Iconic Quote
“You know I love you.”
— The Other Mother, Coraline
What Makes Them Great
The Other Mother is the villain who offers everything a child wants — attention, food, fun — and the price is your eyes and your soul. The button-eye motif is profoundly disturbing, and her gradual transformation from loving mother to skeletal spider-creature is stop-motion horror at its finest.
The Villain
The Other Mother (the Beldam) is stop-motion animation's most unsettling villain — an entity that creates a perfect mirror world to lure children, feeds on their souls, and replaces their eyes with buttons. Teri Hatcher voices both Coraline's distracted real mother and the attentive, gradually more monstrous Other Mother, and the contrast is the film's genius. The button eyes are among the most disturbing villain signatures in animation history.
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