"The Babadook"

Touted by none other than The Exorcist director William Friedkin as the most terrifying film he’d ever seen and crowned with an unusually high number of film festival prizes for a horror film, The Babadook rode in theatres with great expectations weighing on its shoulders. Given its seemingly trite premise – a child’s imaginary friend/monster turns out to be true and terrorizes him and his mother – that had already produced last year’s dull Mamá, I was initially quite skeptical about its ability to live up to these expectations. Happily, my skepticism was misplaced. Not only does The Babadook succeed in frightening you without a single jump-scare (a rarity in contemporary Hollywood horror), it understands the roots of what make stories of our mind’s demons coming to life so frightening and that the true point of interest is not whether the monster is real or a product of the protagonist’s imagination – it is both – but what the monster represents.

The titular Babadook is born from the very existence of Amelia’s son Samuel, whose father died taking his pregnant wife to hospital (an interesting gender-switch on traditional fairytale tales of orphanage, as it is usually the mother who dies giving birth to the child) and the devastating psychological scars that result from so paradoxical a tragedy. The Babadook is many things: A widow’s grief, the resentment she dares not admit she feels towards her son for his perceived responsibility in his death, the resentment he feels in turn for the feelings he perceives within her that she denies, and the violent fantasies that he takes refuge in. Writer/Director Jennifer Kent shows a keen grasp of what it is like to both be a troubled “special” child and the mother of that troubled child; it is not surprising that the film’s most frightening scenes are not the night terrors but the scenes between mother and son that build up to them – Samuel’s knocking of a cousin out of her treehouse at her birthday party and the subsequent tantrum in the car come to mind.

As the Babadook’s grip on Amelia’s mind tightens, her house is gradually defragmented into semi-autonomous rooms that seem to exist parallel to the corridors and hall that connect them. Using mid-to-long focal lenses and dark lighting, Kent and cinematographer Radek Ladczuk contribute to the progressive sense of despatialization by repeatedly placing Amelia in the center of shots and framing her in a way that blocks out most of the outside world. This is particularly evident in scenes where she watches television: Scenes from silent Georges Méliès fantasies and Mario Bava horrors are assembled next to long-focal close-ups of Amelia’s tired staring face, integrating them within her mental space as much as her physical one.

All very simple, even basic stuff. Yet Jennifer Kent manages to renew familiar tropes and situations by making them the icing on the cake rather than its pastry, and subverting expectations induced by their appearance – such as the threatened interference of an external party who, in most horror films, would be either killed off by the monster or contribute to its defeat. Composed like a symphony, the film builds its scares on unsettling yet little-magnified behaviour from its characters and occasional unusually fast framerates, reserving the bigger scare chords for its climax. As such, most of the fuel backing up these stylistic tools is provided by the intense Medean duel between Essie Davis and newcomer Noah Wiseman – each of whom at different times gives the impression of turning into a screeching, grimacing beast. Their performances don’t just make the pop-up book monster come to life, they also manifest the fears contained within all scary fairy tales for children; fears that, beneath the simple plots and structure, are treated with a very adult maturity. And while its themes of depression and grief are more overt than the underlying subtext of most tales – perhaps a little too much at times from a horror aficionado’s point of view – The Babadook keeps in with the Perraultian tradition with beauty and intelligence that put the mainstream horror film industry to shame.