Grief, motherhood and the horror of living on.
The horrors of motherhood are many, and a ton of brilliant (and terrible) films/books/etc have been sharpening this trope, especially in the last ten years. In this post, I’m comparing two: The Babadook (2014) and The Woman in the Yard (2025). I’m looking at how both films use grief to rattle the cage of idealized mother myths and place children in roles meant to unearth the pain that mothers suppress. Also: MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD!!!!! 
Meet our Momsters: Amelia and Ramona
In The Babadook, grief is a big, creepy goth in a top hat, unkillable and lurking in the basement. Director Jennifer Kent’s iconic monster is a metaphor for the emotional residue of loss, embodied in a child’s pop-up book and eventually in Amelia’s murderous rage. The film’s brilliance lies in its refusal to “cure” grief: Amelia simply learns to live with it.
The Woman in the Yard, by contrast, introduces the Woman as suicidal ideation incarnate: seductive and persistent. This shrouded figure behaves as an intrusive thought made flesh, saying that “today’s the day” with an excited relish, directed at Ramona to entice her to give up on life. Unlike Amelia’s more obvious shift to resilience, The Woman in the Yard’s ending leaves the audience unsure if Ramona has died, overcome her suicidal urges, or succumbed to madness in order to make living bearable.
Isolated. Exhausted. Trapped. Single mothers with no support shown as ticking time bombs of abuse and neglect for the kids they love.
For me, the most terrifying thread you can pull at in a horror story is one that unravels a human to the point in which they are a danger to those they love. Couple that with the vulnerability of children, especially to their parents and caregivers, and you’ve got a film that will haunt me for days.
Both Amelia and Ramona are widows. They are portrayed as emotionally raw and socially alienated mothers struggling against societal ideals of who they should be, of how strong they are expected to be. Amelia tries to hold it together in front of other adults, but snaps, swears, and nearly strangles her son when no one else is around. Ramona opens the film already emotionally detached, interspersed with random bursts of performative mother tasks and awkward attempts to comfort her kids. It’s heartbreaking to see how they both continue to try, despite the terror they feel at their own doomed situations. It’s like watching someone struggle to stand after their legs have been blown apart by a landmine.
Both films tap into that pressure and then fracture it.
Children are not just casualties of this fight. They are the soldiers.
In both films, the children function as truth-tellers, agitators, and unsung heroes to their mother’s plight. Samuel in The Babadook knows the monster is real long before his mother does. He is sounding the alarm and laying traps, which infuriates Amelia because he won’t allow her to ignore it.
Taylor and Annie in The Woman in the Yard perceive the threat of the Woman with a clarity Ramona cannot allow herself. With all the developmentally appropriate venom of a teenager, Taylor challenges every empty attempt that Ramona makes to placate her children. He will not allow her to gaslight him. He knows things are not right and makes her face his anger and refusal to back down. Annie’s sweetness and persistent love of her mother will not let Ramona rest, either. It tethers Ramona to her own love of her children, her own instinct to protect them, which is the one thread keeping her from checking out of life.
These portrayals continue a genre tradition of children who see what adults deny, functioning as audience stand-ins and emotional barometers. They both love and fear their mother. They see the monster inside of her but are determined to save her from it, despite the danger she poses. They are infuriating and selfish to their mother, and yet somehow still deeply compassionate and brave for her. And I think it hits us so hard because we’ve all walked that line as children, and if you are also a parent: both.
Endurance or erasure? The liminal space between these two endings offers a lot to be explored in the motherhood horror genre.
While both The Babadook and The Woman in the Yard begin from the same uncanny premise—widowed mothers crushed by grief after their husbands’ fatal car accidents—these films diverge in some interesting ways.
The Babadook is gray, claustrophobic, and slow-burning. It builds empathy for Amelia by immersing us in her exhaustion and suppressed rage until the monster finally surfaces. The horror is metaphorical but also visceral, and the resolution insists on survival: grief doesn’t go away, and the key part of living with it is to acknowledge that fact.
The Woman in the Yard is warm and bright at first, with violence and supernatural suggestion arriving quickly. Context is given with voiceover instead of world-building. Ramona is harder to read, her depression more told than shown, and her antagonist more abstract: suicidal ideation embodied in a taunting figure who becomes more beautiful and strong as Ramona becomes more weak and exhausted. Its ending, intentionally ambiguous, frustrates and unsettles. Is this survival or surrender?
These differences matter for the evolution of motherhood horror. Some critics dismiss The Woman in the Yard as a Babadook knockoff, pointing to the near-identical setup. I’ve heard reviewers call the “grieving single mother” a tired trope. But the fact that two films with such a similar premise manage to diverge so radically in mood and resolution proves the opposite: this narrative is far from depleted, and shows how much more there is to dig up here.
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