Equal parts hilarious and disturbing, writer and director Brian Taylor’s Mom And Dad (2017) is a classic example of horror as social critique. Like Jennifer’s Body (2009) or Dawn Of The Dead (1978), Mom And Dad employs a fantastic premise to exaggerate a specific aspect of our society in order to simultaneously satirize and warn against said aspect. Mom And Dad is the spiritual descendent of Parents (1989) wherein the greatest horror of all is the shattered trust between a parent and their offspring.
Taylor takes his time to fully reveal the extent of the carnage, privileging character development first and foremost. The audience is asked to identify with Mom (Selma Blair) and Dad (Nicolas Cage) as a middle aged couple who have had to compromise their own ambitions to support their family and have lost their sense of identity in their roles as parents. These are relatable scenes of tenderness and vulnerability whose tragedy is that they can only culminate in frustration and disappointment. The homicidal attacks on children by their parents, as inexplicable as they are, seem motivated by these circumstances which works to keep Blair and Cage’s characters from being wholly vilified or caricatured.
However, the audience proxy is located in the children Joshua (Zackary Arthur), Carly (Anne Winters) and Carly’s boyfriend Damon (Robert Cunningham). The scares in Mom And Dad are not located in the perspective of the parents but rather in the children. Kids are traditionally the most vulnerable members of society so the audience’s empathy is immediately with this set of characters. The horror comes from the children’s experience of total betrayal by their parents whose love and care they are entirely dependent upon to survive. This economy of terror is then essentially an inverse of Who Can Kill A Child? (1976).
But Mom And Dad is really funny and that’s all down to Brian Taylor’s Sam Raimi inspired direction and the performances of Nicolas Cage and Selma Blair. For instance, the wild hoots and barks that Cage makes as he pursues his son and is pursued by his own father (Lance Henriksen) are so ridiculous that no matter how disgusting the gore is one has to laugh. Another, albeit more subtle, example of the film’s dark humor are the constant sighs and eye rolls with which Blair greets all of Cages suggestions and attempts to kill their kids. Both actors are generally excellent and they deliver truly solid work here.
For whatever reason though audiences have been slow to embrace the madcap horrors of Mom And Dad. The film has been a critical success since its release and has garnered a loyal cult following, but as a whole audiences are still hesitant to give Mom And Dad another chance. Perhaps it is the root of the scares in Mom And Dad that viewers find disquieting or in some tragic cases familiar.
