The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, which debuted in 1992 and featured an early, awful Julianne Moore performance, was the first “scary nanny” film of America’s two-income era1. The gothic story starred Annabella Sciorra as a professional class mother tormented by Rebecca de Mornay’s plotting caregiver who wants – as Maika Monroe’s reptilian governess puts it in the new Hulu remake – to “sleep in [her] bed, fuck [her] husband, and raise [her] beautiful daughters."
The original THTRTC – specifically the bathroom-mirror-murder climax – was hokey. Also, a big hit. The film became a date night grand guignole for the first generation of mothers in the odd position of being able to afford help, but unable to not afford it. Presumably, the movie performed well at the box office for precisely the same reason Mrs. Doubtfire, which copied its plot outright, did $219,196,147 at the box office a year later: There’s a haunting truth embedded in caregiving work. The nanny is either pretending to love the kids, which is scary, or really does love the kids, which is arguably scarier.
Since the THTRTC came out there have been, give or take, 20 scary nanny movies to open in wide release. These films are structurally similar to haunted-house movies in which the homeowners don’t move out because of the sunk costs. The monster is only scary because the victims lacks the economic wherewithal to escape. But the scary nanny is a far more insidious foe than any haunted doll because she’s “like family.” That means that she has access, but also – far more importantly – that she’s performing kinship.
Whether or not she’s wearing a mask like Robin Williams, she’s wearing a mask.
Who opens the door for a masked intruder? A lot of us. In 1990, when THTRTC was greenlit, 53% of married couples with children had two incomes. By the mid-1990s, that number was closer to 60% and roughly two million domestic workers were employed nationwide, a third in childcare. Another million worked in day-care centers (which had already endured the pedophilia panic that accompanied the Satanic Panic of the 1980s2). At the same time, the social distance between the upper middle and the middle, including the women doing much of the care, was widening. An increase in homophilous marriage – the coupling of partners with similar educations and incomes – created a high-earning class of parents with more money than time (and not enough money to hire one of those real British nannies).
For young professionals with children, nannies became the price of staying in the top quartile. A white-collar problem was solved with pink-collar labor.
All these nannies – many from the other side of town, plenty of others from Mexico, the Caribbean, and the Phillipines – brought both stability and instability. They became middle management for the home and made schedules sustainable, but they also intruded in intimate spaces because American homes aren’t built with the upstairs-downstairs delineation of Gosford Park (or the basement from Parasite). The practical solution was to oh-so-magnanimously treat them as equals, which also helped assuage the guilt of outsourcing the most meaningful labor to an ostensibly less qualified woman. The trouble with this approach is that it created a crack between the narrative of the home and the reality. Scary stuff hids in that kind of crack.
“When a housewife says her maid is like a friend or a daughter, she is not dismantling the hierarchy between them; she is reinforcing it,” wrote Mary Romero in Maid in the U.S.A.
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[2] Incidentally, there were many more men in childcare prior to the pedophilia panics that accompanied women entering the workplace. I’m referring to nannies here as women because the vast, vast majority are. That was not actually an inevitability. It was the result of bad reporting, lying, and fear. We’re not so great about trusting men either.
[3] Jack subsequently adopts his nanny’s negotiating tactics and Jamaican accent for a professional negotiation. Alec Baldwin’s “So… wattchawannado?” line reading is pure art.
[4] In order for these movies to work, the mothers in them need to be both empowered in their homes and also… not. They need partners who are at once deferential (“sure, let’s hire her"), opinionated (“no, let’s not fire her”), and dumb as a brick (“who doesn’t give 10-year-olds fireworks?”).
SPOILER: Just in case you’re interested, in the new movie the evil nanny turns out to be the daughter of a man who molested the mom as a child causing her to burn down his house with the rest of the family (save one) in it. The implication seems to be that she was also molested, but refuses to believe that her father molested the mother and is also smarting from an economic comedown having been raised in an orphanage. It’s… maybe not the most plausible thing in the world, but it’s a fun set up for Chekhov’s SUV.
