“You can bring me the boy. You can bring me the boy. You can bring me the boy.”
Making horror movies in the wake of The Babadook feels almost irrelevant. It’s not that there haven’t been great scary films released after Babadook – It Follows and Hush, the latter of which we’ll cover, are both terrific – it’s just that Jennifer Kent’s first feature is so frightening, so well-constructed, that it makes the bar almost impossible to hurdle. It had such an indelible impact on the horror genre that you almost expect it to be overhyped, but it not only deserves the praise it gets, it somehow deserves even more. A lot of horror films, like Rosemary’s Baby or Insidious or Pet Sematary, are about the lengths a parent would go to in order to protect their child. The Babadook flips the whole idea on its head and wonders what would happen if the parent were the monster instead.
Make no mistake: Amelia (Essie Davis) hates her son Sam (Noah Wiseman). It’s a testament to Kent’s script, and the performances from Davis and Wiseman, that the film never takes great pains to make either one very likable. The film opens with a car crash that kills Amelia’s husband Oskar (Ben Wispear) while they’re on the way to the hospital so Amelia can give birth to Noah. His life is inextricably linked to his father’s death, and when Amelia looks at him she sees a ghost. She tries her best, though, dutifully checking his closet for monsters and reading him fairy tales. Things start to go south when he brings her a children’s book bound in red, featuring an inhuman silhouette on its cover. It’s title: Mister Babadook.
The name Babadook, silly on its surface, is perfectly suited to Kent’s creation. The syllables engender a sense of unease just by being spoken. There’s that insidious D, those long, cavernous Os, and that abrupt K, carrying with it a sense of both finality and inescapability, like the blade of a guillotine. The Baba at the beginning is a false flag, made to seem like so much childish nonsense, when in reality it is a mocking specter of the same. The book itself is a masterwork of design, etched in black and white that looks like charcoal or soot. The popups grow ever more intrusive, the titular monster taking up most of the frame. Kent contrasts this with an earlier shot of Amelia reading The Three Little Pigs to Noah, with its onomatopoeic dialogue and rhyming. Mister Babadook, by contrast, is full of threats that don’t even bother to veil themselves (“I’ll soon take off my funny disguise”). Even after my third viewing of The Babadook, the book has lost none of its chilling strength.
Reading the book lets the monster into Amelia and Noah’s life, but on subsequent viewings one starts to wonder if it was already there. In many ways, The Babadook reminds me of Stephen King’s It, wherein a malevolent force of nameless evil takes whatever form will frighten its victim the most. But the Babadook isn’t evil – it’s hate, the kind of hate that’s impossible to get rid of.
Amelia starts seeing it everywhere. After she tears out the pages and burns the book, it shows up on her front step, stitched back together, with even more menacing imagery. Amelia sees a likeness of herself killing her dog, Noah, and ultimately taking her own life. “The more you deny me, the stronger I get,” the book warns. Amelia sees the Babadook’s hat and coat hanging at a police station; later she crashes her car trying to shake it off of the roof. She can’t escape the ever-growing antipathy she feels towards Sam; at one point she screams “Why can’t you be normal?” after he pushes his cousin out of a treehouse. Sam answers with a shriek of his own. It’s hectic, and unnervingly loud, and it’s at this point that the film takes a strange, brilliant turn.
Essie Davis is the best horror monster of the past decade. As the Babadook’s influence grows on her, she becomes surly and unresponsive, losing her grasp on reality (she sees bugs that aren’t real, hiding behind the wallpaper). When Sam says he’s hungry, she snaps, “If you’re really that hungry, why don’t you go and eat shit!” She does, in fact, kill the dog, snapping its neck in one of the most unpleasant scenes I can remember. The climax of The Babadook is the kind of horrifying that renders you unable to look away. I didn’t even take any notes during this sequence because I physically couldn’t stop watching. If it sounds like I’m overselling this, I am not. Also, if you want to write a contrary review of the film, you can get your own goddamn website.
The film builds to a devastating emotional climax, with the enormous specter of the Babadook – Amelia’s hatred for Sam – looming in her suddenly-enormous room. “You’re not real!” she screams at it, over and over, but it is real. It escapes into her basement, where she keeps it, feeding it worms. Her hatred, like anyone’s, is impossible to banish completely. You can manage it, you can even feed it, but you don’t have to engage it, and ultimately, you can triumph over it.
You can forget the bizarre resolution of the film (honestly, I’ve seen it three times now and have trouble remembering how it ends between rewatches), but you will never forget the imagery (especially Amelia’s creepy Georges Meilere-inspired dream). Or the all-consuming dread and despair. Or the monster’s gravelly, otherworldly voice, demanding entry:
“Baba-dook! Dook! DOOK!”
10/1: Dawn of the Dead (2004)
10/2: The Exorcist
10/3: Pontypool
10/4: Hocus Pocus
10/5:The Orphanage
10/6: Rosemary’s Baby
10/7: Alien
10/8: Scream series
10/9: Scream series
10/10: Cujo
10/11: The Cabin in the Woods
10/12: Pulse
10/13: The Babadook
10/14: Friday the 13th
10/15: The Last House on the Left (both versions)
10/16: The Thing (both versions)
10/17: Little Shop of Horrors
10/18: Hush
10/19: Silent Hill
10/20: The Shining
10/21: Funny Games (2007)
10/22: Evil Dead series
10/23: Evil Dead series
10/24: The Mist
10/25: The Ninth Gate
10/26: The Fly
10/27: A Nightmare on Elm Street
10//28: The Nightmare Before Christmas
10/29: 28 Days Later/28 Weeks Later
10/30: It
10/31: Halloween (either version)
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