This trio of films about mothers and monsters offers a variety of familiar subgenres, including evil children, backwoods slashing, and possession. But do they also deliver on scares?
THE OTHER (2025)
The director of the gay slasher classic Hellbent takes us on a white hetero couple’s crazy ride with their newly adopted Black daughter. It’s so crazy that despite being intriguing and having some compelling horror elements, it’s absolute chaos and completely loses focus. There’s just way too much going on here.
The couple adopts the girl, who is mute. Things immediately start getting weird around the house—everything in the fridge goes bad, pink stuff shows up in the pool, the kitchen knives end up in the little girl’s bed.
There’s also a psychotic neighbor girl with Down syndrome who befriends the adopted girl and encourages her to indulge in macabre behavior, like mutilating dolls. The neighbor girl’s mother is also pretty weird and played by horror queen Shawnee Smith.
There’s a disturbing backstory, the concept of “other” is explored in various ways, bugs play a prominent role in the nasty moments, the wife seems to become possessed and turns on her new daughter, and the husband is determined to protect the seemingly evil daughter. Literally everyone appears to be psycho, so it’s hard to figure out what is going on, which is part of what makes this so intriguing and watchable.
The horror really delivers in the final act as things get clearer and move into Stephen King’s The Dark Half territory.
WOMB (2025)
Violent, macabre, dark, and suspenseful, this backwoods horror flick has a killer opener, with perfect camera angles and use of sound (or lack of it) to create a super tense chase. A camouflaged killer carrying a baby carrier and a knife chases a very pregnant woman through the woods. Eek!
Next, we meet a young woman being driven to a cabin in the woods by her hot fiancé so she can spend some time alone with her future sister-in-law.
Here’s where things get infuriating fast. A cop stops them for a chat, and the main girl says, “Shouldn’t you be out looking for that fetus snatcher?”
WHAT? You know there’s a fetus snatcher on the loose and you’re going to go stay in a cabin in the woods? WTF? This is an immediate suspension of disbelief cock blocker. Oh, but it gets better. She arrives at the cabin, and there’s a padlocked door inside with a cryptic message on it, and she just accepts that the owner has said it’s off limits. Also, the windows are boarded up, yet that’s explained away, too. Am I supposed to feel sorry for her pregnant ass?
I have to admit, the first appearance of the fetus snatcher is perfectly smooth and fresh and thrusts us right into the action, but then the pregnant girl cries out to the killer, “What do you want?!?!”
No. Seriously. You don’t know what he wants?
The film really is intense and thrilling as more people find their way to the cabin for various reasons, the most important one being to get killed off, but even though there are some red herring along the way, I knew where this was all heading right from the start, and I imagine most horror veterans will as well.
Despite the flaws of the film, the final few moments get into Jeepers Creepers territory, and the ending is nasty, mean, grisly, fatalistic, and comes complete with a graphic visual baby delivery moment. Nope. Birth is not beautiful, real or fake.
THE BEAST INSIDE (2024)
I love scream queen Sadie Katz, and while she usually does great horror comedy roles, she is notably good in this more dramatic role. I was really liking the fresh take on the possession theme at first, but the movie ends up going nowhere and concludes with a very typical and bland exorcism scene.
A divorced mother, all Sadie wants to do is see her son, but she is fighting her demons, literally. She believes her mom died of possession and that her family passes possession on and now it’s her turn. While it’s not the focus of the film, the Christmas season is on full display, so this one goes on the holiday horror page.
Sadie definitely experiences signs of possession, and she goes to her family’s priest for help, but he tells her the church doesn’t believe in possession anymore and passes on helping her…for now.
Therefore, Sadie decides to self-exorcise. Cool change in plot, right? Unfortunately, it just drags on and goes nowhere. The most that happens is that she has some demonic encounters in the hotel room in which she’s staying, and her ex-husband’s girlfriend seems to be lightly terrorized by the demon.
And in the end? The priest comes back to help exorcise her, making for a routine possession bedroom scene with a lot less excitement than the best of them.
