From producer James Wan, one of the most influential architects of modern horror, and Blumhouse Atomic Monster, the studio behind Backrooms and Obsession, comes a terrifying trip from breakout genre director Rob Savage, into the darkening world of a young girl, Bela, who forms a relationship with a sinister entity in her home who looks uncannily like her own mother.
Other Mommy is directed by Rob Savage (Host, The Boogeyman) from a screenplay by WGA award winner Nathan Elston, writer for the Emmy-winning sensation Succession, based on the New York Times bestselling novel Incidents Around the House by Josh Malerman (Bird Box).
Producer James Wan has stood at the vanguard of modern horror for more than two decades now and his passion for the genre is undimmed. Having just produced the breakout blockbuster Backrooms, Wan believes that horror is on the threshold of a thrilling new era. “We’re at a very exciting inflection point in the horror genre, but also in cinema in general,” Wan says. “With successes like Obsession and Backrooms you are seeing the next wave of filmmaking—and the next wave of filmmakers—who are making movies and telling stories that are connecting to a whole new generation. I am so excited about where we are going because horror is such a great commentary on societal fears and societal anxieties that we can do a lot of fun things that most other genres cannot.”
From that fresh, fertile ground rises Other Mommy, a shocking new nightmare, based on a best-selling novel by Josh Malerman, about a girl being befriended, and then hunted, by a sinister entity that has the ability to look exactly like her own mother. “I was interested in the concept of an entity that mimics someone and uses that ability to get into a child’s heart, get into her mindset, and take over,” Wan says. “I thought it was an interesting way to portray what a demonic presence wants by appealing to a child’s innermost love, innocence and emotion.
Director Rob Savage was eager to dig into the family dynamics at the center of the story and exhume how this entity both causes and reveals the emotional fissures spidering below the suburban surface. “It was non-negotiable for me to preserve the darkness, contradictions, and emotional complexity of the novel,” Savage says. “I did not want to make a softened or sanitized version of this story. When I first came in with my take, I wanted to make sure we were really making the book, and Blumhouse Atomic Monster were completely aligned with that.”
Savage’s skills, both narratively and technically, were exactly what the film needed, Wan says. “What’s great about Rob is he really understands set pieces,” Wan says. “A lot of the work he has done has a heightened, fantastical quality, and yet his filmmaking is very grounded in the emotionality of the characters and the story.”
By having the events of the story unfold through the perspective of a young girl, the film is able to examine the loss of innocence —and the painful childhood discovery that your parents lead lives apart from you—in a way that has rarely been explored in genre film. “Bela’s relationship with her father, the way she sees her mother, and the way she begins to understand the complicated truths about her parents all felt incredibly unsettling,” Savage says. This structure also invites audiences to question Bela’s perception of reality and the psychological trauma of not knowing whether the woman who is supposed to love her is really her mother … or something else. “Once Bela is pulled into Other Mommy’s world, the rules become strange and unstable, which connects to Bela’s point of view as a child, when reality can still feel fluid,” Savage says.
Savage was also inspired by the sinister figure of Other Mommy. He had been looking for a horror character who could become iconic, “something in the tradition of Freddy Krueger or Michael Myers, and there are not many of those in modern horror cinema,” Savage says. He immediately knew he had found his character when he heard the name Other Mommy. An unknown, amorphous figure who can shapeshift at will, Other Mommy goes through a rapid and unsettling transformation throughout the film. “Whenever she appears, or whenever her presence is felt, you learn something new about what she can do, how she can manipulate Bela, and how she can manipulate the audience,” Savage says. “The goal was to make sure viewers never felt they had seen the entirety of her.”
Other Mommy’s ambiguous form and nature gave Savage and Wan almost unlimited options of how she could appear. “That gave us a lot of leverage to try different things, and it allowed Rob to create looks and approaches that you haven’t quite seen before,” Wan says. Other Mommy takes on the shape of Bela’s mother, but it is barely able to keep the disguise. “The sweetness of Other Mommy is almost too sweet, but underneath it, you feel something coiled and furious,” Savage says. “As she becomes more monstrous, that control starts to slip and the thing underneath begins to come through.”
