M.O.M. (Mothers of Monsters)

I’ve always been intrigued by real-life horror films that use the dysfunctions of society as a vessel to explore the truth. One of the tragic truths we are facing right now is an epidemic of youth violence in this country. The 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary in Connecticut was a real wake-up call for me because that was the same school my niece almost attended, which would have put her in the same classroom, at the same time, when a former student went on a shooting spree, killing twenty-six people. Despite the overwhelming sense of horror we all feel in the aftermath of a mass shooting, the divisive state of this nation has rendered us completely incapable of enacting change. We’ve allowed it to become a political argument over gun reform and healthcare and I believe our inaction ultimately condones these acts of violence.

I’m not a politician, but as a filmmaker I felt the need to keep this crisis seared into our collective consciousness however I could. A lot of research went into this film, the screenplay was vetted by mental health professionals, and we worked very hard to make sure we were not sensationalizing this crisis in any way. This film is not about a school shooter. It is about the generational breakdown of communication within a uniquely American family. It is about the deterioration of the human psyche that has the propensity to produce a school shooter. First and foremost, M.O.M. is a very disturbing work of narrative fiction, but a lot of the events, character traits and dialogue were borrowed from the journals, manifestos and memoirs of real-life school shooters and their parents.

I have a background in documentary television, and I wanted this film to have that same kind of authentic, unpolished doc vibe. I needed it to be gritty and uncomfortably voyeuristic, so the audience had that sense of peeking through a keyhole into the intimate life of someone else’s dysfunctional family. Found footage is a brilliant mechanism of filmmaking if you use it right. And using it right has everything to do with giving the characters a believable reason to be filming in the first place. What better hook than a mother who outfits her entire house with spy cameras to figure out if her own son is a psychopath? The monster in this movie is human, and it’s the kind of monster we’re seeing on the news every week in this country. That makes this a very confronting film, but I think it will contribute to the national dialogue surrounding mental health stigma and gun violence in a profoundly personal way.