Raising Kids in the Age of “Oh God”
There are helicopter parents, there are free-range parents, and then there is Abbey Bell, who skips right past all known parenting styles and invents “counterterrorism mom.” M.O.M. Mothers of Monsters takes one of the most terrifying modern nightmares—a potential school shooter in your own house—and turns it into a found-footage psychological horror that’s far more unnerving than any ghost story.
Tucia Lyman’s feature debut is low-budget, intimate, and deeply uncomfortable in all the right ways. It’s a horror film where the monster might be your son… or your own paranoia… or both, depending on which camera angle you’re staring at. It’s also darkly funny in that “I laughed but I hate myself now” kind of way.
Abbey Bell: Mom, Filmmaker, Possible Unreliable Narrator
Abbey (Melinda Page Hamilton) is a single mother who responds to her growing fear about her teenage son Jacob (Bailey Edwards) the way any rational person with Wi-Fi and trust issues would: by turning the house into a low-budget NSA op. She installs hidden cameras, records video diaries, and basically converts every argument, eye roll, and slammed door into potential evidence.
Hamilton is phenomenal. Abbey is not a caricature of “hysterical mom”; she’s smart, articulate, and visibly exhausted in that “has Googled every symptom at 3 a.m.” way. Her monologues to the camera swing between heartbreaking vulnerability and bitter sarcasm: one moment she’s pleading with the imagined viewer to understand, the next she’s half-joking about raising “the next Columbine.” The dark humor lands because it never feels glib; it feels like the gallows jokes people make when reality’s already gone too far.
Is she overreacting? Is she right? The film forces you to sit in that awful uncertainty with her. You’re watching a woman try to decide if she’s protecting her kid or pre-emptively destroying his life, and it’s not clear which one is the true horror.
Jacob: Monster, Victim, or Just a Teenager from Hell?
Jacob is the film’s most unnerving achievement. Edwards plays him with a mix of charisma, manipulation, and normal teen assholery that makes it genuinely hard to pin him down. He’s obsessed with violent video games, he has creepy drawings, he lies, mocks his mother, and occasionally radiates that dead-eyed stare you see in true-crime thumbnails.
Of course, that also describes about 40% of teenage boys on any given Tuesday. And that’s the point. Jacob doesn’t stride in like a movie villain; he stalks around the edge of the frame, sometimes a child, sometimes a budding sociopath, sometimes just a kid whose mom is way too up in his business.
When he realizes he’s being recorded, things get really nasty. He turns the psychological screws on Abbey—gaslighting her, mocking her fears, leaning into the role she suspects he’s playing. Is he genuinely dangerous, or just weaponizing her paranoia as revenge? The film never gives you an easy answer, which is exactly why it gets under your skin. The scariest thing isn’t knowing your kid is a monster; it’s not knowing.
Found Footage as Family Therapy from Hell
The found-footage format fits this story like a hidden nanny cam. Lyman uses multiple surveillance angles and handheld confessions to make you feel like an unwilling therapist watching sessions you shouldn’t have access to. The “gritty documentary” look isn’t just stylistic—it deepens the voyeurism. You’re not watching a polished horror film; you’re spying on a family that urgently needs a counselor and instead has YouTube.
Lyman’s background in documentary TV shows in the way scenes are staged and performed. After the actors did a “proper” take, she’d ask them to strip away all the training and deliver lines as simply as possible. You can feel that in the dialogue: it’s messy, overlapping, sometimes awkward—exactly like real arguments. No one is crafting perfect speeches; they’re just trying not to emotionally explode on camera.
There’s a darkly funny meta layer to all this: Abbey is essentially making her own found-footage horror film about her son, except she calls it “evidence.” By the time she’s addressing hypothetical “other mothers of monsters” who might be watching, the line between PSA, plea for help, and manifesto is so blurred it might as well be shot through frosted glass.
The Horror of Not Being Believed
One of the sharpest aspects of M.O.M. is the way it weaponizes disbelief. Abbey is certain something’s wrong. The world around her says: boys will be boys, video games are harmless, moms worry too much, maybe you’re the problem.
That’s where the “monsters” in the title becomes deliciously ambiguous. Is Jacob the monster, or is it the culture that shrugs off red flags until after the tragedy? Is Abbey a monster for invading her son’s privacy and narrativizing his life as a countdown to catastrophe? Or is the true monster the system that leaves one overwhelmed woman to decide whether to turn her kid into the FBI or wait and hope she’s wrong?
The film doesn’t moralize so much as sit you in an increasingly hot bath of ambiguity. Every time you think, “Okay, Jacob’s definitely dangerous,” the movie shows you a moment of humanity. Every time you think, “Abbey is spiraling,” Jacob does something that makes your stomach drop.
Dark Laughs in a Very Dark Place
Given the subject matter—school shootings, parental fear, mental illness—you’d expect the film to be humorless. It isn’t. It’s not cracking jokes about gun violence, but it does find bitter laughs in the absurdity of modern parenting.
Abbey ranting to the camera about warning signs while she digs through her son’s belongings like a one-woman CSI unit feels both horrifying and grimly funny. The idea of making a “how-to guide” for other moms, as if there’s a step-by-step tutorial for spotting future mass murderers, is both bleak satire and a razor-edged commentary on the DIY safety culture we live in.
The humor works because it’s always grounded in pain. These aren’t punchlines so much as pressure valves—tiny releases of tension before the next emotional gut punch.
A Horror Movie with Too Much Reality
On a technical level, M.O.M. is impressive for a mostly single-location, low-budget production. Multiple cameras in a single scene are used smartly, letting us see the same moment from different angles and forcing us to question which “version” we believe. The lack of polish is intentional. This isn’t Paranormal Activity with studio gloss; this is “woman with a laptop and too much fear” territory.
What makes it genuinely unsettling is how close it feels to the real world. We’re used to horror externalizing evil as demons, ghosts, masked killers. Here, the evil—if it exists at all—is entirely human. There’s no soundtrack warning you when to be scared, just the hum of household appliances and the occasional raised voice.
And then there’s the Rotten Tomatoes badge of honor: being named one of the “Top 100 Best Found Footage Movies.” That’s not just trivia; it tracks. M.O.M. understands that the scariest thing about found footage isn’t the ghost at the end of the hallway—it’s the sense that you’re watching something you were never meant to see.
The Monster in the Mirror
By the time the credits roll, M.O.M. Mothers of Monsters has done something slyly brilliant: it’s turned the audience into the final judge. You’ve watched all the “evidence.” You’ve seen the worst of Jacob and the worst of Abbey. Now what? Call the cops? Call a therapist? Call a priest? Or hit “like and subscribe” and move on to the next true-crime binge?
The film doesn’t just ask whether Jacob is a monster; it asks what kind of culture creates kids like him and moms like Abbey. It’s a horror movie that quietly suggests the scariest thing in the room might be us—our appetite for voyeurism, our eagerness to diagnose, our habit of turning tragedy into content.
As a found-footage psychological thriller, it’s tense, well-acted, and surprisingly layered. As a dark little funhouse mirror pointed at modern parenthood and violence, it’s even better. If you’re looking for horror that sticks with you longer than the average jump scare—and don’t mind feeling like an accomplice by the end—M.O.M. Mothers of Monsters is absolutely worth inviting into your living room… just maybe don’t watch it with your teenager.
