Written and directed by John Waters (aka The Pope of Trash), SERIAL MOM is a black comedy and smart social satire drawing on the concept of the nuclear family, and the glue that holds it all together – a perfect doting housewife and mother.
Beverly Sutphin appears to be an unassuming upper-middle-class housewife living with her dentist husband Eugene and their teenage children, Misty and Chip, in Towson, Maryland. In truth, she is a serial killer who glories in the violent murders of people who have slighted her.
LANGUAGE: English
RUN TIME: 1h 33mins
VIBE: Camp genre classic, dark comedy
This screening is part of THE FEMININE URGE, a series themed around alternative depictions of femininity, where violence, psychopathy and dissociation define female leads. The selected films look at the changing nature of feminine archetypes, with a move towards the ‘girlboss’ as a loyal subject of capitalism. In late-stage capitalism, girlboss culture relies on social expectations of femininity to enact a quiet evil – maintaining the status quo through a veil of softness, care and subjugation. The women on screen in THE FEMININE URGE represent a dystopian end-point for the deadly combination of quiet servitude and internal rage that capitalist-feminism feeds on, but in some cases also a cathartic and pure form of evil through urge fulfilment that rebels directly against societally-forced identities.