XX (2017)

Don’t be fooled by the movie’s title: there’s nothing lascivious about the horror anthology XX (2017, Netflix). Women wrote and directed each segment of XX, including the creepy stop-motion animation opening credits and interstitials by Sofia Carrillo. Men may dominate the horror genre, but women’s pain — both individual and collective — provides a bottomless well of inspiration for disturbing stories.

Yet, even in 2020, the concept of womanhood remains nearly synonymous with motherhood. Three out of four of the short films center around moms and the horrors they internalize for the sake of their families. Happy Mother’s Day!

The Box, written and directed by Jovanka Vuckovic based on the story by Jack Ketchum

The Box starts with Susan (Natalie Brown) suffering from exhaustion familiar to mothers everywhere: she’s spent the day out with her kids. While she zones out on the subway ride home, her son Danny (Peter DaCunha) asks a stranger about a shiny red present he’s carrying. Susan makes a half-hearted attempt to reign in Danny’s rude behavior, but it’s clear she’s too exhausted to give it her A-game. The stranger opens the box and Danny looks inside: whatever’s in there horrifies the child. He goes home and refuses to eat; he won’t eat the day after that or the weeks after that. When Danny tells his sister Jenny (Peyton Kennedy) what he saw in the box, she, too, stops eating; then the father (Jonathan Watton) follows suit. Eventually, only Susan is left at the dinner table as her family slowly wastes away to nothing.