Spooky season isn’t for another two and a half months, but 2026 has already been a great year for horror. The story so far has revolved around Curry Barker and his box office breakout, Obsession, which earned wildly positive marks from critics and audiences alike and hauled in over $442 million globally on a reported budget of just $750,000. However, it’s been surrounded by stiff competition, including fellow YouTube sensation Kane Parsons‘ blockbuster Backrooms adaptation, the acclaimed 28 Years Later follow-up The Bone Temple from Nia DaCosta, and indie darling Damian McCarthy‘s Adam Scott-led hit Hokum, among others. Yet, there’s a new film that’s already frightening audiences well before it bows in October.
Other Mommy, from Host director Rob Savage, has been building up buzz ever since the official trailer debuted at CinemaCon back in April. More recently, however, viewers going to see Christopher Nolan‘s epic The Odyssey have been frightened to find the horrifying teaser attached ahead of the Matt Damon-led adventure. Based on the 2024 novel Incidents Around the House by Bird Box author Josh Malerman, the film is led by Jessica Chastain as Ursula, a mother in a troubled marriage that becomes infinitely worse when another entity makes its presence known. Her eight-year-old daughter, Bela (Arabella Olivia Clark), confronts the being, whom she calls the titular “Other Mommy” because of her striking resemblance to Ursula. However, this mimic is no motherly figure, but an increasingly threatening presence that endangers the entire family.
The trailer has now arrived online, giving everyone a chance to see what audiences were so terrified by in theaters. It first introduces what appears to be Ursula, who is having a light-hearted discussion with Bela about the right things to eat after she catches her hiding ice cream behind her back. She seems like an ideal mother, showing a firm hand, but plenty of care for her daughter, until she starts saying some eerie things. Her full nightmarish nature is revealed when Ursula’s husband, Russ (Jay Duplass) comes home to find the creature in hiding and twisted into a form far less human. Chastain will have dual roles to play between the mother and the monster, also joining Dichen Lachman, Karen Allen, Sean Kaufman, Adam Silver, and Carrie Dimaculangan.
Collider Exclusive · Horror Survival Quiz Which Horror Villain Do You Have the Best Chance of Surviving? Jason Voorhees · Michael Myers · Freddy Krueger · Pennywise · Chucky
Five killers. Five completely different ways to die — if you’re not smart enough, fast enough, or self-aware enough to avoid it. Only one of them is the villain your particular set of instincts gives you a fighting chance against. Eight questions will figure out which one.
🏕️Jason
🔪Michael
💤Freddy
🎈Pennywise
🪆Chucky
01
Something feels wrong. You can’t explain it — you just know. What do you do? First instincts are the difference between the survivor and the first act casualty.
02
Where are you most likely to find yourself when things go wrong? Setting is everything in horror. Where you are determines which rules apply.
03
What is your most reliable survival asset? Every survivor has a quality the villain didn’t account for. What’s yours?
04
What kind of fear is hardest for you to fight through? Knowing your weakness is the first step to not dying because of it.
05
You’re with a group when things start going wrong. What’s your role? Horror movies are brutally clear about who survives group situations and who doesn’t.
06
What’s the horror movie mistake you’re most likely to make? Honest self-assessment is a survival skill. Denial is not.
07
What’s your best weapon against something that can’t be stopped by conventional means? Every horror villain has a weakness. The survivors are always the ones who find it.
08
It’s the final scene. You’re the last one standing. How did you make it? The final survivor always has a reason. What’s yours?
Your Survival Odds Have Been Calculated Your Best Chance Is Against…
Your instincts, your strengths, and your particular way of thinking under pressure point to one villain you actually have a fighting chance against. Everyone else — good luck.
Camp Crystal Lake · Friday the 13th
Jason Voorhees
Jason is relentless, but he is also predictable — and that is the gap you would exploit.
He moves in straight lines toward his target. He doesn’t strategise, doesn’t adapt, doesn’t outsmart. He simply pursues.
Your ability to keep moving, use the environment, and resist the panic that freezes most victims gives you a genuine edge.
The Crystal Lake survivors were always the ones who stopped running in circles and started thinking about terrain, water, and distance.
You think like that. Which means Jason, for all his indestructibility, would face someone who simply refused to be where he expected.
Haddonfield, Illinois · Halloween
Michael Myers
Michael watches before he moves. He is patient, methodical, and almost impossible to detect — until it’s too late for anyone who isn’t paying close enough attention.
But you are paying attention. You notice the shape in the window, the car parked slightly wrong, the silence where there should be sound.
Michael’s power lies in the invisibility of ordinary suburbia — the fact that nothing ever looks wrong until it already is.
Your spatial awareness and instinct to map every room, every exit, and every shadow before you need them is precisely the quality Laurie Strode had.
You are not a victim waiting to happen. You are someone who already suspects something is wrong — and acts on it.
Elm Street · A Nightmare on Elm Street
Freddy Krueger
Freddy wins by getting inside your head — using your own fears, your own memories, your own subconscious as weapons against you. That strategy requires a target who can be destabilised.
You are harder to destabilise than most. You’ve faced uncomfortable truths about yourself and you haven’t looked away.
The survivors on Elm Street were always the ones who understood what was happening and chose to face it rather than flee from it.
Freddy’s greatest weakness is that his power evaporates in the presence of someone who refuses to give him the fear he feeds on.
Your psychological resilience — the ability to stay grounded when reality itself becomes unreliable — is exactly the quality that keeps you alive here.
Derry, Maine · It
Pennywise
Pennywise is ancient, shapeshifting, and feeds on terror — but it has one critical vulnerability: it cannot function against someone who genuinely stops being afraid of it.
The Losers Club didn’t survive because they were braver than everyone else. They survived because they faced their fears together, and faced them honestly.
You ask the questions others avoid. You look directly at what frightens you rather than turning away.
That directness — the refusal to let fear fester in the dark — is Pennywise’s worst nightmare.
It chose the wrong target when it chose you. You are exactly the kind of person whose fear tastes like nothing at all.
Chicago · Child’s Play
Chucky
Chucky’s greatest advantage is that nobody takes him seriously until it’s already too late. He exploits the gap between how something looks and what it actually is.
You don’t have that gap. You take threats seriously regardless of how they present — and you never make the mistake of underestimating something because of its size or appearance.
Chucky relies on surprise, on the delay between recognition and response. You close that delay faster than almost anyone.
Your instinct to treat every unfamiliar thing with appropriate scepticism — rather than dismissing it because it seems absurd — is the exact quality that keeps you breathing.
Against Chucky, not laughing is already winning. You are very good at not laughing.
Rob Savage Hopes ‘Other Mommy’ Becomes an Iconic New Horror Villain
Atomic Monster and Blumhouse backed Other Mommy, with James Wan serving as a producer and Malerman joining Savage as an executive producer. The screenplay, meanwhile, came from Nathan Elston. For Savage, the appeal of the project came from the main monster herself, who not only plays into classic tropes of maternal horror and evil beings targeting and manipulating children, but becomes her own entity. In an interview with Collider’s Michael Zimmermann ahead of the trailer’s arrival, he expressed his hopes that, with Wan’s help, effects wizardry combined with the physicality of stunt performer Lucy Johnson, and the Oscar-winning Chastain’s performance, the Other Mommy enters the pantheon of horror greats.
“I think when I first got sent the book by Josh Malerman, who, I knew Birdbox and I knew his stuff. I was reading it, flipping the pages, and very early on, this Other Mommy character comes up, and I was always looking for a new, iconic horror villain. I feel like it’s very hard to make that hit. It’s very hard to make that connect and feel like there’s going to be a legacy to these characters. I mean, James is the king at doing this, especially in the Conjuring universe. But I read Other Mommy and I felt like there is an iconic horror villain that… And I was reading it. I was like, okay, well, if I can get people dressing up as Other Mommy next Halloween, that could be something really special. So that was the jumping-off point. And then to make that horror villain Jessica Chastain, it’s kind of a slam dunk.”
Wan, on the other hand, loved the idea of exploring the concept of an evil doppelgänger, but with extra layers. “It’s a movie about, like, the evil entity in this world is trying to befriend this little kid to try and kind of get into her world to take her over, whatever it is that she’s aiming to do, and I think that’s frightening,” he told Zimmermann. The true horror of Other Mommy comes not just from her appearance, but how the being learns and slowly blurs the line between itself and Ursula. Add in the perspective of a young child who relies so deeply on her mother, and it makes for something that the Insidious and Saw maestro finds deeply unsettling and unique among his filmography.
“Thats a very scary thing, and I don’t think I’ve ever made a movie yet where the evil demonic entity is actually like your mother, or at least looks like your mother in this case, and I feel like that’s what makes this effective is that you know it’s not a faceless monster out there that’s coming into your house that’s chasing you down with a hatchet or whatever. It’s not that. It’s one that wants to be someone that is beloved. That’s from your world, and I think that, from a psychological standpoint, makes for a very effective horror film.”
Other Mommy arrives in theaters on October 9. Check out the trailer in the player above.
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