Editorials
DIEting with Freddy! Mother-Daughter Relationships with Food & A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child (1989)
The pursuit of perfection through children is a dangerous parenting method, one that can ultimately leave a child battling for their life. This is especially the case when it comes to food and the possible development of eating disorders. Weight for young people is a sensitive topic and should be treated as such within the family unit. While The Dream Child is one of the least watched in the franchise, it stands as a clear example of how parents manipulate their children through food control. Despite the fact that this film was released in 1989, it serves as an indicator of how much further we have to go to ensure parents today do not make these same mistakes.
Trigger warning: eating disorders, parental abuse
The Elm Street franchise has dealt with parental abuse in its myriad forms. Sexual assault, physical abuse, neglect, manipulation, and control flood the series. In several cases, Freddy uses teens’ fear of their parents to murder them. Remember Carlos from Freddy’s Dead? Greta Gibson’s narrative, however, strikes a sensitive nerve in A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child (1989). Like many young women, I grew up surrounded by diet culture in the home and at the grocery store. Prior to Third Wave feminism and the body positivity movement, we had been systematically raised with the mentality that thin is in and every other body is out. Priority was not given yet to young women’s mental and emotional health, who then brought toxic eating habits into adulthood, and sometimes, to their children. Generational trauma around food exists, and this trauma can manifest in eating disorders, self-harm, depression, and can lead to death. In The Dream Child, this is Greta’s fate, with her food demons personified in not only Freddy Krueger but her mother.
A Window Into Complicated Mother-Daughter Dynamics
Mrs. Gibson is incredibly controlling of her daughter, particularly her eating habits. Within the first ten minutes of Dream Child, Greta is scolded mid-lick of a lollipop. Like a sniper, Mrs. Gibson spots her daughter. “Greta! That’s not what a cover girl puts in her body!” The mother-daughter dynamic is further explained in Greta’s final scene.
While at dinner, surrounded by ogling strangers, Greta becomes fed up with her mother’s omnipresent gaze and comments about her body. Greta’s friend had just been killed by Freddy Krueger. Still, it is business as usual for Mrs. Gibson, who is trying to land her daughter a modeling contract. “People are always mistaking us for sisters!” she tells a guest. Greta is treated as an extension of herself. “Greta certainly has the perfect body for modeling,” a sleazy guest states. When unreceptive to a subsequent modeling offer, Mrs. Gibson tells Greta to show gratitude. “One of my friends died yesterday, mother. Do you mind if I take a few hours off to remember him?” Greta asks. “But we’re having a party dear!” Suddenly, a dream sequence commences, and Greta is about to endure one of the most gruesome deaths in the Elm Street franchise.
Greta refuses food. The table gasps, and everyone turns to her in disbelief. “Aren’t you eating?” Mrs. Gibson asks with feigning concern. “I really don’t feel up to it.” “Really, dear, you ought to try something,” Mrs. Gibson politely demands in a way only a mother could. Greta is incensed, “You’re the one who’s always slapping my hand about my weight, mother.” “That’s why we diet, dear,” explains Mrs. Gibson, “so we can eat at social events and not upset the other guests.” Mrs. Gibson uses her daughter as an extension of youth and beauty. She has tethered herself to Greta, manipulating her eating patterns to suit her image – “That’s why we diet, dear.”
Almond Moms, a Fun Trend to Some, But a Scary Reality to Others
In an article for Psychology Today (2017), author S.M. Schmitt explains that when mothers fear they cannot control their daughters’ behavior, their daughters’ eating habits show more restriction, and they exhibit greater dissatisfaction with body image. “This relationship was even stronger in mother-daughter pairs that are highly dependent on each other.” Greta and Mrs. Gibson seem to be the only ones in the household, with no other children or father. Greta is then at the mercy of her mother’s control, and perhaps much of Greta’s backstory was left on the cutting room floor. “Tell you what,” Greta fires back from across the table. “Why don’t I just eat the whole goddamn tray, go throw up, and come back for seconds, all right?” According to Eating Disorder HOPE, when mothers consistently comment on their daughter’s weight, these daughters are susceptible to extreme weight control behaviors such as self-induced vomiting.
Immediately after this exchange between Greta and her mother, I could not help but think of Karen Carpenter, particularly Todd Haynes’ Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (1987), an experimental short film depicting the rise and fall of Karen Carpenter, as a Barbie doll. Her death in 1983 after years of disordered eating brought widespread awareness of anorexia/bulimia. Greta has a room full of dolls, and she is effectively treated as one by her mother: unlike a child, a doll has no autonomy, and is whatever its owner wills it to be. Like Karen’s mother, Mrs. Gibson is severely manipulative and dominant over her daughter’s life, especially when it comes to food. I was surprised to learn that Greta, like Karen, originally suffered from bulimia. However, this was deemed too graphic for the film’s final cut. Instead of being force-fed, sliced open, and forced to eat the contents of her stomach, Greta’s porcelain doll is dissected in her place. Freddy forces its squishy insides into her mouth. “Bon appetite, Bitch. Filet-a-Barbie!” The force-feeding begins. Greta’s face becomes engorged with food as guests and Mrs. Gibson laugh. Mother chimes in between screams, “Don’t talk with your mouth full, dear.” We then see Greta, back in reality, choking. Her mother sees her convulsions across the table and looks irate. To her disbelief, Greta drops dead.
After Greta’s death, Mark, who was in love with Greta, bluntly states “Well, maybe it was her mother who killed her… with all that Polly Perfect shit.”
The pursuit of perfection through children is a dangerous parenting method, one that can ultimately leave a child battling for their life. This is especially the case when it comes to food and the possible development of eating disorders. Weight for young people is a sensitive topic and should be treated as such within the family unit. While The Dream Child is one of the least watched in the franchise, it stands as a clear example of how parents manipulate their children through food control. Despite the fact that this film was released in 1989, it serves as an indicator of how much further we have to go to ensure parents today do not make these same mistakes.
It could cost your child their life and happiness.
Editorials
What’s in a Look? The Jason Voorhees Redesign Controversy
The Jason Voorhees redesign sparked heated debate, but is the backlash overblown? Dive into Friday the 13th’s formula and fan expectations.
If you’re a longtime reader of Horror Press, you may have noticed that I really really like the Friday the 13th franchise. Can’t get enough. And yet, I simply couldn’t muster a shred of enthusiasm for piling hate on the new Jason Voorhees redesign that Horror, Inc. recently shared with an unwitting public.
Why the Jason Voorhees Redesign Controversy Feels Overblown
Hockey mask? Check. Machete? Check. Clothing? Yeah, he’s wearing it. I really didn’t see the problem, but very many people online pointed out all the places where I should. The intensity and specificity of the critiques shot me right back to 2008, reminding me distinctly of watching Project Runway with my friend’s mom while I waited for him to get home from baseball practice. What, just me?
But the horror community’s sudden transformation into fashion mavens got me thinking about other things, too: the character of the franchise as a whole, how Jason Voorhees fits into it, and why I feel like this reaction has been blown out of proportion. (A disproportionate reaction to a pop culture thing? On my Internet? Well I never.)
What Does A Jason Look Like, Anyway?
What confused me the most about this reaction was something I couldn’t quite get a bead on. What does Jason Voorhees look like? His look, both masked and unmasked (especially unmasked), changes wildly from film to film, even when he’s played by the same person (in three consecutive movies, Kane Hodder played a hulking zombie Jason, a shiny slime monster Jason, and a Jason who was mainly seen in mirrors and looked like his face was stung by a thousand bees). And then there’s the matter of him being both a zombie child and a bagheaded killer before receiving his iconic hockey mask.
However, if you synthesize the various forms of the character into the archetypical Jason Voorhees, the one that most people might visualize in their head when told to imagine him, the result doesn’t not look like this new redesign. Frankly, I even think “redesign” is too strong a word for what this is. This image shows a dude in outdoorsy clothes wearing a hockey mask. It looks enough like “Jason Voorhees” to me that my eyes just slide right off of it.
What Do We Expect From Friday the 13th, And What Do We Need?
Ultimately, many people clearly disagree with my assessment of this redesign, which led me to ponder the franchise as a whole. If there’s something to complain about with this new look, that implies that there is a “right” way and a “wrong” way to be a Friday the 13th movie.
This I can agree with. While the franchise is wide-ranging and expansive to the point that it has included Jason going to space, fighting a dream demon, and taking a cruise ship from a New Jersey lake to the New York harbor, the movies do still follow a reasonably consistent formula.
Step 1: Generate a group of people in a place either on the shores of Crystal Lake or in Crystal Lake township (they can travel elsewhere, but this is where they must start).
Step 2: Plunk Jason down near them, give him a variety of edged weapons, and watch what happens. One girl survives the onslaught, and sometimes she brings along a friend or two as adjunct survivors. Bada bing, bada boom, you have yourself a Friday the 13th movie.
If you fuck with that formula, you’ve got a problem. But beyond that, there’s really not a hell of a lot that the movies have in common. Sometimes you have a telekinetic final girl, other times you have a child psychologist. Sometimes the dead meat characters are camp counselors, but other times they’re partiers or townies or students attending space college.
Hell, even the people killing them aren’t always the same. Look at Pamela Voorhees in the original movie or Roy in A New Beginning.
So why this protectiveness around the minutiae of Jason’s look?
It’s Us, Hi, We’re The Problem, It’s Us
I don’t mean to discount everyone’s negative opinions about this Jason redesign. There are a multitude of aesthetic and personal reasons to dislike what’s going on here, and you don’t have to turn that yuck into a yum just because I said so. But I think we’ve had online fandoms around long enough to see how poisonous they can be to the creative process.
For instance, was The Rise of Skywalker a better movie because it went down the laundry list of fan complaints about The Last Jedi and basically had characters stare into the camera and announce the ways they were being fixed?
Look, I’m not immune to having preconceived disdain for certain projects. If I’m waiting for a new installment in a franchise and all that I’m hearing coming out of producers’ mouths is “prequel” and “television show,” those are fighting words.
However, the constant online pushback to projects that are in early development might be one reason it has taken us so long to actually get more Friday the 13th (I’m talking in addition to the long delays amid the lawsuit, of course). It’s been more than a decade and a half without a new Jason vehicle, and that time keeps on stretching longer and longer.
What Fans Really Want From a New Jason Voorhees Movie
Instead of just letting the creative tap flow and having a filmmaker put out the thing they want to make, then having somebody else take the wheel and do that same thing for the next installment, it seems like producers are terrified of making the wrong move and angering the fans, which has prevented them from actually pulling the trigger on much of anything.
Look, we survived A New Beginning. And Jason Takes Manhattan. Even Jason Goes to Hell. A controversial misstep can’t kill the immortal beast that is Friday the 13th. I say let’s just let them make one. Having something tangible to complain about is better than having nothing at all.
Editorials
Monstrous Mothers: Unveiling the Horror in ‘Mommie Dearest’ and ‘Umma’
The horror umbrella is massive and encompasses many subgenres including thrillers, sci-fi, and even true crime. I like to quip that movies like Mommie Dearest and Priscilla belong to the latter category. I even point out they have final girls surviving their monsters, but like most jokes, there is a lot of hard truth behind that. To be clear, Mommie Dearest is highly contested even by Christina Crawford, who wrote the book about the abuse suffered at the hands of her alcoholic guardian. However, the fact remains that there is an abusive mother terrorizing children at the heart of the horror. This is a tale as old as time in the genre, and we see these themes of motherhood, mental illness, and generational trauma often. So, why do we typically forget this movie when discussing titles like Psycho (1960), Run, Hereditary, etc.?
I challenged myself to fill a gap in my cinema history this month and watched Mommie Dearest. I was very familiar with the movie due to how many drag queens reference it and because of Joan Crawford’s villainous reputation. However, I had never seen it in its entirety before, which is weird because I write about my own maternal baggage often. Without ever seeing the film, I knew this movie, categorized as a drama, belonged under my favorite genre label. Some sources even try to meet in the middle and classify it as a psychological drama, which is a phrase that does a lot of heavy lifting to remove itself from what it actually is. After all, what else should we call a film about being abused by the person who should love us most other than horror?
Does Mommie Dearest Belong in the Horror Genre?
The horror umbrella is massive and encompasses many subgenres including thrillers, sci-fi, and even true crime. I like to quip that movies like Mommie Dearest and Priscilla belong to the latter category. I even point out they have final girls surviving their monsters, but like most jokes, there is a lot of hard truth behind that. To be clear, Mommie Dearest is highly contested even by Christina Crawford, who wrote the book about the abuse suffered at the hands of her alcoholic guardian. However, the fact remains that there is an abusive mother terrorizing children at the heart of the horror. This is a tale as old as time in the genre, and we see these themes of motherhood, mental illness, and generational trauma often. So, why do we typically forget this movie when discussing titles like Psycho (1960), Run, Hereditary, etc.?
Mommie Dearest recounts a version of Christina Crawford’s upbringing by Hollywood royalty Joan Crawford. It depicts her as an unstable, jealous, manipulative woman who only holds space for her beliefs. As with most abusive parents, she takes out her frustrations and feelings of inadequacy on those around her. Specifically, those who cannot fight back due to the power dynamics at play. This version of Joan is a vicious bully, which feels familiar for many people who grew up with an abusive parent. How many of us never knew what would set our parental monster off, so just learned to walk on eggshells? How many of us grew up believing we were the problem for way longer than we should have? How many of us normalized the abuse for so long that it carried over into adulthood, letting us believe being mistreated is just part of living?
Watch the trailer for Mommie Dearest
The Lasting Impact of Abusive Parents in Horror Movies
While my mother wasn’t the active bully in our home, part of my struggle with her is her complicitness in the hell she helped create for all of us. Which is why, while I don’t think Mommie Dearest is a great film, I believe it’s a decent horror flick. It made me want to revisit a better movie, Umma, that also dealt with motherhood, mental illness, and trauma. Iris K. Shim’s 2022 PG-13 horror sees Sandra Oh playing a single mother who has not healed. After growing up with her own mother, who was especially cruel to her, she has built her world around that trauma and forced her daughter to live within its walls with her. As someone who was severely homeschooled by a woman who still really needs to find a therapist, Umma hits me in my feelings every time.
Watch the trailer for Umma below
Maternal Monsters: A Common Thread in Psycho, Hereditary, and More
Before the film starts, Oh’s character, Amanda, has turned her back on her family and cultural heritage. She has built a life that she’s not really living as she hides in her home, afraid of electricity due to the abuse she suffered at the hands of her mom. So, when her uncle shows up with her mother’s ashes, she is triggered and haunted. All of the issues she hasn’t dealt with rush to the surface, manifesting in ways that begin turning her into her deceased mom. Amanda does eventually force herself to confront her past to avoid becoming her mother and hurting her daughter. So, while Umma is different from Mommie Dearest, it’s not hard to see they share some of the same DNA. Scary moms make the genre go round which is why movies like M.O.M. Mothers of Monsters, Serial Mom, Mother, May I?, and so many others will always pull an audience by naming the monster in the title.
I doubt I am the first person on Norma Bates’ internet to clock that some of horror’s most notorious villains are parents, specifically moms. I’m also sure I cannot be the first person to argue Mommie Dearest is a horror movie on many levels. After all, a large part of the rabid fanbase seems to be comprised of genre kids who grew up wondering why the film felt familiar. However, I hope I am the first to encourage you to watch these two movies if your momma trauma will allow you to hold space for a couple more monstrous mothers this month. Both have much to say about how we cope with the fallout of being harmed by the people who should keep us safe.
[REVIEW] ‘Fear Street: Prom Queen’ It’s Not Great…
[Review] ‘Bring Her Back’ A Gut-Wrenching Horror Masterpiece
[INTERVIEW] Talking Tremors with Levi Dylan Burzlaff-Luett
How Lucha Libre Birthed Mexico’s Wildest Horror Films
Why Max’s ‘Velma’ Failed: A Lesson for Hollywood’s IP Revivals
What’s in a Look? The Jason Voorhees Redesign Controversy
[REVIEW] ‘Shocker’ (1989) Is Finger-Lickin’ Good
[REVIEW] ‘Final Destination: Bloodlines’ Death Makes a Return
Menstruation Meets Mayhem: 5 Horror Films That Bleed Terror
A Note From the EIC of Horror Press
‘The People Under the Stairs’ Review: A Brilliantly Bizarre Undercover Horror Classic
Glen and Glenda: Don Mancini’s Reverence for Queerness in ‘Seed of Chucky’ (2004)
Slappy Was the Blueprint: How the Dummy from Goosebumps Became A Horror Icon
‘Truth or Dare’: Who Did it Best?
HORROR 101: Five Nights at Freddy’s and The Story of William Afton Explained
[REVIEW] ‘Cherry Falls’ (1999) Brittany Murphy Shines in This Cult Classic Slasher
Mia from ‘Evil Dead’ – A New Kind of Final Girl
This Is What Makes Sue Ann from ‘Ma’ a Terrifying Yet Loveable Horror Villain
Is ‘Butcher, Baker, Nightmare Maker’ Too Problematic for 2022?
