![]() ![]() Manson’s name here is little more than a boogieman – like Satan, or Hitler, or Freddie – to establish a creepy tone for a story about evil hippies with malign intent. However, it barely engages with Manson or the stories around his so-called “family” of followers, or what is significant, in cultural terms, about the murders they committed in Hollywood in 1969. “What Mary Shelley shows us is what a bad idea this really is, and how male hubris really does monstrous things with motherhood.T his shambolic but not entirely uninteresting low-budget horror flick clearly aims to cash in on the continuing public fascination with 1960s cult leader Charles Manson, who died in prison in 2017. Really, he wants to create life without the intervention of women,” he said. “Her story is about a man who wants to be God, but he also wants to be a mother. It is not insignificant that almost all of these scary movies about protagonists’ relationships with their mothers are directed by men.īut Lowenstein maintains that the genre’s mommy issues began with a woman, and long before film: Mary Shelley’s classic 1818 horror novel, “Frankenstein,” is often considered to be the inception of modern horror. ![]() And Ari Aster clearly understands the connection between these things.” “We think horror and we think fear and dread and haunting, but we don’t necessarily think guilt, shame, humiliation. “When I left ‘Beau Is Afraid,’ I heard a teenage woman ahead of me walking out of the theater saying to her friends, ‘That just made me want to call my mom and say I’m sorry for everything,’” Lowenstein recounted. The movie – about a man trying to get to his mom’s house – is as much a surrealist epic as it is a horror movie.Īnd while Aster’s third movie is admittedly less scary than his “Midsommar” or “Hereditary,” another film that exploits the terrors of family dynamics and mother-induced trauma, it is safe to conclude by the end that Beau’s fear of his guilt-inducing mother was warranted. In Ari Aster’s new “Beau is Afraid,” the central theme is the fear and pain that can come from the mother-child bond. “It just lent itself to this exploration of maternal fears and what it might mean if your mother was to turn on you.” “I think it’s very terrifying to imagine somebody so familiar to you in your world becoming a subversion of that, and becoming something really dangerous and evil,” said director Lee Cronin. “ Evil Dead Rise,” now available to rent on streaming services, plays with the fear-inducing extreme of a mom being possessed by a demon. Other films let the dynamic between mother and child carry the drama. Zach Cregger’s “Barbarian” (2022) also turns breastfeeding into a spectacle, not from an inviting yet depraved sexual partner as in “Infinity Pool,” but from a monstrous maternal creature who forces her victims to feast. While the genre has often been dismissed as low-brow, Adam Lowenstein, a film and media studies professor at the University of Pittsburgh who specializes in horror, said it is well-suited for grappling with these kinds of deep-seated, psychological issues. In one talked-about scene, Gabi (Mia Goth) exposes her bare chest to James (Alexander Skarsgård) in an invitation to breastfeed, revealing a complicated tension between his actual mother and his understanding of Gabi as his new one. The director, after all, has surely learned a thing or two from his filmmaker dad and giant of the genre, David Cronenberg. It’s no surprise it was replete with disturbing moments. ![]() Take, for example, Brandon Cronenberg’s “Infinity Pool,” which became one of the buzziest films to come out of this year’s Sundance Film Festival. Since the genre’s inception, horror movies have tapped into the psychological trauma and terror that can only come from a mother, and a number of recent films are embracing that time-honored tradition. ![]() LOS ANGELES (AP) - If you’re stumped for how to spend this Mother’s Day, consider relishing a good scare. ![]()
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