Throughout theatre and cinema, characters will often fall into one of many categories or archetypes (e.g. Pierrot, Columbine, and Harlequin of Commedia Dell’arte [Green and Swan, 1986]). These serve to give the audience a base understanding of the characters they are seeing without having to provide too much exposition, therefore not distracting from the current plot and allowing a story to get to the action a little faster. The same idea has carried over to the horror genre.
Horror is a genre of exploration. Being outside of the mainstream, horror gives society’s outcasts a place to tell their stories without there being so much control over their expression. This freedom allows for introspective and honest stories about gender, sexuality, race, revolution, and fear to arise in the form of artistic fiction. A piece of horror media speaks volumes about the time in which it is created, and can act as a reflection of society.
Throughout the horror genre of cinema, characters will often fall into one of many varied archetypal roles beyond ‘protagonist’ and ‘antagonist/monster’. These are categorised by the purpose they serve to the overarching story of the film or the role they fill in the group they find themselves part of.
To name a few common archetypes of horror, there’s The Jock, an athletic male character whose character can be defined as ‘brawn over brains’ and will likely meet his demise by overestimating his own strength when deciding to go up against the villain of the story; The Blonde (sometimes harshly referred to as The Slut/Whore), a young, attractive female character in a supporting role who exists eye candy for the audience and an inevitable kill for the villain to claim, usually during or immediately after having sex (both the Bonde and the Jock are generally susceptible to the tropes of Death by Sex and Fanservice Extra [TV Tropes]; and the Final Girl, a female protagonist who is not stereotypically feminine or like her fellow on-screen female characters, who will watch all her friends die and be the sole survivor of the film’s villain - bringing the story to a close-by either escaping or managing to kill the villain [Clover, 1992].
But one commonly occurring type of character who still manages to vary in appearance and role is the Mother. She is a part of every story that plays out in a film, whether she’s on-screen or not; the Mother is half of every character, she has influence over personality and actions from how she raised (or failed to raise) her child. But outside of her own purpose is the one she serves in the film; Is she a fighter, a victim, a villain, or maybe absent entirely?
Mothers can appear as both good and bad characters; in the forefront or the background of the story. If there are children, there’s likely a mother, and even if there are no children in the story, every person was once a child with a mother. Even a fictional character can be governed by the way their mother raised them, or the closeness or distance between them and their mother now. A mother is an ever-present but fluid influence, yet in fiction, she is commonly broken down to a few bare elements; her character may be simply defined by the fact she has a child and whether, according to her child, she is a help, a hindrance, or a threat.
These outlines for how a mother is characterised or portrayed are likely influenced by psychology - either wider known theories that are deliberately drawn on when creating the character, or the personal experiences and ideas of mothers from the writer or director.
Psychologist Carl Jung developed his own archetype model in which he defined four archetypes that, he theorised, apply to all people through a ‘collective unconscious’ [Jung, 1969]. One of these four archetypes was that of the Mother, who contains all positive and negative aspects of what a mother can be. She is not only based on a person’s mother or immediate female relatives but also other personal female influences, ‘a nurse, a governess or perhaps a remote ancestress’ [Jung], and figurative female influences such as that of the Virgin Mary and other female deities. More abstract concepts that relate to fertility, devotion, and protection fall under Jung’s umbrella of Archetypal Mother are gardens, churches, lotus flowers, and mandalas.
In contrast, symbols that Jung relates to the mother as ‘ambivalent aspects’ are goddesses of fate such as Moira and Norns, and evil symbols such as witches, dragons, and the demoness Lilith.
Jung acknowledges that these ideas of the archetypal Mother are not all positive, as not everyone’s relationship with the maternal figures in their lives is positive, and the idea of a mother’s role can vary depending on what kind of society or religion a person is raised in. He also draws on ideas from Sankhya, an orthodox Hindu philosophy (where “the great and terrible Mother” Kali is worshipped) where ‘Mother’ is made up of three attributes: goodness, passion, and darkness.
Jung elaborates, ‘These are three essential aspects of the mother: her cherishing and nourishing goodness, her orgiastic emotionality, and her Stygian depths.’
It is these three elements that, through personal observation, mothers in films of the horror genre seem to be broken down into; the nourishing mother, who not only cherishes her child but also her role as a mother; the emotional mother, who feels rather than thinks, being ruled by her own emotions over the logic of the world around her; and the dark mother, the terrible mother, the mother who has fulfilled her role of creating life and is now driven to destroy.
In this dissertation, I will seek to expand the ideas behind the Jungian Archetypal Mother and define three cinematic archetypes of the Mother in horror films. These will be based on observation of Mothers within horror, as well as academic reading on cultural and psychological records and theories of the portrayal of women in media and mythology. In doing so, I hope to deepen the context of the films in which they are portrayed, thus deepening the context of other films in which similar archetypal mothers appear. I will better define these types of good, passionate, and dark mothers, provide examples of each and give context to the roles they fill and the place they have within the horror genre - not only as mothers but as women.