Horror movies work best when they touch on a primal fear that the audience can relate to, and they are even more frightening when the main character is a mother. Everyone can relate to a mother’s fear of losing their child. In the classics of horror cinema, mothers have lost their children to everything from demonic possession, like Chris MacNeil in The Exorcist, to warped space-time, like Ellen Ripley in Aliens. It is even scarier when the threat is to turn the child against their own mother.

There are so many horror movies that deal with the psychology of motherhood, and the horrors are a checklist of terrifying moments. In some cases, the themes look at post-partum depression, and in other cases, it is more about a mother realizing their child is pure evil. In most cases, a mother wants to protect her child at all costs, and in other cases, a mother considers their child an enemy, with the mother conflicted over whether she should save her offspring or let nature take its course.

10 Bird Box (2018)

A Mother Forced To Protect Her Two Kids From Unseen Monsters

Netflix scored one of its biggest hits with Bird Box. Set in a post-apocalyptic world populated by entities that cause people to take their own lives if they look at them, Bird Box stars a blindfolded Sandra Bullock trying to get two young children down a river in a rowboat. Bullock is Malorie, a woman who fights to help keep two kids (both unnamed) alive during this apocalyptic event. However, one important thing to note about Malorie is that she is not a nurturing, caring mother, and her actions are almost methodical.

This is a unique situation for a mother in a horror movie. She isn't someone who would die to protect their child, and instead, she is someone who feels it is her duty to keep these two children safe, even if she refuses to even communicate with them using their names. The movie is a horror tale about monsters - both human and alien - and their attempts to end humanity. However, it is also about a mother, blindfolded, struggling to figure out how to protect her kids, a theme that many mothers feel in real life every day.

9 Serial Mom (1994)

A Serial Killer Mother

John Waters is renowned for his transgressive, cult films, but in the mid-1990s, he took a satirical stab at a Hitchcockian thriller with the suburban murders of Serial Mom. Kathleen Turner stars as Beverly Sutphin, an unassuming middle-class housewife who moonlights as a psychotic serial killer. Beverly kills anybody who wrongs her family or even says a disparaging word about them. She’s evil but hard to root against because of Turner’s hilarious performance, and her murderous motivations are somewhat understandable.

The movie offers a look at extreme motherhood, the expectations put upon a woman to her family at all costs, and the mental break that can have on a person's psyche. Every time Beverly kills someone, the viewer almost feels they deserve it, even if it was just for a slight. Beverly was raised to believe she should protect her family at all costs, which is what she does. In the end, when she represents herself during her murder trial, she proves she did it all for love.

8 The Babadook (2014)

An Allegory For Post-Partum Depression

Jennifer Kent instantly made a name for herself with her acclaimed debut feature, The Babadook. A staple of “elevated horror,” The Babadook revolves around a single mother who realizes that the monster her son is afraid of is all too real. Like all the best horror filmmakers, Kent doesn’t rely on cheap jump scares to get a reaction from her audience. Instead, throughout The Babadook, she creates a creepy atmosphere.

She feels trapped now, with her son holding on too tightly.

What makes The Babadook so frightening is what isn't shown on the screen. Throughout most of the movie, Amelia seems to be trying to protect her son from a monster haunting him in their home. Amelia is a widowed single mother whose husband died before her son was born. She feels trapped now, with her son holding on too tightly. It is a sign of post-partum depression, and when the monster hurting her son was Amelia herself, she had to face it head-on and let it know it wouldn't control her anymore.

7 Us (2019)

A Woman Protects Her Family From Their Doppelgängers

Jordan Peele’s sophomore directorial effort, Us, starts as a home-invasion movie and becomes a unique tale of doppelgängers and the sense of belonging. The Tethered, an underground cult of neglected American clones dressed in red onesies, rises up to reclaim the surface world from their counterparts. Lupita Nyong’o gives a stunning dual performance as Adelaide, a mother of two determined to keep her family safe through the apocalypse, and her Tethered alter ego, “Red.”

Bringing this to the horror genre, Jordan Peele told the story of motherhood taken to the extreme.

Us is a story about the uncertainty of African American motherhood and familial intimacy. Its main villain is a Black mother kept caged up and forced to live in captivity, while the "hero" is the Black mother who lived a safe, happy life despite stealing it early in her childhood. The film is comparable to Toni Morrison's seminal Beloved, a novel about an enslaved Black mother who had to make drastic choices to save her family. Bringing this to the horror genre, Jordan Peele told the story of motherhood taken to the extreme.

6 The Exorcist (1973)

A Mother Tries To Help Her Demonically Possessed Daughter

Chris MacNeil has a tough enough time balancing her acting career with being a single mother to her 12-year-old daughter, Regan, before Regan is possessed by the demon Pazuzu in William Friedkin’s horror masterpiece The Exorcist. The movie is as much about a mother’s anxiety as it is about demonic possession. Ellen Burstyn received a much-deserved Oscar nod for her performance as a concerned mother who must hire a pair of exorcists to save her daughter from the Devil’s wrath.

Burstyn's Oscar nomination shows how this story is as much about Regan's mother as it is about the possessed girl and the priests, although she never got the same respect as the others when looking back on this iconic horror movie. The Exorcist went down in history as the first horror movie ever to receive an Academy Award nomination for Best Picture, and the Library of Congress added it to the National Film Registry in 2010.

5 A Quiet Place (2018)

A Pregnant Mother Fights To Save Her Children

Real-life parents John Krasinski and Emily Blunt brought the foibles of parenthood to the screen in a genre context with the thrilling tale of A Quiet Place. Parenting is tough under the easiest circumstances, but it’s challenging in a post-apocalyptic wasteland full of bloodthirsty aliens who hunt with their hearing. In A Quiet Place, breaking the silence means courting death. Blunt’s character, Evelyn Abbott, is put in the unfortunate position of giving birth while a noise-sensitive alien prowls around the house.

She then has to protect her new baby and surviving daughter by keeping the newborn baby quiet from the alien threat.

However, there is another aspect of motherhood in A Quiet Place. Evelyn loses her son early in the film, thanks to his playing with a loud toy, and then her daughter has to help protect them using sign language. With that said, Evelyn is also pregnant and delivers her baby without making a sound. She then has to protect her new baby and surviving daughter by keeping the newborn baby quiet from the alien threat.

4 Mother! (2017)

A Parable Of The Challenges Of Motherhood

Darren Aronofsky distilled the story of the Bible into his polarizing psychological horror opus mother!, anchored by a phenomenal performance by Jennifer Lawrence. Lawrence plays a pregnant woman whose husband, “Him,” played by Javier Bardem, invites his cult followers into their remote country home to disrupt their tranquil existence.

The movie’s overt religious themes and graphic violence were met with controversy. But deep down, mother! is a story about a mom trying to protect her baby. In the end, the film is about a woman who built her family and then watched as it all crumbled around her. Rather than let the people who invaded her home ruin everything for her, she decides she will burn it all to the ground. When she wakes up without the baby in her arms at the end, that is the true horror of her existence.

3 Aliens (1986)

Ripley Protects Her Surrogate Daughter

James Cameron’s Aliens is a wildly satisfying follow-up to its predecessor. It’s just as tightly crafted, tautly terrifying, and full of thought-provoking themes. The film takes the horror story from the first Alien, a haunted house story in space, and turns it into an all-out sci-fi action blockbuster with Marines helping Ripley dispatch Xenomorphs. However, there are a lot of themes in this second movie that have to do with motherhood, specifically that of Ripley herself.

She becomes a surrogate maternal figure to Newt, the orphaned sole survivor of a xenomorph-ravaged human colony, and Aliens becomes a mother-daughter story.

It also has a surplus of spectacular action set-pieces and an emotionally engaging story that draws on Ellen Ripley’s maternal instincts. Ripley learns that her own daughter has grown up and died of old age while she was in cryosleep between movies. She becomes a surrogate maternal figure to Newt, the orphaned sole survivor of a xenomorph-ravaged human colony, and Aliens becomes a mother-daughter story. Even the xenomorph queen is a mother trying to protect her young.

2 Hereditary (2018)

A Mother Suffers A Traumatic Loss

Toni Collette was egregiously snubbed by the Academy for her breathtaking turn as Annie Graham in Hereditary. Shortly after losing her own mother, Annie has to face every parent’s worst nightmare – outliving their child – when her young daughter Charlie is decapitated in a horrendous car accident. Annie feels intense grief, rage, and resentment toward the son responsible for Charlie’s death. Not only is Hereditary a chilling tale of pagan cultists, but it’s also a harrowing family tragedy.

The movie is as much a family drama as it is a horror movie, with Peter destroyed after realizing he was the cause of his sister's death and Annie full of rage, lashing out at anyone and everyone around her. When Annie tells her son she never wanted to be his mother, it is the depth of horror for both characters, and there is no turning back. The end was a tragedy, but considering the chasm that grew between Annie and her only surviving child, it was one that seemed foretold.

1 Rosemary’s Baby (1968)

The Mother Of The Antichrist

Based on the novel of the same name by Ira Levin, Rosemary’s Baby is the definitive cinematic portrait of paranoia. Pregnant Rosemary becomes convinced that her husband has been indoctrinated by a Satanic cult conspiring against her unborn baby. The genius of the film is that it doesn’t confirm Rosemary’s fears to be true until the chilling final scene. Before then, it could feasibly all be in Rosemary’s head, like the people around her keep insisting.

So many movies about motherhood owe their existence to what Rosemary's Baby did first. In Hereditary, it shows a mother who hates her child, much like Rosemary felt when she stood over her baby with a knife. Both mother! and Rosemary's Baby present women pregnant with children and the fear of what will happen after their child is born. Rosemary had her autonomy stripped from her, and like in The Exorcist, it ends with a mother wanting to protect her child, even if there is an inherent evil possessing it.