Here are Cinephile Corner’s 10 recommendations for horror movies like Other Mommy:
Coraline
It’s hard to watch Rob Savage’s Other Mommy, about a young girl drawn to a presence that looks just like her mother, without thinking of Coraline. Henry Selick’s stop-motion adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s novella follows a bored girl who discovers a tiny door to a parallel home, where an attentive Other Mother with buttons for eyes wants her to stay forever. It’s one of cinema’s best entry-level horror movies, and its doppelgänger mom remains one of the genre’s great villains.
Us
Jordan Peele’s Us is the definitive modern doppelgänger horror film. Lupita Nyong’o plays both a mother on a beach vacation with her family and the red-jumpsuited double who shows up in her driveway with a pair of scissors. Like Other Mommy, it gets its chills from a familiar face turned into something sinister, and Nyong’o’s dual performance is extraordinary.
Bring Her Back
Danny and Michael Philippou followed Talk to Me with an even nastier tale of maternal love gone wrong. Sally Hawkins plays Laura, a cheerful foster mother who takes in two grieving siblings and whose kindness slowly curdles into something monstrous. It’s brutal, upsetting, and one of the most effective films about a parental figure who can’t let go since Hereditary.
Hereditary
Ari Aster’s debut is the gold standard for modern domestic horror. Toni Collette plays a miniature artist whose family begins to fracture after the death of her secretive mother, and the tension at the dinner table proves almost as frightening as anything supernatural. Fans of Other Mommy’s unsettling family dynamics will find plenty to chew on here.
The Woman in the Yard
Jaume Collet-Serra’s Blumhouse chiller stars Danielle Deadwyler as a recently widowed mother of two whose isolated farmhouse is suddenly watched by a mysterious veiled woman sitting in the front yard. It’s tense, emotionally grounded, and smartly contained, using a single eerie image to explore how grief can take hold of a parent and the children who depend on her.
Cobweb
Samuel Bodin’s Cobweb is another story about a child who hears something in the walls that the grown-ups insist isn’t there. Woody Norman plays Peter, a bullied boy whose parents (Lizzy Caplan and Antony Starr) grow more controlling as the knocking in his bedroom grows louder. Like Other Mommy, it twists the safety of home into something menacing.
Talk to Me
The Philippou brothers’ breakout is one of the best A24 horror movies of the decade, a possession story about grieving teenagers who pass around an embalmed hand to let spirits inside. Sophie Wilde plays a girl still reeling from her mother’s death, and the film understands how easily grief can open the door to something that is only pretending to be a loved one.
Smile
Parker Finn’s Smile stars Sosie Bacon as a therapist who witnesses a patient’s shocking death and begins seeing grinning figures everywhere she looks. Our review found the trauma plot thin, but the film is packed with effective jump scares and features one of the creepiest recurring images in recent studio horror: a familiar face wearing a smile that is all wrong.
Night Swim
Like Other Mommy, Night Swim comes from the Blumhouse and Atomic Monster horror factories. Bryce McGuire’s film follows a former baseball player (Wyatt Russell) and his family who move into a new home with a backyard pool that turns out to have a sinister hunger. Our review found it light on scares, but it’s an easy, familiar watch for fans of haunted-home stories.
Mothers’ Instinct
For more Jessica Chastain in maternal-paranoia mode, try Mothers’ Instinct, Benoît Delhomme’s 1960s thriller co-starring Anne Hathaway. The two play best friends and neighbors whose bond unravels after a tragedy, as suspicion and grief turn their picture-perfect suburban homes into battlegrounds. It isn’t supernatural, but it shares Other Mommy’s fascination with motherhood as a source of dread.
READ MORE: Horror Movies Like Bring Her Back, Movies Like The Woman in the Yard
