Exploring Horror’s Dads, Good and Bad, on Father’s Day
Horror is full of bad moms. Matriarchs of such menace and preternatural evil, they’re as much a trope as terrifying tykes or slamming closet doors. Mothers are antagonistic. The longstanding history of horror, no different than the Greek tragedies or Freudian dives into the tenebrous subconscious, centers mothers as the conceptual origin, both literally and figuratively, for the genre’s storied monsters.
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Jason Voorhees is only Jason Voorhees on account of his mother, Pamela. In the second entry, his queer-coded demise occurs in a gravity well of maternal attachment and toxic motherhood. Norman Bates sliced Janet Leigh apart, both on account of his mother and as his mother. Even zeitgeist-redefining entries hinge their conflict on bad moms doing bad things. Sidney Prescott’s mother induced the events of the entire Scream series, and Billy Loomis’s mom herself was a willing combatant as the central antagonist of Scream 2. Wes Craven’s seminal, splattery, sensation A Nightmare on Elm Street inexplicably co-stars Ronee Blakley as the alcoholic, distant, periodically abusive mother to final girl, Nancy Thompson. In the ending before the fake-out, Nancy’s mother dissolves alongside series antagonist Freddy Krueger. She is no less a monster than he is.
Joan Crawford as Lucy Harbin in Strait-Jacket slices and dices her way to freedom. Samantha Eggar’s Nola Carveth rage is so unrestrained, she psychically conceives a brood of homicidal, gremlin children. Barbara Hershey’s Black Swan mother, Erica Sayers, drives her prodigal daughter over the edge, an inverted fairy tale origin of mental illness and murder. Mothers, horror avers, rarely, if ever, know best.
There are certainly good mothers in the genre, but an evil, wicked, diabolical matriarch is a surefire way to guarantee audience resonance and deep-seated pathos, however cheap and exploitative. Curiously, though, little, if any, attention is paid in the opposite direction. Horror movie fathers are good. Horror movie fathers are wise. Americana virtues are condensed to human form. They’re conservative, strong, and willing to protect their families no matter the cost. Winston Duke in Us takes a bat to the doppelganger danger outside. John Saxon’s Lt. Thompson dies in a dreamscape trying to protect his daughter in A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors. Emily Blunt kicks serious monster ass in A Quiet Place, but it’s John Krasinski’s sacrifice that looms over the final act of the first and the entirety of the sequel.
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Yet for a large swath of the horror watching audience, or at least a pointedly underrepresented one, the opposite remains true. Having grown up in what amounts to a single-mother household, horror is too often reticent to reflect a worldview I know to be true. Without an active father figure in my own life– one willing to endure audial space creatures or bury me out back in a Pet Sematary (maybe not that one, but the sentiment remains), there were a great many things that for a long, long time I feared– worse than the most terrifying of horror movies– I had missed out on.
I thought for the longest time that things might be different, even if only a little, had there been a reliable, consistent, or simply present father around. In pockets and ephemeral moments, my mom, stretching her resources across five kids, had to teach us about strength and resilience, and family, commitment, and sacrifice. The kind of profound, wholly undefinable sacrifice innate to parenthood.
I truly thought that things might be different. Not in some conservative, hegemonic way that fathers are uniquely positioned to raise, parent, and guide their sons, but in the sense that, perhaps, I might have felt safer and more adept at navigating the spaces that scared me most. Middle school locker rooms, freshmen year cross country practice, or even experiences with male teacher, administrators, and peers. They might have gone a little differently had he been there.
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At the very least, there would have been some familiarity with non-queer spaces, some familiarity with masculine, heterosexual energy where I didn’t quite feel so alone. Some familiarity with a sense of security and fatherhood that didn’t render my bullies and public spaces so deeply, distressingly monstrous. So truly, honestly scary. There might have been someone in my corner. I might not have looked so much like prey.
The genre reminded me recurrently that there was something broken within me. Mothers and their sons were monstrous. Masculine influence inoculated the young from becoming boogeymen and beasts. Without it, young men killed their friends and wore their mothers’ dresses. Young men were Dressed to Kill.
It’s a noxious contention the genre has still not sufficiently grappled with, though it is getting better. Still, the horror of old so sincerely valued the nuclear family– mom, dad, fractional tykes– that deviations therein had disastrous, violent consequences. It gripped me like Krueger’s claws. It wrapped itself around me and choked me out like a Xenomorph baby.
I thought there was something fundamentally wrong with me, and it was easy to blame the absence than any active presence in my life. In retrospect, though, there was nothing to blame, because there was nothing wrong with me. Fathers are good. Fathers are bad. Some are influential, some considerably less so. It’s dizzying and chaotic and difficult to conceptualize.
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I’m not contending that horror should treat fathers worse. It would be unfair and ugly for the genre to do so. Additionally, it’s still too raw a wound for me to see generally refracted in my favorite genre. Horror probes, but I’m not always able, willing, or eager to see it probe some of my deepest insecurities. If nothing else, though, among all the bad mothers and good fathers, horror has taught me something. It, along with my mom, taught me those compact, worthwhile values. The horror genre is diverse. It is inequitable, sometimes unfathomably rewarding, sometimes heartbreakingly difficult. Something of a father unto itself, horror has been there for me in moments I needed it most. I’m not quite sure what that is, but it’s something. It’s worth criticizing. It’s worth interrogating. And, at times, it’s worth celebrating.
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