Movies like The Hand that Rocks the Cradle include stories about people who infiltrate a family’s life and disrupt everything. The original film was a 1992 release by director Curtis Hanson (L.A. Confidential), the story of a nanny (Rebecca De Mornay) working to tear a family apart and replace the mother she works for.
In 2025, The Hand that Rocks the Cradle was remade, with Mary Elizabeth Winstead as the mother, and minor changes were made to help the new Hulu release dominate its opening week. For fans of stories where someone tries to ruin a person’s life, here are other movies like The Hand that Rocks the Cradle.
The Visit (2015)
Released in 2015, M. Night Shyamalan began his comeback with the found-footage horror film The Visit. The story follows teenage siblings who are sent to spend five days with their maternal grandparents, whom they have never met. However, the longer they are there, the more they realize something is wrong.
Like most of his movies, this includes a Shyamalan twist, and it works perfectly here. It turns out that the grandparents are not the real grandparents, but are instead escaped psychiatric patients who killed the kids’ grandparents and took their place in the home.
Much like The Hand that Rocks the Cradle, this is a movie about someone who wants to step in and replace another person, taking over their life. In this case, they succeeded and would likely have maintained the charade if not for the two teens who came to stay for the week and discovered the ruse.
One difference is that the killers in this movie are not really interested in being grandparents to the teens, but are only playing along to keep their dark secrets. That makes it an even more terrifying version of the trope.
Poison Ivy (1992)
Poison Ivy is a movie very similar to The Hand that Rocks the Cradle, but it comes at the story from a different angle. Instead of a nanny who wants to push out the mother and replace her in the family unit, this sees a teenager who wants to replace her friend in the family, with devastating effects.
Drew Barrymore stars as Ivy, the teen who decides she wants to move in and then starts to try to seduce her friend’s dad. However, in this case, only the daughter, Sylvie (Sara Gilbert), realizes what is going on and tries to get Ivy out of her life before she destroys her family.
With the main villain being a teenager seducing the father and actually killing the mother, this was an even more disturbing telling of the story. This movie had a similar ending to The Hand that Rocks the Cradle, as it took the death of the antagonist to end their reign of terror.
Bad Influence (1990)
Not only did Curtis Hanson direct The Hand that Rocks the Cradle, but he also directed a similar story with a different slant two years earlier in Bad Influence. Instead of an outsider coming in to destroy a family by trying to force her way in, this had an outsider ruining a man’s life by luring him into temptation.
Rob Lowe was the charming outsider, Alex, who meets James Spader’s Michael, a socially awkward man who allows people to push him around. Alex then convinces Michael to cut loose and do things that keep him from getting stepped on all the time. What results is a cat-and-mouse game between the two that ends in tragedy.
As mentioned, there is no family destruction here, but it is similar to The Hand that Rocks the Cradle in that a person comes in and tries to mold a person’s life into what they want it to be. The acting was great, and this was a look at the story from a male perspective by the same director.
Single White Female (1992)
The same year as The Hand that Rocks the Cradle, a very similar movie was also released in theaters. That movie was Single White Female, which stars Jennifer Jason Leigh as Hedy, a woman who answers an ad and becomes the roommate of Allie (Bridget Fonda), a successful software designer.
Just as in The Hand that Rocks the Cradle, Single White Female depicts an outsider who sees a successful woman and wants her life for herself. Both films see the outsider begin to dig in more and more, setting things up to force their way in and replace their roommate.
This movie is much more tragic than The Hand that Rocks the Cradle, and it plays more like a dark thriller than that film. This is a movie about one obsessed person destroying another’s life completely, and leaving them empty and alone at the end. There was also a lesser sequel 13 years later.
Orphan (2009)
Orphan takes the theme from The Hand that Rocks the Cradle and turns the outside invader into a “child.” In this movie, a couple has struggled to have a child and decides to adopt a nine-year-old Russian girl named Esther. However, they don’t realize until it’s too late that Esther is not a child at all.
Throughout the movie, Esther depicts puzzling mannerisms that lead Kate, the mother, to realize something is wrong, and when she finally learns the truth, there is a battle to the death. This is a little more similar to The Visit, where Esther is in self-preservation mode and will do anything to keep her secret, including murder.
What is most shocking is that Orphan is based on a true story, and there was even a similar case after the fact, where the adoptive parents used the movie as an excuse for why they felt their daughter was not really a child. It is a disturbing tale, and it even received a prequel in 2022.
Fatal Attraction (1987)
Fatal Attraction is a thriller about a man who has an affair with a woman, only to find that she won’t let it go when he tries to end it. Michael Douglas is Dan, and Glenn Close is Alex, the woman he has an affair with. When he tries to break things off, she contemplates suicide and then begins to torment Dan and his family.
Unlike The Hand that Rocks the Cradle, Alex doesn’t want to take Dan’s wife, Beth’s, place in the family. She wants to just take Dan for herself and does some terrible things to his wife and daughter to try to drive them away. By the end, she has come completely unhinged and launches an all-out attack on the family.
The Fatal Attraction ending is a little troublesome today, with Dan’s wife coming to his rescue and almost instantly forgiving him for his blame. It is also ironic that the ending was supposed to be more tragic, with Alex dying by suicide, making it look like Dan killed her to ruin his life. This tragedy could have changed everything about the film.
Stoker (2013)
Stoker is a complicated movie about a family whose patriarch dies, and his brother moves in and slowly takes his place in the family unit. Directed by Japanese visionary Park Chan-wook (Oldboy), Matthew Goode is Charlie Stoker, the brother who moves in with Nicole Kidman’s Evelyn and her daughter India (Mia Wasikowska).
The film becomes very creepy when he takes more notice of India while continuing to woo Evelyn. This causes India to start to develop more antagonistic traits, which Charlie almost encourages, and he slowly begins to demolish this small, broken family with just his presence.
Unlike The Hand that Rocks the Cradle, Charlie succeeds in destroying this family. However, this takes the entire idea one step further. Charlie does not emerge victorious but instead corrupts another family member into committing atrocious acts, delivering a shocking, dark ending to the story.
Fear (1996)
Fear is a movie about a handsome, charming young man who begins dating a young woman and slowly destroys her family’s life. Released in 1996, this was an early Mark Wahlberg performance where he plays David, a young man who begins dating teenage Nicole (Reese Witherspoon).
While Nicole’s (William Petersen) dad doesn’t like David, his concerns are for good reason when David shows violent tendencies, and Nicole can’t seem to let him go. This, like The Hand that Rocks the Cradle, is a movie about a person becoming obsessed with someone and refusing to let go, as he destroys their life.
David is even more dangerous and evil than Mrs. Mott in The Hand that Rocks the Cradle, as he is a violent man who will hurt anyone who angers him and doesn’t really care about love or acceptance. He only wants destruction.
The Good Son (1993)
The Good Son is similar to Orphan and Poison Ivy, but it is much more disturbing because of the characters’ ages. Fresh off his breakout role in Home Alone, Macaulay Culkin took on a very different role as a young sociopath who sets out to destroy the lives of another young man and his family.
Elijah Wood plays Mark, a young man whose mother died, so his dad sends him to live with his aunt and uncle, and their kids, Connie (Quinn Culkin) and Henry (Culkin). Of the two, Henry turns out to be the bad seed, and his own parents can’t seem to see that he’s developing violent tendencies.
Unlike The Hand that Rocks the Cradle, The Good Son presents the person actively trying to destroy the family as part of the family, and the young man he seeks to blame is the innocent outsider. Despite that difference, the two movies are very similar in structure, and each ends with a gut punch.
Rosemary’s Baby (1968)
Rosemary’s Baby is a lot like The Hand that Rocks the Cradle, but on a much grander scale. Instead of one person coming into a family’s life and trying to manipulate them into what they want the family to look like, this sees an entire cult pulling the strings to get the family where they want them to be.
Of course, Rosemary’s Baby isn’t about someone who wants to replace a family member, but instead about the cult trying to ensure that Rosemary becomes pregnant with the Antichrist. Shockingly, Rosemary’s husband is even part of the scheme, making this even more difficult to accept.
This might be the top critically acclaimed movie like The Hand that Rocks the Cradle, as it earned two Oscar nominations, winning Best Supporting Actress for Ruth Gordon. It was also added to the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress in 2014.
This story originally appeared on Screenrant
