In the canon of horror cinema, the conventional monster often embodies an external threat or force; something tangible and recognizable, usually confined to the supernatural or the grotesque. Yet, in The Woman in the Yard, the terror is not merely about motherhood or poverty in the abstract. It is about Black motherhood in the rural South, where survival has historically depended on communal networks of care and kinship that are here stripped away. Black women are disproportionately single mothers — 23 percent of Native American/Alaska Native women, 17 percent of women of two or more races, and 16 percent of Latina women are single mothers, compared with 13 percent of White and seven percent of Asian/Pacific Islander women (IWPR 2019). These numbers reflect systemic inequities that structure women’s lives, but the horror Ramona faces is not reducible to statistics alone. Unlike white maternal horror films, which often depict entrapment in patriarchal domesticity, The Woman in the Yard stages the absence of the Black “village”— the interdependent neighborhood webs that have historically sustained Black mothers against the failures of men, parents, and finances (Collins 2000). Rural Georgia becomes not just a backdrop but an isolating landscape of dispossession, cutting Ramona off from joy, survival, and cultural connection. The horror here is racialized: it is what Black maternal life looks like when severed from its collective lifeline.

Ramona’s crutches become the film’s central metaphor: visible markers of both resilience and vulnerability. They resist the stereotype of the “strong Black woman,” a cultural script that demands endurance without support (Collins 2000). But in the context of rural Georgia, the crutches are not justprops of disability — they mark her disconnection from community. Without other mothers, neighbors, or kin to lean on, the burden of survival falls solely on her. The film’s dread comes from this solitude, where the everyday labor of care is stripped of the collective dimension that has long defined Black maternal survival strategies.

Patricia Hill Collins’s framework in Black Feminist Thought illuminates the stakes here. Collins describes Black motherhood as a site of both oppression and resistance, shaped by intersecting structures of race, class, and gender (Collins 2000, 47). Ramona embodies this contradiction: her motherhood is loving yet precarious, resistant yet under siege. Deprived of the “othermothers” who often help sustain Black families, Ramona becomes isolated in a nuclear household form that has historically marginalized Black women. Her struggle is not simply maternal; it is distinctly racialized, as her Black motherhood is rendered fragile by the erasure of community ties.

The film’s cyclical temporality resonates with Nietzsche’s concept of eternal recurrence — the sense of reliving the same struggle without escape (Nietzsche 1978). For Ramona, each day becomes an iteration of survival without reprieve. Yet, in a specifically Black maternal key, this recurrence recalls Christina Sharpe’s theorization of the “wake” and the “weather” — the ongoing afterlife of slavery that shapes Black existence (Sharpe 2016, 14). Ramona’s haunting is not individual but historical: her solitude echoes the dispossessions that have historically fractured Black kinship networks, from enslavement to Jim Crow to contemporary poverty.

The architecture of the rural home intensifies this isolation. Dylan Trigg argues that domestic spaces are haunted by lived experience, carrying residues of memory and anxiety (Trigg 2012, 87). Ramona’s house, creaking under silence, becomes a site of psychic collapse. Julia Kristeva’s notion of abjection — the breakdown of meaning between self and other (Kristeva 1982, 4) — takes root here, as Ramona confronts both the corpse of her own joy and the unassimilable absence of community. Barbara Creed’s monstrous-feminine (Creed 1993, 11) emerges not in Ramona as monster, but in the horror that maternal life, without communal grounding, can itself become monstrous.

This re-centering of Black maternal horror distinguishes The Woman in the Yard from films like The Babadook (Kent 2014). Where white maternal horror pivots on the collapse of nuclear family structures under patriarchal pressure, The Woman in the Yard stages a different crisis: the stripping away of Black communal mothering. Ramona’s horror is not only that of grief and poverty, but of being forced into a structure alien to her cultural inheritance — isolated motherhood in rural space, cut off from the village that sustains survival.

Ultimately, The Woman in the Yard redefines maternal horror through the specificity of Black motherhood. Ramona’s solitude is not a universal condition but a racialized one: the terror of being denied community in a world where Black survival has always been collective. In staging this dispossession against the backdrop of rural Georgia, the film offers a haunting reminder that the horror of Black motherhood lies not only in systemic neglect, but in the erasure of the very communal lifelines that have historically transformed endurance into resistance, and survival into love.

Works Cited

Collins, Patricia Hill. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of

Empowerment. 2nd ed., Routledge, 2000.

Creed, Barbara. The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. Routledge, 1993.

Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Translated by Leon S. Roudiez, Columbia

University Press, 1982.

Sharpe, Christina. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Duke University Press, 2016.

Trigg, Dylan. Topophobia: A Phenomenology of Anxiety. Edinburgh University Press, 2012.

Collet-Serra, Jaume, director. The Woman in the Yard. Blumhouse Productions, 2025.

Kent, Jennifer, director. The Babadook. Causeway Films, 2014.Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Translated by Walter Kaufmann, Penguin Classics, 1978.

IWPR. Estimates of the Share of Female College Students Who Are Single Mothers by Race/Ethnicity are

for Undergraduate Students Enrolled at Degree-Granting Institutions. 2019. IWPR analysis of data from

the NPSAS:16 and IPEDS.