accidentally kills his 13-year-old sister, Charlie, a resentment spreads throughout her soul like a cancer, her bitterness and sadness corrupting her thoughts and actions.
Eventually, Annie succumbs to full demonic possession, a process triggered by a cult to which her mother belonged. There’s no saving Annie as her madness and violent acts escalate into one of the most chilling scenes in modern horror filmmaking. If there’s a mother on this list who never stood a chance against the forces of evil pulling her strings like a maternal marionette, it’s Annie Graham.
3) Norma Bates (Psycho)
This entry could be considered a cheat, but tell me you don’t think about Mrs. Bates when making a mental list of unhinged movie-related mothers! After her husband died when Norman was young, Norma raised her son Norman in extreme emotional isolation. The situation took its toll, but not enough to shut Norma down entirely. She tried dating someone new when Norman was a teen, but the jealous boy grew resentful and murdered them both with strychnine. Tortured by his actions, Norman stole his mother’s body before her burial, preserved her body through taxidermy, and kept her in her bedroom. As a way of coping with his outrageous actions, Norman began wearing his mother’s clothes, mimicking her voice (a combination of Virginia Gregg, Jeanette Nolan, and Paul Jasmin), and, for all intents and purposes, pretending she was still alive for close to a decade.
When Alfred Hitchcock‘s Psycho opened in theaters, the twisty director launched an aggressive, highly orchestrated promotional campaign that legally bound theater owners and explicitly begged audiences to keep the film’s twists a secret. Not only did he want to hide Marion Crane’s iconic death, but he also wanted audiences to be clueless about Norma Bates’ true nature. The brilliant move to hide Mrs. Bates’ withered corpse from moviegoers resulted in one of the best-kept secrets in Hollywood in the 1960s, making Norma Bates a shoo-in for this list.
2) Pamela Voorhees (Friday the 13th)
Before Jason donned his signature hockey mask, Betsy Palmer’s Pamela Voorhees was the original killer of Camp Crystal Lake. Driven by grief and vengeance, she blamed the careless counselors for the 1957 drowning of her son, Jason, a boy born with severe facial deformities and developmental disabilities who was left unsupervised and vanished into the water. Rocked to her foundation by the loss, Pamela vows revenge against anyone resembling the people she deems responsible for her son’s demise. As a part of her revenge, she systematically slaughters a group of counselors to keep the camp from reopening.
Part of what makes Pamela such a formidable villain is her dual personality. During the film’s climax, we hear her speaking to the film’s final girl, Alice Hardy (Adrienne King), in two distinct voices, switching between sweetly maternal nurturing and a harsh, water-logged rasp, representing Jason’s damaged vocal cords. It’s clear that something broke in Pamela the day her son presumably drowned in Crystal Lake, and who could blame her? I can’t begin to imagine what Pamela saw each time she closed her eyes after Jason’s death; whatever it was, it transformed her into a ruthless killer. What would she say if she could see Jason so many years later, picking up the unfinished family business with an equal amount of bloodlust?
1) Margaret White (Carrie)
Few mothers in cinema are more unhinged than Margaret White, brought to life with venom and malice by Piper Laurie in Brian De Palma’s Carrie. A devout fundamentalist practicing her own corrupted brand of Christianity, Margaret views womanhood, menstruation, and physical maturation as cardinal sins—things to be scrubbed clean, prayed away, and banished back to Hell. She’s manipulative, physically and mentally abusive, and her delusions of grandeur make her the ultimate villain for her young daughter, Carrie (Sissy Spacek).
When Carrie develops telekinetic powers, Margaret sees her daughter’s talents as blasphemy, devilry, and witchcraft. She’ll stop at nothing to cleanse Carrie’s soul, even if that means baptizing her in pain, ridicule, and lies. Piper portrays Margaret as positively deranged, unforgiving, and unredeemable. I can’t think of unhinged mothers in cinema without picturing Margaret’s wild eyes, the glint of her gnashed teeth, and the way she wails and moans in discontent. She’s a character I’ll never recover from, and few resolutions are as satisfying as watching Carrie knock her down from her cross.
