The maternal experience of filial violence, in that it remains largely unutterable and unacknowledged, is the subject of this project. The home is the silent witness providing ‘objective’ descriptions of the violence and it is the uncanny expressing the mother’s changing perceptions of her everyday environment under siege. The home and the mother’s body are considered as maternal spaces, at times indistinguishable. This research is an attempt at representing in an art and writing practice the predicament of the mother who experiences violence from her child, a violence about which she must remain silent. How can she risk endangering her child by revealing how her child endangers her? How can she endanger herself, by revealing how her child endangers her? How can she endanger herself by not revealing how her child endangers her? Is the mother the monster or is it the child? As she is the progenitor of the monster, must she not be monstrous too? Although domestic violence between adults or from parent to child is widely acknowledged and the subject of many studies and representations, child to parent violence remains mainly unrecognised. Filial violence pitches a presumably innocent and helpless child against a mother presumably all loving and in charge of the care, well-being, and formation of her child. Filial violence undermines these dominant assumptions by literally and figuratively wreaking havoc in this untroubled scene of reciprocal and unconditional love. Taking my cue from Slavoj Žižek’s suggestion that we ‘look awry’ in order to glimpse at that which is not evident, I approach the topic of child-to-mother violence through the motif of ‘the home’ understood as the house of maternal benevolence and its familiar objects as well as the primary home of the child – the maternal body. The physical site of home is also apprehended through the mother’s changing perception of her familiar environment that becomes strange and menacing, I turn to the idea of the uncanny (unheimlich, unhomely) defined by Sigmund Freud as the familiar becoming unfamiliar and which he interprets as signalling the return of unconscious phantasies that had been repressed. Writing and artistic practices borrow the structure and tropes from the literary and cinematic horror genre (for instance, the haunted house and the double, both figures of the uncanny) in order to represent an experience that resists representation. According to Paul Wells horror ‘as a genre, remains subversive and challenging because it foregrounds, through the comparative safety of fiction, the very agendas humankind needs to address in “fact”’. Keeping with the idea of ‘the comparative safety of fiction’, I am creating a fictional mother and child whose interactions take place in a fictional home constructed out of other fictions (novels, films), memories and testimonies of actual filial violence.