What is it about Australia? Every time I watch a film from the poisonous continent it turns out to be markedly different from anything coming out of the rest of the English-speaking world. I guess I shouldn’t really be surprised - after all, Australia is more than ten thousand miles away from Hollywood, so one should expect a certain degree of difference in cultural outlook. Still, the fact that it’s a former colony full of white people who speak the same language as me means that part of me always expects Australia to just be Britain with snakes.
Anyone who’s seen Wolf Creek or The Loved Ones knows that that Australia has produced some of the most uniquely depraved horror cinema of the twenty-first century, but while The Babadook is just as original as either of those two films, that’s where the similarity ends. If you’re looking for graphic violence, or any of the other horror tropes you’re used to, look elsewhere.
At its heart, Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook is a film about grief. It follows a mother (Essie Davis) as she struggles to raise her son and cope with her grief for his father, who was killed in a car crash while driving her to the hospital to give birth to him. The boy, Sam, is a weird kid, fixated on an imaginary monster named the Babadook. Amelia (Davis) finds a pop-up book about the monster in Sam’s room - after Sam’s behaviour worsens, she destroys the book, only for it to reappear undamaged on her doorstep, now containing a passage that says the Babadook becomes stronger if you deny its existence. The situation worsens, culminating in Amelia having a hallucination where she murders her son.
Amelia tries to resist the Babadook, but it eventually possesses her and attempts to murder Sam. When she tries to strangle him, he strokes her face, and she expels the Babadook - but, Sam reminds his mother, “you can’t get rid of the Babadook”.
In the film’s epilogue, we see Amelia and Sam living happily. The final scene shows Amelia bringing a bowl of earthworms to her basement, where the Babadook eats them. She then goes back upstairs to play with Sam.
The grief metaphor is obvious, and it’s not what I’m here to discuss. What I want to talk about is how Jennifer Kent has built a horror film on a social realist framework.
Amelia is a working-class single mother. She works in a care home for the elderly, and struggles financially. The film doesn’t go into great detail, but it’s made clear that she and Sam are in a precarious situation, trying to live on a single modest income. There are long stretches where nothing supernatural or conventionally horror-y happens, to the point where halfway through I forgot that I was watching a horror film - I was just wrapped up in the kitchen sink drama unfolding, about a struggling mother and her son with behavioural problems. And that’s what noone seems to be talking about with The Babadook: the fact that you could take away the monster and the German expressionist aesthetic and still be left with a film that would not only function, but would actually be quite good.
The real horror in The Babadook isn’t the monster, it’s losing someone close to you; it’s spending your life slaving away at a job you hate that pays barely enough to make ends mete; it’s the fear that there might be something profoundly wrong with your child, and that it might be your fault. Jennifer Kent understands what life is like for those who actually live in fear - of the next bill, the next day, the next meeting with the school - and she understands how to build on that to create characters you care about, and fear you can believe in.
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