I've talked before about my distaste for jump-scares; that horror is much more effective when it doesn't have to go, "BOO!" and ask if you're scared yet, because it's already quietly filled you with an overwhelming sense of dread. The Babadook nails it right off the bat. It opens with Amelia (Essie Davis) dreaming about the night her husband died in a car accident driving her to the hospital to deliver her baby boy. When she wakes up, Samuel (Noah Wiseman) is now six and has some problems. He's loud, in constant demand of attention, abusive, blunt and has a penchant for making rather brilliant weaponry to tackle supernatural foes. It could be he has some serious behavioural issues. It could be he's just that age. Or it could be he's starting to comprehend the circumstances of his birth and can't shake the feeling his mum doesn't love him. Amelia isn't getting help from anyone, and she spends every second of the day teetering on an edge. Superb cinematography and editing puts you right in her position, and within the first five minutes you come to understand and sympathise with her second-to-second life, leaving me horrifically uncomfortable before the horror even began. It's no wonder she doesn't really question how a children's book detailing a boogeyman called The Babadook that gets stronger the more you don't believe in it came to be on Samuel's bookshelf, or why it's made such an impression on him that he starts seeing and talking to The Babadook. She's got more important things to worry about. But it's when Samuel's behaviour becomes more terrified, desparate and dangerous, and when Amelia herself begins to notice the signs of The Babadook, that she's forced to confront this demon head-on, in a literal and figurative sense.
The Babadook's greatest strength lies in its ambiguity. The film never explicitly states whether or not The Babadook was ever real. There's reason to believe it is: both Amelia and Samuel see it, we the audience definitely see it and at the end of the day, we don't want to think for a second that a mother would buy into a horror story at the danger of their child's life. But, if just for a second, we wonder if it's possible that The Babadook isn't real, and we let that seed grow, the evidence begins to mount. Samuel is a child, and children see monsters. Nobody else in the film has an encounter with The Babadook. There is the question of how the book came into existence, especially when its final pages are personally directed at Amelia, but there is an explanation. Amelia used to make children's books. Is it that much of a stretch to think she may have created The Babadook? She tears up the pages and throws the book in the bin, only to have it reappear on her doorstep the next day taped together. Note: not immaculately repaired, taped back together. When she later burns the book, it burns, and never shows up again. Already, the rules of supernatural literature are being broken. The genesis of the monster itself could be born from the old horror posters in the house, and the late-night TV she watches, which seems to be a loop of black and white horror movies and George Melies flicks. When you look at The Babadook, a creative amalgamation of Edward Gorey and Robert Wiene, it's all within reason to think that this is potentially a product of Amelia's imagination. But why would she go to such lengths to create a monster?
The answer is because she doesn't want to admit that she is the monster. At the core of the Babadook story is the idea that the more it's ignored, the stronger it gets, and that your only option, for better or worse, is to let it in. The book and Amelia's hallucinations lead her to believe that she's being possessed by a supernatural force that wants to see her son dead, but the truth is it's just Amelia who wants that. Her husband died when they were supposed to be receiving someone they would both love. Instead, she lost someone she knew she loved for someone she just had to. And of course she doesn't truly want to kill Samuel, but how can she not see what he represents every time she looks at him? Add to that the mental strain she's already under every second of every day, and it's suddenly not outside the realm of possibility for her to drum up an all-powerful spectre to take responsibility and control away from her. The film ends with Amelia summoning the strength to stand up to The Babadook, frightening it into the basement. The film jumps ahead a few days and she and Samuel have a much improved relationship. She's learned to nurture his unique personality and abilities and in return, he's far more loving and comfortable with her. And every day, she heads into the basement to feed The Babadook. "How was he?" Samuel asks as she's closing and locking the door. "Quiet today," she replies. A day will never come when Amelia will look at Samuel and not see her dead husband. But before this, she was trying to deny the existence of these feelings, when she should have been confronting them head on. They're not going anywhere, they're still in the basement as it were, but with acknowledgement and nourishment, she can keep them at bay and focus on what exists underneath all of it: love.
So, The Babadook is pretty gutsy as far as narratives go, and it approaches being a horror flick with the same confidence. Jennifer Kent takes a huge gamble by having Amelia read The Babadook almost in its entirety fifteen minutes in. The cat's out of the bag in terms of what the monster is going to look like, something movies like this often rely on to generate interest. It works here, though, partly because of the established tone I mentioned, leaving you in a constant state of anticipated terror regardless of whether or not you've seen the ghost, but mostly because she understands that the supernatural boogeyman is far less terrifying than the possibility of a real one. Essie Davis backs this up with her phenomenal performance as Amelia, sending The Babadook literally into the shadows with her terrifying intensity in the film's later moments. Kent also knows all too well the tropes and conventions of this type of movie and deliberately plays against our expectations. Potential love interests and kind old neighbours are introduced and developed with the expectation that they will eventually meet their demise in an overtly violent fashion only to have them disappear from the narrative as time wears on: safe, sound and unaware of the monster next door. Because ultimately, the only lives that are really at stake here are Amelia and Samuel's. I've already sung the praises of the cinematography and editing, but the sound design deserves as much kudos, working perfectly in tandem with the visual side of the film to enhance the feelings of desperation, isolation and mounting terror, from something as obvious as the jagged, erratic ticking that accompanies The Babadook's brilliant stop-motion puppetry to something as subtle as a light 'dook-dook-dook' sound, cited in the children's book as a sign that The Babadook is near, that pulsates in the background as Amelia grows more tense in a scene. It's also, above all else, a top-notch Australian production that, by taking genuine, relatable human drama and visualising it as a monster, succeeds where many fail in making a horror movie that's actually horrific.
