“I am stuck inside a prison of my own creation,” she imagines herself telling an acquaintance in a passage from the novel that appears largely intact in the film. “I am angry all the time. I would like one day to direct my own artwork toward a critique of these modern-day systems that articulates all this, but my brain no longer functions as it did before the baby, and I am really dumb now.”
“The thing I really attached to is this idea of loss of identity,” Adams says. Heller, too, could relate on several levels: “I have this memory of having food poisoning when my son was really little. I was throwing up, and he toddled in and started nursing on me while I was lying on the bathroom floor.” She felt emptied, “like I had nothing left. Just like, ‘My body is not my own anymore. This is so fucked up.’” At the same time, she couldn’t imagine delegating his care to another person. “It felt like I was a bear and I had this cub, and the cub wasn’t supposed to go very far away from me. I needed to be connected physically to him at all times.”
As she flounders, Mother starts to notice those inexplicable physical changes. Fur appears on her back and butt. (As her adorable son, played by Arleigh and Emmett Snowden, helpfully informs her: “Mama fuzzy.”) Neighborhood dogs start turning up wherever she goes. There’s a bump at the base of her spine that just might be a nascent tail. Things head in an increasingly surreal direction, showing just how wild Yoder let her imagination run when she wrote the novel in a sort of fevered haze. (Like Heller, she had to do it in short, focused bursts while her young son was in day care.) “One of the real challenges of Nightbitch is, what is the tone going to be? Is it going to be funny? Is it going to be dark? Is it going to be horror?” Yoder says. “This is a character who’s in emotional turmoil, but this is also an absurd situation.”