Before I even saw “The Babadook” I was scared of the Babadook. He quickly became such an icon of horror that the idea was immediately unsettling.
Invented by the Australian director Jennifer Kent for her 2014 film, Mister Babadook is a creature from a children’s pop-up book that suddenly appears in the home of Amelia (Essie Davis) and her son, Samuel (Noah Wiseman). The brute is crudely drawn, with a top hat, long spindly fingers and teeth that form a grimace. “If it’s in a word or in a look, you can’t get rid of the Babadook,” the foreboding red hardcover reads.
Despite his silly name and somewhat dapper attire, the Babadook is the stuff of nightmares, inexplicable but threatening. And as you watch Kent’s film, the terror only intensifies. You never actually see the corporeal form of the Babadook, but he infiltrates Amelia, an exhausted mother grieving after her husband was killed while driving her to the hospital to give birth to Samuel. He has grown into an erratic little boy who believes monsters are lurking in their house and has behavioral issues in school. When the Babadook book suddenly appears out of nowhere, his fears seem justified. Amelia, however, tries to pretend everything is normal.
She has buried her pain, allowing it to fester into a bloodthirsty animosity toward her own spawn. The Babadook latches on to what’s been growing inside of her.
When the film was originally released, it grossed just a little over $960,000 domestically (and a little over $10 million worldwide). Yet like the Babadook himself, the film has cast a long shadow that grows only more encompassing as it celebrates its 10th anniversary with a rerelease starting Thursday.
The character became an internet phenomenon, even making an appearance in the Urban Dictionary. One popular post from 2016 featured the comedy writer Katie Dippold announcing that for Halloween she had “dressed as the Babadook but my friend’s house had more of a grown-ups drinking wine vibe,” complete with a photo of herself out of place in full Babadook drag. Somehow the creature also turned into a gay icon. (Well, he is quite fabulous.)
But the more lasting legacy of “The Babadook” involves the horror genre itself: For better and for worse, the movie arguably served as the inception point for the latest wave of “elevated horror,” a.k.a. horror with stuff on its mind.
It’s not that “The Babadook” was the first to mash up frightening moments with rich themes — see: “Rosemary’s Baby” (1968) or “The Exorcist” (1973). And horror was hardly schlock before 2014. Kent herself might point that out, especially given that she says she “stole bits and pieces” from genre pioneers like Carl Theodor Dreyer (“Vampyr”) and F.W. Murnau (“Nosferatu”).
But largely thanks to the films that followed it, “The Babadook” fostered a new respect for the genre, It ushered horror out of its preoccupation with found footage (like “Paranormal Activity,” 2007) and torture porn (“Hostel,” 2005), and into an age centered on personal demons. These films included “Hereditary” (2018), Ari Aster’s brutal saga of generational trauma; the cannibal-themed “Raw” (2016), a coming-of-age story doused in blood; and the aging-parent nightmare “Relic” (2020). Jordan Peele, who earned the rare horror best-picture Oscar nomination for “Get Out” (2017), has been vocal about his love for “The Babadook.” He told Lupita Nyong’o to watch the film before starring in “Us” (2019) as a terrorized woman and her eerie doppelgänger.
“‘The Babadook’ came from a long line of films dealing with deeper things,” Kent told me in a video call. “Horror at its best has always plunged the depths in a way that drama normally can’t because it doesn’t have the permission to. Maybe it’s a resurgence of giving horror more credit and not relegating it to the poor country cousin of serious film.”
But there has also been a drawback to the way her movie enchanted the horror industry. It has resulted in films that read like emotionally cheaper but financially more expensive versions of “The Babadook,” which was made for about $1.6 million. The technology-focused “Come Play” (2020) was described in a New York Times review as “‘The Babadook’ goes paperless.” And without “The Babadook” it’s unlikely that we would have had an entire press tour of Jamie Lee Curtis insisting that her “Halloween” sequels were about trauma. Even the campy-creepy robot doll flick “M3gan” (2022) incorporates homages to “The Babadook” via a car-crash opening and a child inspired by a vicious new toy.
Sam Zimmerman, vice president of programming at the horror streaming service Shudder, said “The Babadook” had reverberated in the submissions he reviews. “The amount of decks that I still see using film stills and then mood boards from ‘The Babadook’ almost speaks for itself,” he said in an interview.
“The Babadook” is so beloved that Kent herself has struggled to get projects off the ground that aren’t a rehash of her debut feature. “Many people want you to remake ‘The Babadook’ over and over and over,” she told me. “And that’s never been my intention.” Instead, she followed it up with “The Nightingale” (2018) a harrowing drama about rape and colonialism in Australia.
“The Babadook” emerged from her own grief over the death of her father. She was ruminating on what she was going through when she considered the alternative: What if she didn’t allow herself the time to mourn? What monstrosity would emerge to fill that black hole of pain?
Amelia tries to pretend that the tragedy of her husband’s death never happened. Young Samuel acts out, building medieval-looking weapons in an effort to protect her, but all she wants is for him to be normal. What she doesn’t realize is that the same sorrow eating her son alive is consuming her. He is just more honest about what he’s going through, so he’s able to combat the Babadook while it eventually takes over her body.
Amelia never really defeats the Babadook. Instead, she tames him. She locks him in the basement, feeding him a dinner of worms, as he bellows at her. To calm him, she repeats, “It’s all right,” and shushes him like a baby. You can’t overcome grief. You can just keep it at bay.
But those final moments are also a reflection of the way “The Babadook” has made its imprint on film history. It feels omnipresent, lurking in the background of so much that followed.
That idea tickles Kent.
“It’s a slap in the face to all those people who said Babadook’s the most ridiculous name, you can’t call a film that, no one’s going to remember that name,” she said. “Cut to it being in Urban Dictionary. It’s a sweet justice.”
The post On the Screen or in a Meme, ‘The Babadook’ Is Still an Unnerving Dream appeared first on New York Times.
