She's actually the demon ruler of the Other World with arachnid characteristics and needle-like fingers and legs. The Other Mother is considered to be some sort of demon as she collects souls. Personally, I think the Other Mother is a result of a spider having sex with a button-eyed doll made out of metal.
shareShe's a metaphor for all the wrong happening on the other side....It's a movie which makes you shift your focus towards negative spectrum & I congrats Team Coraline to made it possible in such a subtle way
Another movie which is less famous than Coraline but nevertheless has same effect on your subconscious is
The King of Pigs 2011
Check out yourself and dive into yours untapped psyche...
http://visualnama.com/video/575/the-king-of-pigs-2011/
Neil Gaiman (the author of Coraline) never revealed exactly what she is (only that he created a backstory for her when he was writing the novel), but I guess she's some kind of ancient deity or demon - like the cat -, who created - or was born in - the Other World.
Some fans of Gaiman's work argue that the Other Mother was based upon a poem by John Keats which describes a wicked fairy who seduces knights and trap them in her lair, just like the Other Mother did with the children. Also, the fairy is referred to as "La Belle Dame", just like the ghost-children would refer to the Other Mother as the Beldam. There were other similarities, but I read it years ago and I can't remember all.
The Other Mother can be a pretty tragic character since eyes are considered the windows to the soul, and the fact that she has no eyes may be telling us that she's empty and her seeking of children to take care and be loving to can be interpreted as her trying to have something to fill her in. In the book, she doesn't show interest in eating them or anything like that. She simply locks them up and leave them to starve when they start causing trouble and destroying the fake, perfect family she built. So she's not the monster out of a Stephen King's novel the movie paints her to be.
Hello World! :-)
It is possible that she was supposed to be one of the Fair Folk, an evil faerie or witch that steals children and feeds on them.
She was a denizen of the Twilight Zone.
Narrator: "There is a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man's fears and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination. It is an area which we call the Twilight Zone."
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The story is king.