10 horror movies that terrify moms and dads

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by Joyce Slaton posted in Mom Stories

For better or for worse, after you have a child, you’re much more susceptible to certain elements of horror. Recognizing an aspect of yourself in a horror movie parent is unsettling. Even worse, is the sight of a child, even a fictional one, in pain or distress. Evil horror-film children are creepier too, with innocent faces that can’t help but remind you of your own babies.

The way you relate to the characters in horror movies characters may shift as well after you spawn. I remember when I caught The Omen on TV as a child that I was terrified Damian would be in my class at school. When I watch now, all I see is a portrait of two parents whose dream of loving a child turned sour (to say the least). Nicole Kidman’s brittle Grace is the villain of The Others, anyone could see that, but only another mom can viscerally understand what desperation drove Grace to the act that sets the movie’s events in motion. Moms can also see that the horrifying ending of The Others? Is, in a morbid and twisted way, a mother’s version of “and then they lived happily ever after.”

Warning, spoilers ahead.

The Others

The servants have suddenly vanished. The ones who mysteriously turned up to take their place seem dismissive of the terrible allergy to light suffered by her children, which leads Grace to lock them up in dim, curtained rooms. But something else is going on in this strange house, isolated by a heavy mist that lets no one in or out. Driven to madness by the failure of her husband to return from WWII, Grace did something awful the day the mist came, and it will just be the servants, Grace, and the kids in the house, forever.

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Poltergeist

When I saw this as a child, the worst part was the scary clown. Now I watch it and all I see is two tiny-tiny kids in mortal jeopardy from closet vortexes and killer trees and assorted other demons. Plus, when Carol Anne is missing and JoBeth Williams is crying her guts out, you just, yeah. I can\’t help thinking about poor Dominique Dunne and Heather O\’Rourke too, who died before their times. It gives the movie that extra dig of horror. Oh, and if this image was not supposed to be a birth callback, I will eat my hat.

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The Sixth Sense

Vengeful ghosts and the status of a social pariah are scary to most people. Moms in particular may relate to Toni Collette\’s gutsy portrayal of a single mom who\’s just doing her damnedest to raise her son, despite unimaginably heavy obstacles. One of which is her butterfly pendant mysteriously moving. \”Grandma says she is sorry she keeps taking it,\” Haley Joel Osment tells her later in the film. \”She just likes it.\” Chills, oh, chills. Additional parent traumatizers: a shot of a teenaged ghost urging Osment to \”see where my dad keeps his guns\” before turning to display a shot-open head, and a very scary Munchausen-by-proxy mom caught on tape by a young, terrifying Mischa Barton.

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Village of the Damned

The entire small British village of Midwich falls unconscious one day and two months later, every woman of childbearing age is pregnant. Has there been hanky-panky going on? No, but the strange, flaxen-haired, silver-eyed self-possessed kids they give birth to sure are strange. Not to mention dangerous. If you\’ve ever wondered \”Where does she get this stuff from?\” This movie will freak you out.

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It’s Alive

Lenore Davis is in a hospital bed, giving birth while her husband sits happily in the waiting room. Lenore tries to tell the doctor something\’s wrong…and cut to an orderly staggering into the waiting room, gushing blood. Frank Davis bursts into the delivery room and discovers doctors and nurses shredded and bloody, his wife still in stirrups screaming in terror, the umbilical cord bitten in half, the baby is missing. Yikes. It\’s such a perversion of a scene we\’ve always known to play out sentimentally in movies that it really floors you.

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Alice, Sweet Alice

The imagery in this little-known 70s shocker is enough to scare anyone. There are blank-faced dolls, scary masks, little Brooke Shields in mortal peril, right on the verge of her first Communion, slain in her veil. There are cockroaches, morbidly obese pedophiles, and a most unnerving attack on a woman\’s feet as she walks down a flight of stairs. But at its heart, this is a story about a mother who can\’t stop awful things from happening to her family, and who worries she unwittingly set a chain of events in motion by loving her two daughters unequally.

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Creepshow

The EC horror comics on which this 1982 anthology film are based often walk the line between humor and horror. So do the segments in the movie, including the interstitial story that connects all the films, that of a young boy who is so infuriated with his father for taking away his comic books, he orders a voodoo doll from an ad in the back of one of them. As his hapless father screams in agony, Billy gleefully sticks pins into the doll. Kinda makes you wonder what kids would do to you if they could.

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The Shining

All Wendy Torrance did wrong, really, was to trust that her husband was working when he locked himself in the faraway room, typing. He was working. Not going completely insane. Not hatching elaborate plans to correct Wendy and son Danny.

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Grace

When an accident leaves Madeline\’s baby dead inside her, she insists on carrying the child to term and delivering the deceased baby naturally. Everyone who attends the water birth at the birth clinic is shocked to see baby Grace move and take breaths. She is alive! Sort of. But now she needs more from her mother than milk. This movie is absolutely on the NO list for pregnant mothers, with its many triggering scenes of OB gyn procedures and other disturbing images.

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The Stepfather

Lonely widow Susan Maine wasn\’t looking for trouble when she married kindly real estate agent Jerry Blake. She was hoping to gain a father figure for her troubled teenaged daughter, Stephanie. It all might have worked out great, if Jerry weren\’t a psychotic killer. Don\’t bother with the 2007 remake, the 1987 movie with scary Terry O\’Quinn is the one you want, where the actress who plays Susan Maine is so sympathetic in her longing for love, you almost want her new husband to turn out okay just to make her feel better.

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