Is Other Mommy based on Coraline? Don't bring the kids who loved Coraline to this one

Other Mommy, Rob Savage's horror movie from Universal and Blumhouse, opened in theaters on October 9 and came to digital on November 10, with 4K, Blu-ray and DVD to follow on December 29. Jessica Chastain plays Ursula, a mother in a failing marriage, and also the creature that wears her face to get close to her daughter, Bela, played by Arabella Olivia Clark. Ever since the first trailer, one question has followed the movie around: isn't this just Coraline?

Is Other Mommy based on Coraline?

No. Other Mommy is adapted from Incidents Around the House, a 2024 novel by Josh Malerman, the author of Bird Box. Nathan Elston, a Succession staff writer, wrote the screenplay.

Coraline is Neil Gaiman's 2002 novella, which Henry Selick turned into a stop-motion film for Laika in 2009. The two stories have different authors and different studios, and they share no rights.

Why it looks like Coraline anyway

The resemblance isn't in your head. It goes deeper than the title:

• The name — Gaiman's villain is the Other Mother. Malerman's is Other Mommy.
• The face — both villains look like the heroine's real mother. In Coraline, Teri Hatcher voices both mothers. In Other Mommy, Chastain plays both.
• The deal — neither monster can simply take the girl. Coraline's Other Mother needs her to agree to have buttons sewn into her eyes. Other Mommy needs Bela to agree to let it into her heart.
• The house — both girls live with parents too wrapped up in their own problems to notice what's visiting their daughter.

That third point is the core of Malerman's monster, and he describes it with a different monster in mind.

"There's something vampiric there," Malerman told Dread Central.

Like a vampire, it has to be invited in. Gaiman's Other Mother plays by the same rule. They make their pitch in very different ways.

Where the resemblance ends

The Other Mother is a temptation. She cooks better, listens better and builds Coraline a world full of wonders. The Daily Beast's review put it this way: she was "seductive precisely because she was the ideal opposite of its heroine's subpar real mom."

Other Mommy doesn't offer Bela a better life. It goes after the one she has.

"Her insidious goal is trying to drive a wedge between Bela and her family," Savage told Empire.

So the creature spends the movie working on the family's secrets. Ursula is having an affair with Frank, a family friend played by Arian Moayed. Russ, played by Jay Duplass, isn't Bela's biological father. And in the basement, the creature drags a final confession out of Ursula where Bela can hear it: she never wanted to be a mother.

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Coraline is about a girl tempted by a better mother. Other Mommy is about a girl finding out what her real one really thinks of motherhood.

Why the Coraline fans should sit this one out

The ratings tell most of the story. Coraline is rated PG for "thematic elements, scary images, some language and suggestive humor." Other Mommy is rated R for "some bloody violence, and language." Here's what that R covers:

• The language — the F-word comes up often.
• The deaths — Other Mommy turns Frank inside out in front of Bela, and a team of ghost hunters learns the hard way that their séance actually works.
• The body horror — a face that sags, feet that drift off the floor, and a body folded the wrong way under a table, the shot that made the first trailer infamous.
• The scares — Savage told Entertainment Weekly the movie "plays the hits of every aspect of horror." It packs them all into 93 minutes.
• The secrets — the affair and that basement confession are adult material, and the movie makes sure a child hears them.

Even the ending won't leave anyone alone. Stay through the credits and Other Mommy comes back for one more shot, finger to her lips, shushing the audience.

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