A Mother’s Job is Never Done: The Trope of the Kept Corpse

by: Lynn Deboeck , March 25, 2026

Once again we can see abjection at work in the horror text where the child struggles to break away from the mother, representative of the archaic maternal figure, in a context in which the father is invariably absent (Psycho, Carrie, The Birds). In these films, the maternal figure is constructed as the monstrous-feminine. By refusing to relinquish her hold on her child, she prevents it from taking up its proper place in relation to the Symbolic. (Creed 2001: 72)

The occurrence of a mother’s deceased body being kept (and often cared for) by her child, usually a son, is a trope in the horror genre. Most famously used in the 1960 Hitchcock horror film, Psycho, this mechanism has been usurped by more contemporary crime dramas such as Law & Order, Bones and Criminal Minds as a physiological manifestation of the killer’s state of mind and as a representation of the failure of the mother. When a father dies, the focus of the narrative typically stays on what they leave behind: the goals they accomplished, the duty they were loyal to or the legacy for the next generation. But given many stereotypical associations with mothers and compulsory nurturing, her job is never done—or at least, never perfectly done. There is a regular occurrence of mother-blame that is baked into the horror genre that curiously needs no living mother to be present to exist; in fact, the trope’s usefulness is dependent upon the mother-monster being created by others in the story. The real evil is not what she as a woman does (the murders Mrs Bates does are ‘excusable’), but through her own autonomy and agency, the real evil mother-monster is created by how others view the son’s actions. The kept-corpse trope, then, is essentially a function of the male gaze in that it is created for the male eye. Still, it is actively resisting the male gaze as well, by displaying the impotence of the form: it requires the mother to be dead and gone, and her corpse to be manipulated, to work. Using a feminist critique of the kept-corpse trope’s use, we can see that the mother’s corpse in these stories and genres serves as a physical depiction (and indictment) of her lack of true ‘presence’ in life and the trigger behind any crimes in which her progeny takes part. In essence, the mother’s dead body is a representation of an internal maternal struggle that ‘whatever I do, it will never be enough,’ while paradoxically at the same time supporting an external, societal notion that she could have prevented her son from becoming a killer, if only she had stayed alive and been a better mother. Society blaming the mother is nothing new, but the interest in preserving a connection with one’s own dead mother while simultaneously snuffing out the lives of others is apparently another trope that hasn’t seemed to lose currency in the 21st century.

Barbara Creed, in her investigation of the monstrous-feminine, examines Kristeva’s exploration of how ‘abjection, as a source of horror, works within patriarchal societies.’ (Creed 2001: 68) Hitchcock’s film set was a patriarchal society in and of itself, wherein he dictated (often without giving his co-workers any reasons) what was to happen on set. In addition, the contemporary crime dramas mentioned above most often depict male-led teams, and these patriarchal roots shape the stories. Creed also establishes the premise for the mother-corpse attachment, stating: ‘One of the key figures of abjection is the mother who becomes an abject at that moment when the child rejects her for the father who represents the symbolic order.’ (Creed 2001: 68) She goes on to explain the horror genre’s frequent use of corpse-figures in its storytelling. (Creed 2001: 70) What does it mean, then, to depict the purposeful retention of the abject that was once rejected within a genre that popularises corpse-like figures? Psycho is one example of a film that manipulates the maternal by turning it into the abject before the point of attack of the plot and then fixing it in a lifeless body and ethereal voice (a puppet, if you will) to be whatever will serve the patriarchal narrative. Yet, as I will show, resorting to the use of a corpse in place of a live mother character reveals the trope’s weakness within the male gaze.

In the second edition of Raymond Durgnat’s book A Long Hard Look at ‘Psycho,’ he delves into how, through the medium of film, ‘Psycho works through suggestion, through atmosphere, not stating ideas, but generating them, in the minds of the audience.’ (2010: 1) Use of the mother figure is frequent in horror films as it provides an easy archetype with which to expose the inner demons of both the child (or their ‘inner child’) as well as the spectators themselves. Though often tied together in a Freudian analysis, Durgnat’s view is different:

Mothers, some good, some bad, abound in Hitchcock films, for both artistic and commercial reasons. … Mrs Norman Bates is a figment of Norman’s imagination, and of his private, conscious symbolique. She’s neither feminine nor maternal: she’s a construct, rooted in hostility and loss, and, more important, parent-child hostility (which, though it involves sexual theory, can’t be explained within it). (2010: 246)

Durgnat’s perspective erases the mother’s own story from the narrative entirely (as does Hitchcock), which further leads to creating a demonised view of her that is then fed to the audience as ‘truth,’ though in a medium and genre that constantly forces us to question if what we see is real. The erasure of the mother says much more about the son and his story than about Mrs Norman Bates. In Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho: A Casebook, Robert Kolker observes that ‘Hitchcock was a master of the gaze’ and that ‘[h]is films are largely structured on the interchange of looks, and he is especially fond of the kind of ‘tracking’ gaze, in which we see a character walking, intercut with a tracking shot of what or who the character is walking toward.’ (2004: 119) We see the tracking gaze of Mother, for example, when she is about to murder Marion, only to learn that the character was in fact Norman—or was it?

In the same book, George Toles considers gaze with respect to how eyes are shot in the film, claiming that ‘[t]he eye, after all, is the ultimate goal for any act of violation; it is the luminous outward sign of the private soul one wishes to smudge with depravity.’ (2004: 121) We get a close-up of Marion’s lifeless eye, her face pressed against the tile bathroom floor as blood circles the drain, and we also get the skeletal eye of Mrs Bates herself, both hollow and devoid of life. Toles notes that ‘Mrs. Bates, whose sockets are both full and hollow, directly scrutinises us (the viewers) with the gelded eyes of decency. She speaks quietly to us of a mother’s duty to put an end to a bad son while we are confounded by the sight of her effortlessly inhabiting the lost son’s body.’ (2004: 125) Curiously, this perspective grants agency to Mrs Bates, suggesting that she intentionally possessed her son. Yet, the juxtaposition of Norman with his dead mother’s corpse helps to emphasise that only the living person in the narrative made choices. As the film finishes with the shot of Norman and we hear Mrs. Bates’ voice (presumably echoing within his own mind), there is a double exposure moment of him with Mrs. Bates’ skeleton (though this is not in every version of the film), attempting to hammer home the point that to see within Norman’s eyes is to penetrate the soul of Mrs. Bates herself. Yet, all we see is abjection in Norman’s past life and thought processes. The horror, then, is that the abject gets a second life in the protagonist’s body and mind. Norman will never be free of his mother—or rather, his idea of his mother—and nor will we.

The story of Psycho even begins by placing a mother’s watchful eye at the root of the narrative. At the beginning of the film, Marion and Sam are ending what is seemingly one of their regular sexual liaisons and discussing their relationship. Marion suggests that they meet respectably, ‘with mother’s picture on the mantle.’ (1960: Psycho) Sam insinuates a less respectable meeting and mentions turning her mother’s picture around for that, emphasising a social belief that it is our mother’s eye that keeps us in line, even when she is no longer there. The characters infuse their existence with the idea that ‘she is watching’ because it provides boundaries they perhaps cannot sustain. Through this constant observation, then, the mother is understood to be responsible for all that her child does and does not do.

Laura Mulvey’s seminal work on ‘the male gaze’ catapulted feminist theory into the realm of film and media studies. Despite her own resistance to psychoanalysis as a patriarchal form, she finds it useful in recognising how gender is perceived: ‘The function of woman in forming the patriarchal unconscious is two-fold; she first symbolises the castration threat by her real absence of a penis and second thereby raises her child into the symbolic.’ (1984: 361) The historical purpose, then, of women’s inclusion in story and imagery is to symbolise a threat to man, and this is also why such a threat in the kept-corpse trope is so hollow. It is hollow because a woman is not actually included in the story, but only the symbolic threat in a further-castrated form of a corpse. The trope of the dead mother serves to extend that threat into the psychosis of the man, essentially fulfilling the prophecy. Angi Buettner, in her work on the historical power of imagery, argues that it is the gaze at corpses or skeletons—the remnants of tragedy—which is ‘at the core of our attempts to take in the effects, and gain an understanding, of catastrophe.’ (2009: 351) When we see skeletons and corpses of mothers in these films and television examples, we are reckoning with not just the catastrophe of a mother’s death, but of all that results from that death and what we assume about her life. The psychosis of the son, the transformation at times of his own self to a feminine version and/or his impulse to kill are all due to what he believes to be the will of his mother. This is another weakness of the trope: that we, as the audience, are given no other avenue but to follow along with the son’s assumptions about the mother, rather than see or hear from her herself. The gaze is further extended for us because we often get glimpses of the son’s psyche, as when he ‘hears’ his mother berating him from the other room, only for us viewers to learn in subsequent scenes that it was all in his mind and, cinematically, insinuated to be a memory. Even though the man’s mental state should have spectators questioning the veracity of his memory, the damage done to him by his mother is accepted as truth in the narrative and used to explain why the man turned out the way he did. The man’s psychosis is due to the abuse he suffered at the hands/voice of his mother. The abuse is then felt vicariously by the audience through the vision of the mother’s corpse. And the psychosis is confirmed in the way the mother’s corpse is kept and maintained. In season 1 of Criminal Minds, episode 19, the murderer gives his deceased mother’s body jewellery to wear from his victims and puts her in a comfortable chair, turning on the television for her to watch. The audience finally sees how deeply disturbed the man is, once we see the grotesqueness of the skeleton amid all the care and consideration he has taken for her. In a similar vein, Norman carries his mother’s dressed skeleton carefully from room to room and preserves her carefully in his fruit cellar. This has the simultaneous effect of keeping the mother figure agency-less and foregrounding a character trait for the son: he is dutiful and caring of his mother. While the mother is not granted subjectivity in the narratives herself, typically, a lot of time and energy is spent on producing her corpse-self.

The head of the makeup department at Universal Studios at the time of the shooting of Psycho, Jack Barron, learned more than most about how Hitchcock wanted the image of Mrs Bates’ body to shock the audience. Explaining that ‘Hitch was a stickler for accuracy,’ Barron had to produce an effect

based on [Hitchcock’s] concepts on the information he received in response to a memo he sent in early November to the studio research department: ‘What would be the condition of the corpse of a woman who had been poisoned at age forty—embalmed and buried—   then, after two months, disinterred and kept in a residence for ten years?’ The details (‘mummified…[with] brown leatherlike skin over the bones’) were provided by an instructor at a Los Angeles college of mortuary science… (Rebello 1990: 75)

The specificity with which the director and crew created a corpse for the film—one seen for only seconds—is telling, but this memo Hitchcock sent out speaks volumes more. He wanted the story of a mother being murdered by her son due to her abuse of him to be known not through narrative or dialogue (or, importantly, through the mother herself), but through the visual of her corpse. This is curious, considering that the everyday moviegoer would not have been privy to the intricacies of mortuary science and would therefore need the psychiatrist’s assessment at the end of the film to know what happened to her.

Another contemporary example of this mother-corpse trope and phenomenon is from the television series Bones, a somewhat biographical show about a forensic anthropologist named Dr Temperance Brennan (Dr Kathy Reichs in real life) who works with an FBI agent named Sealy Booth to uncover the truth behind murders, primarily using only the skeletal remains of the deceased victims. As we see with crime dramas that revolve around these types of forensics, the ‘shock value’ of a corpse in Bones and Criminal Minds is not as salient as it perhaps was for Hitchcock’s initial audiences, since there is usually at least one per episode, and frequently more. In addition, the artistic techniques have evolved significantly since 1960, enabling much more realistic and harrowing imagery of death. Despite the lack of shock value in the face of a corpse, the dead mother trope was used in season 6 of Bones when Agent Booth was investigating the violent deaths of women, and it led to a murderer who had kept his mother’s skeletal remains preserved in their apartment for years. Almost a shortcut now, this impotent trope is used as a stand-in to lay the claim that the mother must have been abusive or a bad mother in some way, or else the son would not have committed such grave sins.

Sigmund Freud’s famous Oedipal theory (Freud 1910), which the psychiatrist in Psycho leans on heavily in his explanation at the end of the film—expresses the coveting of the mother-figure by the son in a carnal way that must be repressed for social reasons. Such suppression of desire leads to resentment and hatred that is often focused outward, giving reasons for the aggressiveness of masculine persons. Despite the work of theorists such as Simone de Beauvoir, who have also approached the topic of maternity and mother-child relationships, Freud’s stance is still most often cited when dealing with the subject of male madness. Girls can have ‘daddy issues,’ but men can be ‘mamma’s boys.’ Problematic and incomplete as all this analysis is, it forms the basis for how society pathologises people according to gender. There were attempts to fill in some of the roots of Norman’s pathology early in the film’s screening process. According to Rebello’s work on the making of Psycho, ‘[i]n an early draft of the script, Stefano wrote a flashback in which Mrs Bates, catching young Norman with an erection, gets angry, forces him into some of her clothes and smears lipstick on his mouth. It’s a typical ‘vulgar Freudian’ manoeuvre: to seem to “explain” something, you reiterate it as a scene in infancy, with a little twist: ‘Cruel Mummy made me do it, and now I keep right on doing it’.’ (1990: 238) According to psychologist Dr Gertrude Schwartzmann, ‘[i]n investigating caretaker-infant interaction, and by extension the evolving mother-son relationship, the influence of each partner on the other (interactive regulation) as well as each partner’s behavior as a function of each partner’s previous behaviour (self-regulation) comprises the dyadic system.’ (2006: 226-227) So it is not only the interactions between Norman and his mother before her death that are a part of Norman’s system of behaviour, but how they continue to interact in his mind once she is dead—but the kept-corpse trope only gives us the latter. According to Tony Perkins, another employee on the film, ‘The crew always referred to Mother and Norman as totally separate people. Mother always has her own ‘backstage’ persona, as it were. It’s not just [acknowledged] that Norman is Mother. It’s just not how people want to see it – neither audiences nor the people who work on the crew.’ (Rebello 1990: 113) There is, then, an assumed connection between maternal contradictions and how we feel we know what the mother did to the son from an empty and overused trope.

One cannot ignore the Oedipal nature of these explanations. Though in her book, The Undead Mother, Christina Wieland goes deeper than Freud and explores other theories of humanity’s connection with gender relations and violence, like matricide. In each of my examples, the story is of a fatherless man who is reacting to his ‘dread of the omnipotent mother, the search for a male identificatory figure and [his] violent destruction of his attachment to mother.’ (Wieland 2000: 50) In the episode of Bones, we get glimpses of the fatherless murderer ‘hearing’ his mother berating him from the other room, although we eventually learn she has been dead for years. In the show Criminal Minds, the murderer is known for asking his rape victims (and even his female boss) ‘how he’s doing’ to acquire some sort of maternal approval. In Psycho, of course, we have the voice of Mother (understood in retrospect to be Norman ‘voicing’ his mother) scolding Norman. Whether the mother was indeed overbearing or abusive in these cases is unknown. All that is given to the spectator are the son’s criminal actions and psychosis alongside a weakly signifying trope. It is interesting, then, that the interpretations given (even sometimes within the script!) point to the mother as the cause of the problem.

A part of the psychological premise upon which the demonising of the mother has been built is on how we as spectators have historically consumed women –through spectacle, as explained by E. Ann Kaplan, and from that consumption, developing a taste and desire for the spectacle of the bad mother. (1992: 61) From the visages of the large house on the hill Norman and his mother lived in together, to the close-ups of her skeletal features. Even a shot of a cast of her hands—presumably a bronzed relic death mask—there is a level of spectacle in how Mrs Bates is being visually preserved for us. In addition, by Norman preserving her remains in the house, he could ‘make it up to her’ so that she would eventually approve of him. His actions are assumed to be the result of his mother never approving of any other woman in his life, even though she remarried.

In confronting and working with various feminist film theories, Kaplan notes that they

fall, broadly speaking, into two groups: the first assumes that the ‘feminine’ is always reached via the masculine, making any specifically (and separately) female desire impossible. The second asserts that there is such a thing as an independent ‘feminine.’ In the first set of theories, women are seen to be castrated, and in that sense lacking their own desire; in the second set, women are viewed as being complete as they are, and capable of their own desire. These theorists argue that female castration is a patriarchal    construct serving to prevent men from having to deal with difference, and enabling them to maintain a position of superiority.’ (1992: 69)

Palpably true in the case of Psycho, the patriarchal framing of the story of the Bates family serves to feminise Norman himself by highlighting the men around him to be more masculine without a psychosis, and him to literally turn into a feminine person inside and out with his psychosis. This is also seen in the episode of Criminal Minds, which is appropriately titled ‘Machismo’.

Using the dead mother’s kept-corpse trope in the first season of the show in 2006, the episode of Criminal Minds centres around a Mexican community that has been experiencing a string of brutal murders, specifically of elderly women. When the Behavioural Analysis Unit, the team that the series focuses on, is called in to help, they learn that the murderer is likely a man dressed as a woman. However, it becomes difficult to pursue the case since any deviation from heterosexual and cisgender norms is considered taboo in this culture. While not the only use of maternal murders or maternal connections to motives within the series, this episode most clearly utilises the kept-corpse trope in underscoring the blame placed on the mother’s supposed actions in life toward her progeny that led to the psychotic breaks, which result in murder. Akin to body horror, the ‘genre trope that showcases often graphic violations of the human body,’ the kept corpse’s very presence is a violation. Maternity is held as sacred (in particular in the Mexican culture highlighted in this Criminal Minds episode), which is why desecrations of it, or extreme representations of the archetypes of the bad mother, are so viscerally rejected, and why they are such good fodder for suspenseful horror films or psychological dramas. (Cruz 2012: 161) In particular, the aspects of Mexican culture that Criminal Minds delves into primarily are the ideas of family and idealisation of the mother (the breakdown of which is blamed for the creation of a murderer) and machismo (which is directly threatened by the fact that the killer dresses as a woman). In the episode, the group asserts that the perpetrator had been a rapist in the past who turned to murder due to an incident that made him impotent. According to the character Agent Derek Morgan, ‘at some point, he couldn’t rape anymore. So, he began killing women who represented authority figures in his life that he hated. Typically, a mother or a grandmother. Women he blamed for his impotence.’ (Criminal Minds 2005: Season 1, Episode 19, 23:33-23:42) Even though it is much more dialogue-driven than Psycho, in the same manner of the kept-corpse trope, Criminal Minds sets up our expectation to blame the mother before we ever know anything about the mother herself. Feeding into the audience’s desire to blame her, they construct the monster they have yet to find to be that murderous creature who has kept and preserved his mother’s corpse.

Todd McGowan takes a psychoanalytic view of film theory, claiming—like Kaplan and others—that, regardless of the differentiation between spectators and their identities, films contain, in their structure, an intent to draw one in by virtue of desire. This would mean that we are drawn to the trope of maternal death or the mother’s kept-corpse because we have a desire to see them so—or at least, to blame a mother for unspeakable things at a time when she cannot speak up to defend herself. While highly supportive of the male gaze and a toxic patriarchal perspective, the desire audiences may have to see this does not speak to its strength as a meaning maker. It only highlights that the trope works in the short term due to popularity, but in the end, it is a lazy referral mechanism because it relies on an inert device—the manipulable corpse—rather than on narrative or character. On the set of the film Psycho, Alfred Hitchcock made sure that the empty ‘canvas [director’s style] chair of ‘Mrs Bates’ was kept prominently placed and displayed on the set throughout the shooting.’ (Rebello 1990: 128) By doing so, he kept the absent villain present for everyone as they told the story (but left the woman herself out of the storytelling). His stated motivation was to allow the power of being watched by the ghost of a murderer’s mother to penetrate every scene. But the physicalisation of the absence also casts blame on maternal absence writ large and the negative effects assumed to be associated with that absence.

The mother figure has had to negotiate a contradictory path in literature, media, and other artistic depictions. Her psychic body is understood as ‘a sensual and sexed virgin space that must be conceived.’ (Liss 2009: xv) At once, she must necessarily be sexed to be a mother, but must somehow maintain the ‘purity’ associated with virginity as a woman and model-figure for the child to learn from and emulate. On top of what the mother character herself must contend with internally and externally, society’s reductive treatment supports the assumption that she must be conceived of/constructed by someone outside herself. Julia Mason and Andrea O’Reilly investigate what they call an antidote to the mainstream ideals and pressures on women to be ‘good mothers’ along with the ‘new momism.’ This antidote, called outlaw mothering, is expressed by mothers who ‘do not always put their children first; actively question the expectations that are placed on mothers by society; challenge mainstream parenting practices; and challenge the idea that the only emotion mothers ever feel toward their children is love.’ (Mason 2019: 646) The preserved corpses of mothers in Psycho and the other more contemporary crime dramas looked at in this chapter are not allowed the agency to be outlaw mothers, and so they receive all the indictment without exercising any agency. Though proving motive behind the use of any trope is not realistic, it seems as though the gaze of male directors wanted an easy button when it came to charging mothers with abuse and psychological trauma, and the silent, immobile, kept-corpse trope was it.

It is the spectre of Mother, not just the woman’s silhouette sitting motionless in the window, who haunts Norman and follows him through his various criminal actions. One could excuse him as he cleans up his mother’s mess from the murders—after all, she is a sick woman who is overly protective and overbearing towards her son. Norman makes this known to Marion early in the film, when she suggests putting his mother in a home, saying, ‘Who’d look after her? She’d be alone up there. … If you love someone, you don’t do that to them even if you hate them. You don’t understand. I don’t hate her. I hate what she’s become. I hate the illness.’ (Psycho 1960) Norman says his mother is sick, so she can’t be held accountable. What she did was for her son—protecting him from the evils of a licentious woman. Even the murder of the investigator who comes to the motel to try to find Marion is understandable and excusable. She was merely attacking to protect her home, herself, and her son from an intruder. The social assumption playing out in the narrative here is that once a woman becomes a mother, she loses the agency to choose for herself whether she will do something, and instead, everything is justified because she is a mother; that is, until the sins of the next generation. If a man commits murder, it would be only his fault. Yet, by having Norman psychologically fused to his mother before we learn of him dressing up as her, the blame is on the mother. The paradox here is of excusing or justifying a mother’s own crimes, but if she is seen as the cause of the son’s crimes, then we blame her. It is as if her maternal performance is worth more than her human one. One of the ways that blame is foisted onto the mother in the kept-corpse trope is by encouraging support for the child within the already-established absence of the mother. In Scripting Psycho, the authors explain how ‘[w]hile we are still trying to assimilate the sudden, horrifying loss of the protagonist of the first forty-five minutes of the film, we are subliminally encouraged to sympathise with Norman as he desperately tries to cover up the murder that Mother in her insanity has just committed.’ (Raubicheck & Srebnick 2011: 89) It is suggested that Norman’s desperation is due to his past when he murdered his mother, but his state of mind can also be explained by considering how the abject is inscribed:

the abject is coded as feminine and the narrative is a ritual through which the male subject reproduces itself through the renunciation and expulsion of the feminine. … the male subject is formed through its separation from, and rejection of, the initially close  and powerful relationship with the mother and … is repeated in symbolic form through  the violent eradication of the abject monster.’ (Jancovich 2001: 58)

In other words, Norman’s dissonant distress comes from his simultaneous desire to retain a relationship with his mother while trying to distance himself from the monster who is growing in strength within him (and who happens to be the same person).

Acknowledging the agency lost in narratives and depictions over the years of poor treatment and assumptions about women’s motivations and meanings, feminist theorist Liz Frost argues that women’s involvement in their own appearance is, in fact, the solution. By virtue of immobilising her in death and curating what expression or visual display the corpse or skeleton has, the male writers and directors in these films and television shows have robbed the mother in these dramas of access to what Frost dubs ‘doing looks.’ (Frost 1999) Instead, we see the actions of the (often) male protagonist push the storyline forward, typically followed by a monologue at the end of the show or film that addresses the root causes of the murderer’s actions. According to the psychiatrist who speaks to the witnesses at the end of Psycho, when Norman murdered his mother and her lover:

[h]e was already dangerously disturbed—had been ever since his father died. His mother was a clinging, demanding woman. And for years, the two of them lived as if there was no one else in the world. Then she met a man. And it seemed to Norman that she threw him over for this man. Now that pushed him over the line, and he killed them both.   Matricide is probably the most unbearable crime of crimes. Most unbearable for the one who commits it. So, he had to erase the crime, at least in his own mind. He stole her corpse. A weighted coffin was buried. He hid the body in the fruit cellar. Even treated it to keep it as well as it could keep. And that still wasn’t enough. (Psycho 1960)

In case the spectator is left in any doubt as to whom should be blamed for the murders witnessed in the film, Hitchcock provides us with an explanation from a scientist-like character we have not seen the entire movie (and it is insinuated he was ‘brought in’ and so has no personal knowledge of the people involved) who explains unequivocally that the murder of a mother is hardest on the child who does the murdering, thereby steeping Norman in sympathy and blaming the mother for her ‘clinging, demanding’ ways that created his psychosis and led to his criminal behavior. In the Criminal Minds episode, though the women of the community who were raped eventually band together to kill the murderer, most of the episode is spent depicting mothers being killed, their mutilated bodies being examined, and investigators looking into other motivations for the killing. For example, initially, they believed the first victim’s son killed her because she disapproved of his being gay. The women, many of whom are mothers, are not given a platform to express their own knowledge of the situation. Instead, the kept-corpse trope is used over and over again, and it is the law enforcement agents—most of whom are men—who get to control the narrative and explain the motivations behind the killings.

The murders in these stories are elements of how the abject takes hold. As Creed illustrates, ‘[a]bjection also occurs where the individual fails to respect the law and where the individual is a hypocrite, a liar, a traitor. … Thus, abject things are those which highlight the ‘fragility of the law’ and which exist on the other side of the border which separates out the living subject from that which threatens its extinction.’ (Creed 2001: 70) The gay man threatened the heteronormative social framework of the Mexican community they were in, and therefore, more of the story’s narrative focused on his mother’s rejection of him. Couched in the white-savior framework of a crime investigative group from the United States coming to solve Mexican murders, the focus on maternal rejection is used to blame her for her own death, even though her son was innocent. Additionally, it is Creed’s argument that a person cannot be free from the abject because its place is a place ‘where meaning collapses’ and makes possible errant behaviour. Within all this, Norman and the other male murderers are in a space of abjection wherein their own meaning—their subjectivity—fails and their mother’s subjectivity supposedly pulls them into a chasm of dissonance from which they can never hope to free themselves. And yet, the trope causes its own collapse of meaning by being too insubstantial to support any meaning in the first place.

Interestingly, Hitchcock seems to wish to capitalise on all the psychoanalytic assumptions surrounding mother-child relationships, though he primarily is dealing with a mother-son relationship. He relishes using the sonly and mama ’s-boy devotion Norman has to his mother, but also has him ‘turn into’ his own mother—a fear more typically placed on the daughter. In lieu of this deeper association between the son and his maternal example, more contemporary depictions in crime drama expound upon the sexual frustration and confusion coming from the man’s emotional suppression because of his overbearing mother, which is then expressed in his drag behavior—an extension of the kept-corpse trope in that the man is ‘wearing’ his mother as an inert costume.

Kaplan defines representation as ‘the terrain at the intersection of what [she] has called the ‘historical’ and the ‘psychoanalytic’ discourses.’ (1992: 59) She argues that twentieth-century film derives its scripts of women (and in particular, mothers) from nineteenth-century novels, claiming that ‘[t]he links are particularly true in relation to women, whose mythic constructs and social roles remained uncannily the same from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century.’ (Kaplan 1992: 59) She goes on to define the analogous nature of the maternal sacrifice theme in novels of the early 1900s with the themes Hollywood films used—both of which relied on a framework from a domestic feminism that was growing in the first half of the twentieth century. Underscoring the maternal sacrifice theme, Hitchcock gives us Norman defending his mother to Marion early in the film:

She had to raise me all by herself after my father died. I was only five, and it must have been quite a strain for her. She didn’t have to go to work or anything like that. He left her a little money. Anyway, a few years ago, Mother met this man, and he talked her into building this motel. He could’ve talked her into anything. And when he died, too, it was just too great a shock to her. And the way he died … Anyway, he was just too great a loss for her. She had nothing left. … A son is a poor substitute for a lover. (Psycho, 1960)

This hints that it was Norman himself who killed the man who tried to take his place as the rightful man of the house, all tied back to how his mother supposedly put him in those situations that enabled his bad choices. And yet, it is this defensive position that the son takes that further solidifies how we as viewers are to blame the mother for ‘breaking’ him from his good, sonly ways and turning him into a murderer.

Despite the murderer characters in these dramas claiming a deep connection to their mothers (As Norman says, ‘A son’s best friend is his mother.’), We see the trope of her corpse being kept in the son’s home to be the manifestation of blame for her absence, neglect or overbearing nature that created such a monster. As Creed describes, ‘[t]he ultimate in abjection is the corpse. The body protects itself from bodily wastes such as shit, blood, urine and pus by ejecting these substances just as it expels food that, for whatever reason, the subject finds loathsome. The body extricates itself from them and from the place where they fall, so that it might continue to live.’ (2001: 70) It is horror because we as spectators cannot distance ourselves from the visual of the corpse and the constant threat that holds to anyone who is or has a mother. In the last five minutes of the Criminal Minds episode, there is the inevitable dramatic reveal as the mother’s corpse is approached from behind (all you see is the back of a head with grey hair), the swivel chair is turned, and we see the skeleton in a dress with the grey hair wig. (Criminal Minds, 2006: Season 2, Episode 19, 32:17-32:21) Despite our current culture’s desensitisation, much like the other disclosures, this reveal provides us with the ready-made, easy-button answer to the wrongs of the world: it must be the mother’s fault. And yet, the trope resists the male gaze’s triumph in its triteness. Not willing or able to confront a mother character, the male gaze hides behind this easy trope to stand in for meanings it cannot hope to hold. A mother’s work may never be done, but her own subjectivity is the work of a lifetime, not a film frame.