Spring (2015)

First, the boring bit.

Lou Taylor Pucci stars as a young man who has been caring for his mother through a long, terminal illness. She dies, and the day after her funeral Evan gets into a fight in the pub he works at, which costs him his job. Fearing assault charges and retribution from the bloke he beat up, Evan decides on the spur of the moment to go to Europe (how is he paying for that?). 

    He meets an Italian woman named Louise (Nadia Hilker), and the two of them begin a passionate affair, with Evan taking a job at a nearby farm in order to earn a living (that’s how!), and seemingly making plans to stay in Italy for the foreseeable future. Long story short, Louise turns out to be some sort of conditionally immortal reptilian creature - you were wondering what this had to do with horror for a minute there, right? 

    Anyway, here’s how Louise’s immortality works: every twenty years she has to get pregnant, so that her body can recycle the foetus for stem cells to regenerate.  The down side is, if she ever falls in love with someone, the flood of oxytocin in her body will prevent her body from consuming the foetus, and she’ll permanently lose her immortality. It all sounds a bit fairy tale, I know, but it works on screen thanks to Justin Benson’s abilities as a screenwriter. I’ll leave the end unspoilt, as I don’t need to tell you what happens to discuss the film.

I hate plot synopses - I always feel like I’m just re-typing a Wikipedia article. 

Spring, written by Justin Benson and directed by him and Aaron Scott Moorhead, is a deeply moving meditation on grief, mortality, and how we cope with loss. With a bit of editing, the script could have been a conventional romantic drama, and I think it’s the sign of a truly brilliant writer when a work of art could work equally well in a completely different genre. The reason why Spring works so well is that, at its heart, it’s a story about a man who has lived in grief for a long time, and how he comes to terms with that grief; and about a young woman, who has lived a life of unimaginable loneliness out of the fear of death, and who finally finds something worth facing that fear for. It’s not a horror film (despite being categorised as one on Netflix), but it is beautiful, heartfelt, and human to the core.

The Most Disturbing Line In Les Miserable

Les Miserables isn’t, of course, a horror novel, and the only scary thing about the most recent film adaptation is Russell Crowe’s singing, but there’s one lyric from the musical that I find intensely disturbing. It comes when Fantine is being arrested; she pleads for mercy from Javert, on account of her child who she is afraid will die without the money that Fantine sends to her. Javert responds thus:

I have heard such protestations every day for twenty years

I’ll have no more explanations

Save your breath

Save your tears.

I didn’t notice it the first time I saw the film, but on re-watching it that line stuck out to me. “Every day for twenty years” - how many innocent lives has Javert destroyed? And with him being only one policeman, how much suffering does that equate to across the whole of French society?

    There is a profound message in that lyric about the nature of evil. Javert condemns people to decades-long prison sentences over minor crimes not because he has any personal hatred for those people, because he enjoys making them suffer, or because he stands to gain from their destruction; he does it because those are his orders. Those who break the law must pay the price. Javert is a moral idiot - he bases his morals on an external code that has no relation to any reasonable standard of right and wrong, and in doing so he abandons himself to businesslike evil. 

    It’s become a cliche to say that the order-followers, not the order-givers, are the real threat, but it seems to need restating. We live in a time where the spectre of The Law can be used to justify locking children in concentration camps, so clearly the message isn’t getting through. If you believe that the government’s law is identical to moral law, you are in favour of genocide, slavery, and torture. All those things have been legal, many are still legal in other countries, and any and all of them could be made legal again here. If you treat the law as a moral code, you are on the side of every monster who has ever occupied a position of power, but more so, you are contemptible for your weakness. You are a dog, a child who is incapable of making their own judgements and needs a paternal hand to tell you what to think. Law-worshippers are perhaps the most dangerous people of our time, and there are a worrying number of them.

31 Great Horror Stories You Can Read for Free Online

So here’s the second  part of my list, albeit a day late - a horror story for every day in October, and all of them available for free online. I’ve tried to include a few classics by well-known authors, as well as some you might not have read before.

12. Laird Barron - In A Cavern, In A Canyon

Yeah, there was always going to be more than one Laird Barron story in the list, and here’s the second. It always impresses me when writers come up with entirely new creatures for their stories - it’s so easy to rely on our established myths, or to borrow from the mythology of other cultures, and creating something new is always the hardest option. So the “Help-Me Monster” is doubly impressive, both for being Barron’s own idea and for being so bloody creepy. There’s something about a monster that lures people in through our innate desire to help those in need that seems to add a level of cruelty that the more traditional monsters don’t have.

13. Harlan Ellison - I Have No Mouth, And I Must Scream

The concept of Hell was designed to terrify the gullible into submission, and it’s well-built for the job. The idea of eternal torture - that there’s no escape, nothing you can do to fix the situation - is deeply disturbing to me, and I’ve always been receptive to Hell stories. “I Have No Mouth, And I Must Scream,” besides showing off Ellison’s genius for titles, is probably the best example of that particular subgenre of horror. The premise is simple - a mad supercomputer, having engineered the extinction of the human species, preserves four people to torture forever. In Ellison’s hands, though, it’s far more than just a list of atrocities; as he always did, he builds an emotional core into the story that lets it sink its teeth in all the deeper.

14. Junji Ito - The Enigma of Amigara Fault

I’m cheating a little bit on this one, as The Enigma of Amigara Fault is technically a manga rather than a short story, and the link goes to a Youtube animation of it, but still, Junji Ito is a writer/artist you don't want to miss. 

    The Enigma of Amigara Fault concerns a hillside that splits open during an earthquake, to reveal a series of human-shaped holes bored into the rock. Once the holes are revealed, people begin to feel drawn to particular holes - holes that fit their bodies exactly. Ito is a master of surreal horror, and in this as in all his work a strange premise builds to a terrifying conclusion.

15. Lottie Lynn - The Headfirst

What if there really were monsters under your bed? That’s the premise of this short, simple, but highly effective piece by Lottie Lynn. The problem with very short stories, of course, is that I can’t tell you too much about the plot without ruining the effect (and I’ve now said that about so many stories in this list that I’m running out of new ways to phrase it), but what I can say is that Lottie creates a great deal of dread in very few words, using a premise so well-worn that I wouldn’t have thought anyone could make it seem fresh. I always appreciate a writer who can breathe new life into horror cliches.

16. David Nickle - The Sloan Men

I reacted physically to this story in a way that I didn’t to anything else on this list. Halfway through, I realised that my heart was beating as though I’d just finished a run; the adrenaline rush I got from “The Sloan Men” was like nothing I’ve ever had from reading, and for a day or more after finishing the story, I was still freaked out. Lines from it would come back to me at odd times, and I’d feel that same physical shock of fear. Nickle is an astonishing talent, and he deserves to be more widely known.

17. Sofia Samatar - How To Get Back To The Forest

Sofia Samatar is a Somali-American writer of poetry and prose, and her experience as a poet bleeds into her fiction. Her stories have the feeling of being textured, like fine clothing - layers of language piled so thickly you could touch them. A lot of what she writes isn’t horror, and I’m not sure if this one really is, but fuck it, it’s close enough, and there’s no way I was going to let this liat go by without inxluding at least one Samatar story.

18. Carmen Maria Machado - The Husband Stitch

The horror of “The Husband Stitch” is rooted in the very real terrors that patriarchal society inflicts on women, but Machado doesn’t let the message do the work. The world of “The Husband Stitch” is surreal and disturbing in all the right ways, and finding her work made me realise how many great female horror writers I’d been sleeping on. Check out her collection Her Body and Other Parties for more.

19. Sofia Samatar - The Huntress

Yeah, it’s another Samatar. This one is challenging to write about, because it’s so short - how much can you really say about a four-hundred-word short story? “The Huntress” reminds me of the best of Angela Carter’s work - prose that reads like poetry, and could carry a story this short purely on its own merits; a strange and dreamlike approach to storytelling that privileges texture over narrative; and a willingness not to explain things, to let the audience wonder what exactly is going on without even giving them enough information to figure it out for themselves. Sometimes, the wondering is the point.

Titus (1999) and Under the Skin (2013) - Adapting the Unadaptable

Today, I’d like to talk about adaptations, specifically about adaptations of very difficult source material. I can’t be the only one who’s heard certain books described as “unadaptable”, whether due to their content, their stylistic experimentalism, or their scope, so I;m going to be looking at two of my favourite cinematic adaptations - one of a play, Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, and the other of Michel Faber’s novel Under the Skin. 

Titus is Julie Taymor's adaptation of Titus Andronicus, which is probably Shakespeare's least liked and most misunderstood play. TS Eliot called it "the worst play ever written", and when I studied it in university we had to take seriously the idea that it was supposed to be a parody. It's the violence, I think, that turns most people off – Shakespeare's plays are full of violence, of course, but it's never so intense as it is in Titus Andronicus. The protagonist's daughter is raped, and the rapists cut off her hands and cut out her tongue so she can't tell anyone what happened; Andronicus then kills the two rapists and feeds them to their mother, whose other son he's already had killed as a sacrifice. It's a fucked-up play. But it's also a bloody good one, no pun intended. As anyone who's ever seen her version of The Tempest knows, Julie Taymor is the director when it comes to putting Shakespeare on screen, and on top of her directing you've got a cast including Jessica Lange, Anthony Hopkins and Alan Cummings (who I normally can't stand but he's actually really good in this, probably because his character is supposed to be irritating). 

    Titus Andronicus, essentially, is a victim of history – that's the play, not the character. If someone made a film today that had basically the same storyline as Titus Andronicus, it'd be seen as what is is – a really, really brutal film about revenge. But because Shakespeare wrote it five hundred years ago, you've had snobby fuckers like Eliot (I'm sorry, he was one of the greatest poets who ever lived, but he was a snob) who hated it because they wanted their Shakespeare to be highbrow and very genteel and academic – the kind of plays you could take your mother to see. So when they saw a play full of rape and mutilation and cannibalism, they reacted out of shock, because that wasn't what they were expecting to see. 

    Anthony Hopkins plays Titus Andronicus, a Roman general who captures Tamara, the queen of the Goths, along with her family. He sacrifices one of her sons, as apparently was traditional then, and as you can imagine Tamara, played by Jessica Lange, is not too pleased about that. She and her sons plot their revenge, and after they have enacted their plans Titus takes his revenge on them for their revenge. It’s a very revenge-y play.

Adapting Shakespeare for the screen is never an easy task, and those who succeed often do so by taking the least imaginative approach possible. The plays were written in the sixteenth century, so many directors set their films in the sixteenth century. They have characters dressed in period-appropriate costumes, stick rigidly to the script, and basically stage everything as though it were a contemporary play set in the past. There’s nothing wrong with that approach, of course, and plenty of excellent films have been made that way, but the problem is that in trying to remain faithful to the letter of Shakespeare’s writing, directors are unfaithful to the spirit of Shakespeare as a playwright. 

    Shakespeare wasn’t a “literary writer”, writing to please the minds of upper-class intellectuals; his plays weren’t written to provide the material for your PhD thesis. He was a popular playwright, working to entertain the masses at a time when the idea of an English canon was unheard of. In Elizabethan England, the classics were the works of the classical dramatists, and were studied in Latin or Greek; works in English were considered of a lower stature by nature of being written in the language of the great unwashed, and even among English writers, Shakespeare was looked down upon. He was a young punk, the upstart crow who filled even his tragedies with knob gags so that the people in the stalls would be kept entertained. 

    Moreover, the idea of “realistic” staging is a relatively recent invention. Shakespeare’s plays would have been performed on a wooden platform, with pretty basic props and sound effects, and playwrights didn’t bother trying to make the audience feel like they were somewhere other than where they were. They knew they weren’t in Ancient Rome or the realm of the fairies or wherever the play was set - they were in a theatre, watching a play, and you weren’t going to convince them otherwise. Hence, staging and costumes were largely decided on the basis of what looked right for the atmosphere of the play, rather than what a Roman general would have worn. Drawings from the time when Shakespeare’s plays were performed show costumes that ignore any notion of historical realism - centurions onstage next to Elizabethan nobleman,and so on. 

    Julie Taymor’s Titus stages the play as Shakespeare probably would, were he alive today. She gives us a world that feels the way the last days of Rome probably felt to those who lived through them. Wild, out of control, alternately decadent and savage; a world that mixes fascist dystopia with Mad Max costumes, ancient conflicts with pieces of modern technology. It is a beautiful, frightening world, fit for the characters that inhabit it.

For entirely different reasons, Michel Faber’s 2000 novel Under the Skin was considered by some to be unadaptable, and there’s certainly a lot in there that would translate poorly to the screen. The novel follows Isserly, an alien who lures men back to her isolated farmhouse so that they can be, in essence, factory farmed. She drugs them and takes them to an underground complex where they are pumped full of hormones and fodder until they weigh half a ton, at which point they’re butchered and the meat sent back to Isserly’s home planet. 

    Johnathon Glaser’s film Under the Skin, however, is very different. The basic premise stays the same - a woman who is really an alien lures men back to an isolated cottage and kills them - but Glaser throws away everything else about the novel. In Faber’s book, everything is very physical, very real; Isserly is gangly and awkward because she is an alien of very different anatomy who has been surgically altered to look like a human. The bodies of the aliens and of their human livestock are described in detail, and it feels as though Faber is really trying to build a believable world. We see the society of the world that Isserly comes from, and it feels like it could actually exist.

    In the film, Glaser gives us virtually nothing. The Isserly character - played by Scarlett Johansson in a career best performance - is not even named. Far from looking like a surgically-mutilated alien, she looks like, well, Scarlett Johansson. The process that the men go through upon arriving at the farmhouse is far more abstract and unexplained - a black goo envelops them, and then...something happens. It’s never quite clear what, or why, but we get some gorgeous abstract sequences that I presume are depictions of the men being processed. Glaser explains nothing, and the film - by the nature of the medium, but also because of the decisions made by Glaser and co-writer Walter Campbell - does not let us into Isserly’s head the way that the book does, so we don't even get much character development to distract us from the worldbuilding we aren’t getting. Glaser shows us what’s happening, and lets the audience interpret it for themselves - production of emotion obtained by resistance to emotion.

    From all this, you;d expect the film adaptation of Under the Skin to be a failure. After all, it ignores everything that works about the novel, right? But you’d be wrong. What Glaser does is he strips away everything he can, but leaves the heart of the novel untouched. At its core, Under the Skin is a story about loneliness. Isserly is isolated from both her own kind and the humans that she preys on, and that kind of isolation is a truly frightening prospect for anyone. We all - humans and ridiculously hot aliens alike - need some kind of contact with someone, we need to be understood, to have our existence confirmed by the acknowledgement of another person. By removing any hunt of where Isserly came from, or what she’s here to do, Glaser and Campbell make her even more alone, and emphasise her alienness - which in turn emphasises how unconnected she is to the humans she interacts with. That loneliness is the source of the horror, in both the book and the film.

The Wicker Man (1973)

Let’s talk about sex. Specifically, let’s talk about eroticism and horror. They do say (whoever “they” are) that sexual arousal works in a very similar way to fear, and it’s certainly true that horror, whether in films or in books, tends to go hand in hand with eroticism. Pick up any cheap horror paperback, or watch any slasher flick, and you’ll see what I mean. The amount of sexual content in horror films seems to have decreased recently with the popularity of jump-scare films like Lights Out (which I’ll be talking about later in the month) but with films like Muck and The Neon Demon being released, it’s clear that the public still want some tits with their blood and gore. And let’s be honest – we’re talking almost exclusively about female nudity here. I can’t remember ever seeing a horror film that deliberately eroticised the male form, and I doubt any of you will be able to either. Horror films, like all too many things that should be gender-neutral, are made largely by and for straight men. I mean, I live in hope that we might get to see Jason Statham get his cock out some time soon, but hope in one hand and shit in the other, see which fills up first. 

    I have absolutely no problem whatsoever with erotic art, but what I do have a problem with is bad art, erotic or not, and too many horror films fall into that category when they try and bring sex into the mix. You see it all the time, films where there’s a random sex scene before the monsters arrive, films where a female main character happens to be attacked while she’s wearing very little, even at the worst extreme films like Hostel 2, where the pain and suffering inflicted on female characters is itself sexualised. The problem with films that do that is that they’re trying to force sexual content in where it doesn’t belong – and jamming stuff in where it doesn’t belong is only occasionally sexy. Which brings us to The Wicker Man. 

    The Wicker Man does not introduce eroticism artificially – it doesn’t need to. Sex, and our attitude to it, is an intrinsic part of this story. Basically you’ve got a devoutly Christian police officer who goes to an island off the coast of Scotland to look for a missing girl, only to find that the locals are pagans, and the girl isn’t missing. What it turns out has happened is that the girl was a ploy to bring him to the island so he could be sacrificed in what has got to be the worst possible way to die. If you’ve seen the film, you know what I mean, and if you haven’t, I don't want to ruin the surprise. The film is shot through with sex. Near the beginning, the main character (played brilliantly by Edward Woodward) stumbles across an outdoor orgy after leaving a pub because he wasn’t comfortable with the lewd songs the patrons were singing. A little later, he’s horrified by the extent to which sex is openly discussed around and by children, and of course there is the fantastic scene where the landlord’s daughter tries to seduce him. The set-up is like this: he’s in bed at the inn, and she’s in the next room, completely naked, singing and dancing in this weird, magical/sexual/religious ritual, trying to tempt him into sleeping with her, while he desperately tries to stay pure. It’s almost a kind of microcosm of the film – the conflict between this earthy, fleshy paganism and Christian repression. Woodward’s character refuses to renounce his faith and sleep with Britt Ekland, and because of that he gets killed – the sacrifice, you see, has to be a virgin. 

   

What’s interesting about The Wicker Man is that it doesn’t seem like the sexual content was bolted on after the script was written, to bring in a larger audience - it’s part of the story, to such an extent that it’s hard to imagine what the film would look like without it (maybe something like the godawful Nicholas Cage remake). The story is one of Christianity vs the religion of Summerisle, and the battle takes place largely on the field of sexuality. In a way, in fact, Ekland’s advances towards the Woodward are an attempt to save him; if he had succumbed to her considerable charms, he would have been unfit to be sacrificed, and would probably have left the island alive. Imagine an alternate version of the story, where a policeman goes to a strange Scottish island looking for a missing girl, has an affair with a local landlord’s daughter, and returns without incident. Imagine the look on Lord Summerisle’s face as the boat took Woodward’’s character back to the mainland.

So there you have it - The Wicker Man is the film to look at if you want to know how to write something sexy, but with substance. Also, give it a look if you want to see a battle between Christianity and indigenous religions where Christianity loses.

Wrath James White - Skins

In a way, I was a fan of Wrath James White before I read any of his work. He’s been interviewed twice on Brian Keene’s podcast The Horror Show, and I’ve listened to both those episodes multiple times. An extreme horror author, recovered sex addict, performance artist and former professional kickboxer who spent his formative years slugging it out with neo-Nazi boneheads on the streets of Philadelphia, it’s easy to see why he caught my attention.  And given that it’s the 31 Days of Horror, I thought I’d finally read one of his books and tell all ten of my loyal readers what I thought of it. 

White has described Skins as his most personal book, and it certainly contains a lot of material that’s directly autobiographical. The protagonist, Mack, is clearly meant to be White (six foot five, black, hard as fuck) and there are several moments in the book that are word-for-word the same as stories White has told about his youth - obviously though, being an extreme horror author, White dials up the consequences of the situation the characters find themselves in. 

    Set in the hardcore scene of the eighties (I’m on board already), the story begins with Mack seeing a girl he is in love with beaten into a coma during a fight with far-right skins at a gig. The shock and rage of this incident drives him throughout the rest of the book, which switches between the perspectives of Mack and his best friend Demon, and the three young neo-Nazis who are the antagonists. The two groups come into each other’s orbits, and things quickly spiral out of control, culminating in a deadly confrontation between hardcore  kids and boneheads. I won’t spoil the ending for you, as it took me by surprise and worked largely because of that, but there is that atmosphere that I love in a story, of characters being drawn towards disaster by forces they are powerless to resist.

First, I’ll go over what doesn’t work about the book. The prose is clunky at times, and never really rises above the level of functionality, although there are some great lines of dialogue (at one point, the girlfriend of one of the skins says to him, “Why can’t you just join the Republican party, like every other racist?” Not so funny out of context, but coming across that line unexpectedly made me chuckle on the bus).

    The second thing isn’t so much a criticism as a statement - this isn’t a horror novel. It’s more like a thriller, with moments of graphic violence. Nothing in the book seems designed to scare the reader, but rather to draw them in to the twists and turns of the story, keeping them turning the page to find out what happens next. The thrill of the story isn’t in being afraid or disturbed, but in watching the momentum of the characters carry them into more and more trouble. Nor is it that extreme. There are two scenes where the skins’ hate crimes are shown in grisly detail, and those two scenes definitely go beyond what you’d expect in a Lee Child novel, but not by all that much. Don't get me wrong, it’s pretty gruesome, but from what little extreme horror I’ve read I was expecting more. Still, neither of those things are intended as criticisms - I’m just letting you know that if you’re used to Jack Ketchum you’ll find little to shock you here. Skip the rest of this section if you want to avoid a very minor, very early spoiler.

    The last thing I want to discuss in this section is the character of Miranda. She’s brought in in the first scene as this impossibly sexy, tough, somewhat aloof girl who somehow intimidates the supremely confident Mack - we want to get to know her, she seems like she’ll be a great character. Then a fight breaks out and she ends up in a coma. 

    I think I can see why White does this. We don't care about Miranda yet - we can’t after so short a time - but we’re interested in her, and we want to see more of her. That way, it does carry some impact when she gets hurt. That works to an extent, but mainly it just feels like White has introduced a female character and established a connection between her and the main character, so that he can use her as a prop. I see it in films all the time - women who are there to get hurt, so that their suffering can motivate the hero. Regardless of White’s intentions, it feels like a cheap trick.

That’s that for what I didn’t like about Skins - now on to what I did. First of all, Wrath James White knows how to write a page-turner. When I was reading the opening page, I wasn’t sure if I’d even finish the book (bad prose puts me off more quickly than anything else), then the next thing I knew I was fifty pages in, and didn’t want to stop to go to bed. Skins is gripping and well-paced, with a plot that holds your attention like a bear trap.

    Secondly, Mack’s mum is a great character. Clearly based on White’s own mother (listen to the longer Brian Keene interview) she’s intelligent, strong, believably flawed, and her conversations with her son give Mack some character development the lack of which would have seriously damaged the novel. Mack’s interactions with her give White an opportunity to flesh his protagonist out a little, showing us something of his dreams for the future, highlighting what he stands to lose if things go wrong, and also making an otherwise somewhat overpowered character seem vulnerable (in White’s defence, Mack is based on him, and he’s an overpowered human). Mack isn’t just some anti-fascist badass out of an action film - he wants to go to university; he worries about what will happen to Demon when he isn’t around; he cares about his mum, and wonders what she sees in her current boyfriend. We learn most of this through scenes of his home life. Another great thing about Mack’s mum is that the scenes with her let White slow things down for a moment. You can’t have a novel of non-stop action without hitting a point of diminishing returns - that’s why almost all great action films have a moment when the hero goes to ground, and has to take time to nurse his wounds and prepare for the final act of the film. We need some contrast from our art.

    Finally, I really like how White doesn’t just have cardboard cutout Nazis as his villains. The three boneheads that provide the main opposition to Mack and Demon are fully fleshed-out people. We see what their home lives are like; we meet their friends and families; we get inside their heads, and catch a glimpse of what led them down this path. These are bad people, but they became that way for a reason. Unlike other writers who attempt to write about fascism (whoever scripted that godawful Fantastic Beasts sequel, for example), Wrath James White knows how fascism works, and can create characters who could believably be drawn into that world.

Basically, this is pulp, but it’s damn good pulp. Give it a read, but don’t expect to be scared.

The Babadook (2014) - Fear You Can Believe In

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.