A woman should be scared: maternal ambivalence in Under the Shadow

ABSTRACT

Mothers in horror films have been theorized as monsters through concepts such as the monstrous-feminine (Creed, 1993) and the monstrous-maternal. In this paper, I examine how this figuration of the maternal is taken up in the British-Iranian horror film Under the Shadow (dir. Babak Anvari, 2016). The film hybridizes the ‘maternal horror film’ with the genre of the Iran-Iraq war film, which also bears a complex relation to the figure of the mother. Drawing on the concept of maternal ambivalence, I argue that Under the Shadow posits in the mother protagonist and the feminine jinn (spirit) that haunts her a tension that unsettles the longstanding dichotomy between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ mothers in horror films. The film’s ambivalent position on mothers is expressive of a general cultural ambivalence toward mothers in post-revolutionary Iranian cultural politics.

KE YWORDS:

• Maternal horror
• maternal ambivalence
• Iran-Iraq war
• Under the Shadow
• diasporic filmmaking

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. For example, despite the capaciousness of psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott’s concept of the ‘ordinary, devoted mother’, maternal ambivalence nevertheless functioned to serve the infant’s development. See Winnicott (1971). ‘The use of an object and relating through identifications’. Playing and Reality. London: Routledge.

2. Another exception is Rakhshan Bani-Etemad and Mohsen Abdolvahab’s Gilaneh (2004), which is discussed in Zahra Khosroshahi’s essay in this special issue.

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Notes on contributors

Sara Saljoughi

Sara Saljoughi is Assistant Professor of English and Cinema Studies at the University of Toronto. Her essays have been published in Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies, Feminist Media Histories, Iranian Studies, Film Criticism, Film International, and Iran Namag. She is the co-editor of 1968 and Global Cinema (Wayne State University Press, 2018). She recently completed a monograph on cinema in Iran during the 1960s and 1970s.