Photo Credit: Matt Nettheim
As a film genre, horror has increasingly become little more than an abbreviation for horrible. An exception? Last year’s remarkable Australian award-winner, The Babadook, out now on DVD and in an elaborate Blu-ray edition packaged like the sinister children’s book at the heart of the story.
The Babadook merits mention alongside such classics of late 20th century horror as The Shining and Carrie. Although Stephen King did not author The Babadook, it’s the sort of story King could write at his creative peak. The Babadook finds the uncanny in the everyday, and locates horror in social arrangements and human psychology as well as the supernatural.
Writer-director Jennifer Kent interweaves many anxieties into one tapestry of terror. At bottom, there is a mother’s fear of being unable to respond to her child’s cry for help. The mom, Amelia (a fabulously realized performance by Essie Davis), lost her husband seven years earlier and is coping with raising her increasingly unruly son, Sam (Noah Wiseman). “My dad’s in the cemetery—he got killed driving mom to the hospital to have me,” Sam blurts out to a stranger in the supermarket. The emotional dynamic is primal and intensified by circumstances: Sam wants to protect his mom in an environment lacking a father figure, but the thing he wants to protect her from is in his head (or is it?): A monster, not just the usual ones who live under beds at night, but a specter that emerges from the pages of a children’s book…
But before we address children’s literature, more must be said about family and social arrangements. Amelia’s sister Claire tells her to “get on with it” regarding the loss of Oscar, her husband. Along with Oscar’s aged mum, Claire is one of Sam’s babysitters, but the sister has her own life and doesn’t want the increasingly erratic toddler around. Claire’s daughter, a cruel princess, taunts: “Your dad died so he didn’t have to be with you!” Sam’s school doesn’t want him because his behavior is a danger to other children. Amelia must juggle loneliness, single motherhood in a fraying social network and an increasingly unruly child with a job that brings its own horrors—a nursing home, especially her work in the dementia ward.
And now, that sinister children’s book, Mister Babadook, discovered one night on the shelves. The dark story of a simian-like figure in a top hat is written in rhyme and includes the unsettling warning: “Take heed of what you read.” Words have power, an idea lost in a world where talk is cheap and words have been devalued to the point where their meaning has almost been erased. The hateful top-hatted figure begins to stalk Sam and Amelia.
The Babadook is a quiet film whose silences provide a tense backdrop for the mounting sense of dread and terror.
