Moms. Gotta love em. Want to kill em. Be it mild annoyance or oedipal rage, overbearing parent or sinister kid, the contentious, violent and downright warped relationship between mother and child has been a staple of scary cinema for years. So, celebrate Mothers Day with Shock in supremely poor taste, as we look at the best macabre matricides in horror.
Perhaps needless to say, but this includes both spoilers and NSFW imagery.
Mothers Day Matricide
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Mothers Day Matricide #1
Psycho (1960; Dir. Alfred Hitchcock)
Perhaps the most iconic case of cinematic matricide, all-timer identity crisis killer Norman Bates murders his mother and her lover in a jealous rage, and proceeds to assumer her identity in shamed fits. It’s an act and scenario that would proceed to echo throughout horror for years, haunting the genre much like Norma’s skeleton just sits in the basement.
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Mothers Day Matricide #2
Night of the Living Dead (1968; Dir. George A. Romero)
Arguably the most lasting, haunting image in George A. Romero’s revolutionary zombie classic is young Karen, reanimated and midst the double murder of her parents, Harry and Helen. With Harry gone, Karen raises the trowel above her mother, her black-and-white ghoul visage and the anticipation of her brutal act seared into our brains.
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Mothers Day Matricide #3
Carrie (1976; Dir. Brian De Palma)
A bloody, brutal ordeal, Carrie’s eventual unleashing of psychic rage on her mother Margaret ends in a fitting pose for the religious fanatic.
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Mothers Day Matricide #4
The Omen (1976; Dir. Richard Donner)
Call it attempted matricide if you must, but Damien’s hard charging tricycling is no less hardcore. That it took Mrs. Baylock to truly finish the job takes away none of the most infamous killer kid’s murderous intent. That he does it with a plaything (a tricycle being so specifically a child’s object) is perhaps even more frightening.
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Mothers Day Matricide #5
Who Can Kill a Child? (1976; Dir. Narcisco Ibáñez Serrador)
Perhaps the greatest killer kid film of all time reaches a truly unsettling apex when the vacationing Evelyn is murdered by her unborn child from within.
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Mothers Day Matricide #6
Burial Ground: The Nights of Terror (1981; Dir. Andrea Bianchi)
One of zombie and cult cinema’s strangest presences, the small Peter Bark, gets to take his weird energy to the top in Andrea Bianchi’s Burial Ground. Already filled with weird incestuous desire, Bark’s later zombified Michael perverts and warps the act of an infant further, biting through his mother Evelyn’s nipple in one of the gnarliest instances of psychosexual undead carnage.
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Mothers Day Matricide #7
Night Warning (aka Butcher Baker Nightmare Maker) (1982; Dir. William Asher)
Though something of a cheat, as Susan Tyrell is truly an aunt to high school aged Billy Lynch (Jimmy McNichol), the repressed Aunt Cheryl is very much a mother to the orphaned boy and her increasingly overbearing, murderously protective, incestuous presence is no less ghastly. A performance for the ages, Tyrell reaches operatic end when Billy penetrates Cheryl with the fireplace poker.
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Mothers Day Matricide #8
Pieces (1982; Dir. Juan Piquer Símon)
Caught in the act. No, this isn’t another case of a young child forever damaged by witnessing his mother be a sexually independent adult. Instead, little Timmy is chastised for his handling of a nudie jigsaw puzzle. For interrupting playtime, mother gets an axe to the face.
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Mothers Day Matricide #9
Flowers in the Attic (1987, Dir. Jeffrey Bloom)
Eat the cookie!
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Mothers Day Matricide #10
Dead Alive (aka Braindead) (1992, Dir. Peter Jackson)
Another instance of murder from the womb, but far, far more graphic. Peter Jackson’s ultimate blood opera, the gory all-timer Dead Alive (aka Braindead) finds a swallowed Lionel Cosgrove, cut his way out his overgrown undead mother/rat monkey hybrid. Rebirthed.
