Jessica Chastain's "Other Mommy" Scary Face Has the Internet Obsessed — and Her Method Is Fascinating

LOS ANGELES — There is a specific kind of internet moment that tells you a horror movie is about to land, and it isn't the trailer views or the poster drop. It's when the star starts doing the scary thing on a talk show and everybody collectively loses it. That is exactly where we are with Jessica Chastain and Other Mommy, which opens in theaters tomorrow, October 9.

The clip is 35 seconds long. A fan account, @bestofchastains, posted it this week with the caption "I'M A TRAINED ACTOR": Chastain in a black turtleneck, blonde hair in a sleek bob, bold red lip, doing the film's signature fixed, unblinking smile while looking like she's barely holding it together laughing at herself. By the time of writing it had cleared 219,000 views with around 1,800 likes and 177 reposts — a genuinely absurd ratio for a fan account posting a talk-show clip. People cannot get enough of watching an Oscar winner turn her face into a haunted house on command.

According to a separate report, the demonstration happened on Jimmy Kimmel Live, where Chastain walked Kimmel through the technique: tighten your whole body, keep your teeth hidden, and imagine you're holding something heavy. Then Kimmel reportedly tried it himself — which is the exact kind of cursed television that makes a press tour worth watching.

But here's what makes the clip more than a meme: the face is the movie. Universal released a behind-the-scenes featurette titled "A New Face of Fear," in which Chastain describes getting into the headspace of what she calls a figure "trying to hold its skin on." No elaborate prosthetics doing the heavy lifting — the dread comes from subtle facial work, from an actor deciding exactly where a smile stops being a smile. That is a much harder trick than it looks, and it's why the clip plays: you can see a great actor doing the math in real time.

The most famous story about the face comes from a Q&A on the Universal lot, which CinemaBlend attended. Chastain explained that while she was working on the expression, a five-year-old happened to be in the makeup trailer. She made the face. The child screamed. She and director Rob Savage looked at each other and decided they had it. Honestly? There is no better focus group on earth than a kindergartner. Kids don't do polite applause. If a five-year-old screams, the scare works.

The buzz didn't start this week, either. The first trailer for Other Mommy went properly viral back in July after reportedly startling audiences who caught it before The Odyssey. In it, Chastain's character surprises her daughter with lunch, a kitchen fire breaks out, and she is suddenly revealed as a contorted, spiderlike creature beneath the table. The trailer's other big moment is a simple, chilling question — "Can I go inside your heart?" — which, along with the scares, helped the footage pull tens of millions of views and a whole harvest of memes. Plenty of viewers have compared the premise to Coraline, the other great story about a sinister alternate mother, and it's not hard to see why.

"Can I go inside your heart?"— dialogue from the Other Mommy trailer, which drew tens of millions of views after its July debut

In the story, adapted from Josh Malerman's novel Incidents Around the House, Chastain plays a dual role: she's both Bela's real mother and "Other Mommy," a manifestation of a sinister entity that looks exactly like her. Bela, an 8-year-old girl, is played by Arabella Olivia Clark, with Jay Duplass as her father — a character the film nicknames "Daddo." The cast also includes Dichen Lachman, Arian Moayed and Karen Allen. The setup preys on the most universal fear there is — a parent being replaced by something wrong inside the place that's supposed to be safest.

For Chastain, the role is also a neat inversion of her own horror history. Back in 2013's Mama, she played the woman protecting two girls from a monster. Now she gets to be the monster. And she's doing it at a fascinating point in her career — fresh off headlining Netflix's country-noir thriller Heartland, whose trailer just dropped ahead of its November 13 premiere, and with an Oscar on the shelf for The Eyes of Tammy Faye. The prestige-to-horror pipeline used to be a one-way trip actors took when the phone stopped ringing. Chastain is treating it like a promotion.

She's also keeping a firm line between the work and her life. In a recent profile she explained that the calmer her everyday life is, the more freedom she has to go completely wild on screen — and she declined to discuss how motherhood influenced the part. Which, frankly, tracks with the clip: off camera she's clearly having the time of her life, and on camera she's willing to go somewhere genuinely disturbing. That balance is the whole trick. The scariest people in horror are always the ones who are having fun.

So tomorrow the movie opens, and we'll find out whether the face that broke a five-year-old in a makeup trailer can hold a whole film. But the clip already did its real job: it reminded everyone that movie stars used to do things on talk shows — bits, tricks, actual performance — instead of just plugging the thing. Chastain showed up, tightened her body, hid her teeth, imagined something heavy, and gave the internet a new nightmare. Trained actor, indeed.