Besides the first part of "Suspicion and Faith: The Religious Uses of Modern Atheism," I've never read any works that delve into psychoanalytic theory, so I struggled to understand the foundational concepts underlying Sarah Arnold's analyses of maternal horror films.

Arnold mainly focused on the psychoanalytic theories of 3 thinkers and how they differ: Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, and Julia Kristeva. For Freud, the mark of difference which springs during the Oedipal stage is biological, the physical lack of a phallus. For Lacan, the mark is language, the phallus as a symbol of lack and the resulting desire which is resolved through language and the movement into the Law of the Father (maternal Semiotic to paternal Symbolic). For Kristeva, the mark of difference is not language, as the Semiotic stage has a language of its own, nor is it as discrete as Lacan implies. A child's movement into the Symbolic is a result of the mother's regulation of the child during the Semiotic stage, and the Semiotic and the Symbolic stages bleed into one another. In that sense, rather than discrete stages they're active processes.

Arnold identifies two archetypes that mothers in maternal horror fall into: the Good Mother who embodies essential motherhood, such as self-sacrifice, passivity, and full submission to the interests of the child and patriarchy, and the Bad Mother who is independent, active, and everything that is not essential motherhood. She goes on to do case studies on dozens of films, using these archetypes to identify the function of motherhood in the maternal horror and relating it to the melodrama.

The final chapter deals with pregnancy in maternal horror films and how the role of motherhood is automatically assigned to the pregnant woman. Toward the beginning of the book, Arnold explicitly states that she will not delve into issues of race or class in her readings of motherhood in the horror film, but I thought that, given this chapter's topic, there would be some discussions on queer identities and bodies in maternal horror. There were no such discussions, but I'm sure there's no dearth of books on queer horror.

I began a Letterboxd list of the films mentioned in this book as I read through it, not realizing that there was a filmography page at the end 😭 here it is, unfinished as of now: https://boxd.it/RIqr4