horror slasher gender motherhood Simone de Beauvoir Elisabeth Badinter feminism French horror home invasion pregnancy maternal ambivalence As Simone de Beauvoir and many others have discussed, western society too often assumes that the single goal of a woman’s life should be motherhood. These assump- tions can be very damaging for women who choose to pursue other avenues instead of or in addition to motherhood. This article will use the writings of Beauvoir, Sarah Hrdy and Élisabeth Badinter to demonstrate how the recent horror film À l’Intérieur/ Inside (2007), by Bustillo and Maury, examines these ideas by portraying a conflict between differing ideals of motherhood, each embodied as one of the film’s main characters. The article will argue that Inside understands modern constructions of motherhood as being damaging to society and destructive to mothers themselves. For much of its history, western society has had very clear ideas about what constitutes acceptable maternal behaviour. Simone de Beauvoir, in describ- ing traditional views of women, writes that motherhood ‘is her “natural” vocation’ ([1953] 2009: 524). French philosopher Élisabeth Badinter has documented the extent to which enlightenment philosophy, beginning with Rousseau, views the primary function of women as being that of raising chil- dren, and assumes that a ‘good mother’ will devote her entire being to this endeavour ([1980] 1981: 208–259). In her monumental work Mother Nature: A History of Mothers, Infants, and Natural Selection, anthropologist Sarah Hrdy outlines the history of biological theories on human motherhood, arguing