The 25 Craziest Moms In Movies

Image via Complex Original

Scientist Elsa may have created her child from a smorgasbord of animal genes in the lab, but somewhere in that mix was her own DNA, which explains her initial attachment to the beast-child, who she names Dren.

She nurtures Dren, but when her freakish baby girl grows into an alluring, very human looking adolescent and starts acting out, Elsa quickly goes from maternal figure to sadistic tormentor. In the movie's most terrifying scene (save for the ending), we see Elsa ruthlessly tying Dren to a lab table, where she tears out the stinger from Dren's tail and coldly refers to her as "the specimen." Sure, she's a creepy lab creature, but she has feelings too, which is why crazy scientist mom's behavior is downright cruel.

What's worse than an overbearing mother who gets jealous of your girlfriend and spies on you during dates? An overbearing mother who gets bit by an exotic rat monkey and morphs into an overbearing, brain-consuming zombie!

This campy, visually upsetting horror flick will makes you grateful for your mom, who may be irritating but could never be as high-maintenance as Vera, who requires tranquilizer shots to subdue her urges to consume flesh and occasionally tries to shove her son back into the womb. Crazy mother zombies: Can't live with 'em, but they won't let you live without them.

From threatening to cut out the tongues of innocent children, to storing her deformed son underneath the floorboards, leaving him to subsist on rotten apples and the Baby Ruth donations of strangers, Mama Fratelli has whole insane mother thing down to a science. 

Don't be fooled by her pearls and unassuming beret, Mrs. Fratelli is no Parisian homemaker. She's money hungry and willing to shoot down a stranger's son, toss a limb in the blender, and even use her own progeny as pawns if it means getting her loveless mitts on a little of One-Eyed WIllie's treasure.

Jacki Weaver earned a best supporting actress Oscar nod for her role in the overlooked Australian crime drama Animal Kingdom thanks to her portrayal of malignant mother Janine "Smurf" Cody.

As the caretaker of her sons (all of whom came from different fathers) and a displaced grandson, this conniving matriarch is the pinnacle of mental unwellness not because she inappropriately kisses her sons (although, that does add to it), but because she feels no guilt for urging them into criminal lifestyles. In the end, nothing emphasizes insanity like birthing three degenerate sons, all of whom you support and are abnormally defensive of, despite the fact that they're violent criminals. 

Strange and gleefully campy, The People Under the Stairs was conceived when Wes Craven read about a pair of sinister parents who kept their children locked in the house, and takes the grim tale to a more sinister level with "Mommy" Wendie Robie.

Not a mommy who takes discipline lightly, Wendie tosses her disobedient children under the stairs, trapping them there with an elaborate fortification system that forces them into cannibalism if they want to survive. Not deranged enough? Mommy and Daddy are actually brother and sister, which might be why they have such an unhealthy disdain for the mutant children they've made.

We've heard of mothers who neglect and abuse their children, but Mrs. Iselin does the unthinkable with her son, routinely hypnotizing him and using him as an assassin, ruthlessly puppeteering him to forward her political agenda. 

Lest you think she's not so much crazy as conniving, her true lunacy is revealed when she brainwashes her son into murdering his own fiance. She even throws a little bit of incest into the mix, putting a cap on her trifecta of crazy.

Sharon Stone's Golden-Globe-garnering role of a lifetime as Ginger McKenna in Martin Scorsese's mob flick was marked by a particular brand of insanity. Ginger is is not so much crazy as unstable, smitten with her ex-boyfriend/con man (despite being married). On one occasion, she even ties her daughter to the bedposts so she can hook-up with her husband's mob associate. You might point to drug addiction as the cause of this behavior, but we're pleading insanity on Ginger's behalf, the only possible explanation for her unhinged antics.

This creepy stop-motion children's film follows Coraline (Dakota Fanning) as she finds a portal to a parallel universe, called "Other World," where all the people in her life are replaced with "other" counterparts who seem much cooler, except for the fact that they have buttons where their eyes should be. 

Coraline's Other Mother seems much better than her real mother, giving her the attention she craved from her parents back home. There's only one catch: Other mother wants to sew buttons over Coraline's eyes. And oh yeah, she's actually an insane, soul-consuming witch with sewing needles for fingers, which in our mind, is kind of a deal breaker for a solid mother-child relationship.

Based on the memoir of Augusten Burroughs, Running with Scissors is the story of real-life maniacal mother Deirdre Burroughs. To credit the small amount of sanity she has, Deidre does realize her son would be better off in another's care, but her good judgement takes a turn for the worse when she decides the most suitable foster parent would be her psychiatrist.

While Augusten is left to run amok in the rundown, unconventional house of her equally insane therapist, where his mother knowingly allows her son to be pursued by the therapist's adopted son, a 33-year-old pedophile. Maybe she just didn't want to be a hypocrite, since she was dating a teenage girl herself? 

Diane Ladd's no-holds-barred portrayal of Marietta Fortune uncompromisingly piles on the crazy. We could probably rest our case at the picture above, but we'll go on.

You know mom is lunatic when she hires a hit man to kill your boyfriend after propositioning him for sex in a men's bathroom because she doesn't approve of him. The emotional instability and the smearing of lipstick on her face like it's an etch-a-sketch are only the icing on her crazy cake.

Some might argue that Helene McCready (played brilliantly by Amy Ryan), while clearly a neglectful mother, is not a crazy one. But we deg to differ. Leaving your four-year-old daughter at home while getting loaded on drugs and booze at the local dive bar and then being so high you barely realize she was kidnapped clearly shows you're not mentally fit for mothering. But keeping company with pedophiles when you have a young daughter? That clearly illustrates lunacy.

Mrs. Robinson's insanity is of the lighter variety compared to some of the mothers on this list, but her underage seducing certainly qualifies as crazy. Propositioning yourself to a 20-year-old is one thing, but sabotaging your daughter's relationship just so you can get another piece of Dustin Hoffman's young ass is another. 

Mother's Boys, despite including a young-ish Jamie Lee Curtis, is not a particularly great film, but it is useful if used as a guide on how not to be a crazy mother. 

Jude Madigan teaches us that abandoning your kids (even if you randomly show up again a few years later) can indicate a decline in mental health. Trying to kill your mother off after she threatens to tell your secrets is also a significant sign. And concocting a plan with your kids to dispose of your husband's new girlfriend? The most glaring admission of insanity of all.

Victoria seems like a doting maternal figure. So when she drops her four kids off at a never-before-mentioned Grandmother's house, they don't suspect anything. Even when Grandma takes to locking them in the attic, starving them and forcing them to subsist on the each other's blood, no one points a finger at mom. 

Turns out [Spoiler Alert], mom is actually a psycho who married her uncle (their father) and then decided to kill their children to secure her inheritance (because, go figure, dad disapproved of the whole incest thing). Mom marries another man, and leaves the kids to die a slow death by arsenic-laced Tollhouse cookies, because you know, that's what Betty Crocker would do, right?

Natalie Portman's tour de force as troubled ballerina Nina wouldn't have been nearly as nerve wracking if it weren't for Nina's overbearing mother, Erica. We expect the mother of a dancer to be controlling (have you seen Dance Moms or Toddlers & Tiaras?), but Nina's mother takes her domineering to a dark, seriously creepy place when she insists on helping Nina undress, watching her bathe, and even clipping her nails.

As Nina teeters on the edge on an emotional breakdown, we don't blame the pressures of her challenging role so much as her mother, whose emotionally dominating presence serves to escalate her daughter's mental illness. Plus, what kind of mother watches as her daugher's sanity deteriorates and doesn't send her to doctor? A crazy mother, that's who.

Lilly is a con artist who's willing to whatever it takes to pull off a scam. An initially sympathetic character, Lilly seems genuinely concerned that her son, who has become a grifter, will follow in her ill-fated footsteps.

But in reality, Lilly's true concern—cashing in—trumps her love for her son, prompting her into some seriously nutty antics that include trying to con her own flesh and blood. When her scheming fails, she turns to seducing him in hopes of turning things around, which costs her serious sanity points, and kind of scratches the whole doting mother act, taking it to a darker place. And we're not even mentioning the outrageously insane conclusion...

The fear factor of suburban mothers, once only a source of subdued terror, was memorably heightened by housewife Beverly Sutphin, who needs no more than a petty infraction to fuel her homicidal rage.

Parking spot thievery prompts her to prank call unsuspecting grandmas, sure, but the thing that makes Beverly most crazy is her insistence that she's doing the right thing. She kills of her children's tormentors (and by tormentors, we mean critical teachers and cheating boyfriends) and is convinced that she's been a protective mother, not the maternal Charles Manson her daughter pegs her as. Sorry, Beverly, but we're with your kids on this one.

We knew Norman Bates was doomed to have mommy issues when his mother just tacked a consonant onto her name to form his. Not only is that just lazy, it also foreshadows just how close Mrs. Bates wants her and Norman to be. 

Norma raises poor Norman to be wary of all other women, assuring his allegiance to her by convincing him that sex is sinful, which also explains why he murders her and then murders women dressed in her clothes, all the while hearing her judgmental voice. Even in death, Mrs. Bates is the most mental, domineering corpse in the history of cinema. 

The original Mother's Day featured a matriarch far less alluring than the remake's Rebecca De Mornay, a crotchety old woman who urges her toothless, punkish backwoods boys into brutality of every order, which includes forcing a trio of out-of-town women into elaborately staged rape scenes.

Mother's spawn are overgrown man children, enamored with violence on TV, but mom is the one urging them to reenact the fiction in reality, orchestrating the torture of strangers to fulfill her sadistic sense of entertainment. Mom may keep the blood off her hands, but we can still see the crazy written all over her face.

Success can't buy sanity. Christina Crawford, daughter of silver screen star Joan Crawford, confirmed this truth in her book, Mommy Dearest, which claimed the actress was an abusive alcoholic whose uncontrollable rage was often displaced on her daughter.

Faye Dunaway portrays Joan with slightly campy insanity, throwing cleaning supplies like confetti at her daughter when the bathroom doesn't shine enough to satisfy her OCD, and in the movie's most famous scene, has a violent fit when she finds her daughter's dress on a wire hanger. Christina effectively destroyed her mother's legacy, but after watching Dunaway manically bellow "NO WIRE HANGERS!" we totally wouldn't hesitate to toss mom to the wolves either.

OK, so Peyton isn't exactly a mother. But she wants to be, and seeks revenge for the miscarriage of her own child, which is why she becomes a babysitter for the family she believes is responsible for the destruction of her own family, who have conveniently just welcomed a newborn into the house.

Peyton ruthlessly schemes, convincing her client that she's a compassionate caretaker when she's really trying to sleep with the husband, frame the handyman for child molestation, and kill the actual mother in an attempt to replace her. Yup, the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world...with manipulation and elaborate lies.

Jason Voorhees's Mama Dukes takes revenge to the next when she levels off several generations of Crystal Lake staff because a few negligent counselors let her young son drown while they were partying. A lawsuit would have been a more suitable response, but instead Mrs. Voorhees opts to murder other people's innocent children, enacting a bloody, modern day version of Hammurabi's code.

Mary leaves no psycho stone unturned as the mother of the titular, illiterate teen (Gabourey Sidibe) who endures a disturbing array of abuse at Mary's hand.

Mary hands off Precious's Down Syndrome child (who she cruelly refers to as Mongo) to Precious' grandmother while using her children to secure welfare. She mentally and physically traumatizes her daughter, despite knowing that her father already sexually abuses her, and even attempts to injure Precious' second child. It's never revealed just what fuels her to torment Precious, but we can only assume she's not got it all there upstairs.

Aunt Ruth is the default caretaker of Meg (Blythe Auffarth) and her sister Susan (Madeline Taylor), who are left to live with her after their parents die in a car accident. But it turns out they would have been better off fending for themselves, because Aunt Ruth has some pretty convoluted ideas of what caretaking is.

Besides being a raging alcoholic, she also supplies her underage sons with booze and cigarettes. But nothing could compare to her ultimate act of insanity, egging on her spawn and the neighbor's boy to rape and torture their new house guest in the basement, using her parental authority to urge them into violence that is nothing short of harrowing to watch.

Being a teenager is tough when Carrie shares her first signs of "becoming a woman" with the whole girl's locker room, but her mother takes adolescent angst to the next level when she deems Carrie's breasts "dirty pillows" and calls her period the "curse of blood." Way to congratulate her on her developing body, mom!

Mom rules with a religious fist, scalding her with hot tea and forcing Carrie into a creepy prayer closet to beg for forgiveness for wanting to attend prom, which Mom is convinced is just an elaborate sinner's ball. Which it is, of course, but literally stabbing your daughter in the back for attending is a little much. What happened to good old fashioned grounding?