…nor should you want to.
I’ll
come back to that statement in a bit since it ties into the discussion of the
symbolism and “meaning” of Australian director Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook (2014). Speaking literally
for the moment, however, I do wish that other horror flicks would take note of
how this particular film works. The
Babadook is easily recognizable as an entry in the genre, but it is also
smartly written and exceptionally well-presented, avoiding many of the cheap
tricks that have unfortunately become staples in these types of movies: namely
jump scares. The Babadook is creepy,
unnerving, and even frightening, but it does it all without resorting to
throwing things in your face with a bang. There are moments where audiences
will likely expect the usual banging on to occur, only to have Kent resist the
temptation. Here is an example (you can jump to 1:34 and stop around 2:08 if you don’t want
to see more than this brief snippet): https://youtu.be/zhM4X3cozdI
In
terms of its composition, this scene depends upon a familiar set-up. We’ve got
the camera deployed very deliberately here so that our view of what is behind
Amelia (Essie Davis) is being obscured. We push in on her face and she begins
to turn. We know that there’s something being hidden behind her because of how
clingy the camera is being. Even when we’re not right in her face (such as when
she first exits the basement and at 1:51 when we cut behind her), the kitchen
is still hidden. When we finally see the darkened kitchen doorway at 1:56, we’d
be completely justified in expecting something to leap out at us. It’s the
perfect moment for it, in fact. Instead, the camera remains steady as the
chittering sound that we’ve learned to associate with the presence or influence
of the Babadook intensifies and the creature itself emerges from the shadows.
We see it coming head on, and even with a quick cut back to Amelia’s terrified
face and the aural cue that strikes when the monster flexes its talons, at no point
does anything jump out at us with a bang.
Instead,
Kent lets the shadows, the creature’s appearance, the camerawork, and the
excellent sound design do their work without exploiting one or the other to get
a quick rise out of people. This is the modus
operandi of the film. For lack of a more descriptive term, perhaps, it
holds steady. The camera is by no
means static, but Kent avoids excess. The
Babadook is a film that faces terror head-on—which is yet another statement
that I’ll have to elaborate upon when I talk about the movie’s themes.
I
personally like The Babadook’s
approach to scaring viewers a lot. There are bound to be some people who
disagree, though. I know for a fact that there are those who do not like the
ending, which feels more like a Grimm fairytale than it does a traditional Western
story about horror. It feels altogether more sure of itself and its message
than a movie like Sinister (2012),
which has its own merits but insists on ending on a jump scare rather than
letting the gravity of the events of its final act sit and stew in viewers’
minds.
Thus
far, I have used the terms “horror” and “terror” interchangeably here; however,
the 18th century Gothic novelist Ann Radcliffe actually theorized
that they were two different concepts. They were both ways of scaring an
audience, but they represented different approaches. In essence, according to
Radcliffe’s essay on the subject, horror was all about showing the audience
something… horrific. Terror, on the other hand, was about not revealing things
and instead stimulating the audience’s imagination. Horror, she thought, was
ultimately less effective at scaring people because it could only shock or
startle them in ways that were not as lasting as the effects that could be
achieved by influencing the imagination.[1]
The
video clip I directed you to previously is an example of both. First, we do not
see the Babadook right away. We strongly suspect that it is behind Amelia in
some form, but we do not know for sure. The absence of physical evidence,
though, puts our imaginations to work trying to anticipate what is in the
kitchen. If we scare ourselves, that’s terror. When we see the Babadook itself
emerge from the doorway, we’re entering horror territory. Even though we’re
still forced to imagine some of the details, the looming shape with its sharp
talons is enough of a reveal to horrify us. The encounter continues until the
end of the clip, so without giving too much away, let me suggest that it
returns to terror again as, after Amelia flees upstairs and barricades herself
in another room, the Babadook comes for her again but is entirely unseen. We do not see its body or what it does, so we can
only imagine it.
Now,
obviously the horror-terror dichotomy is imperfect (as in the aforementioned
scene where we see part of the Babadook but still must imagine the rest of it),
and I don’t mean to suggest that there’s no terror in movies that include jump
scares. Like I said before, we are familiar enough with the sort of scenes and
camera movements that anticipate these moments, and the fear we feel in the
process of trying to figure out exactly where the “bang” will come from and
what form it will take is likely a form of terror since until the shock
actually happens onscreen we are effectively living in our own heads,
entertaining and frightening ourselves.
Where
the horror-terror distinction does work very well is in the case of “torture
porn”—a sub-genre of horror that depends on gross-out scares (“body horror” if
you prefer) that is frightening only because it is so disturbingly physical.
The Saw franchise and the Hostel movies fall into these
categories. Again, there are definitely moments in those films where the
audience feels terror in anticipating the horror to come, but they are known
primarily for their use of very obvious, heavy-handed moments of disgust.
There’s nothing wrong with body horror (see John Fawcett’s Ginger Snaps (2000) for excellent visual and thematic use of it)
necessarily, to add another caveat to my growing list; however, I think that
Radcliffe was onto something with the distinction between terror and horror,
and I think The Babadook does a good
job straddling that line.
 |
| Use your imagination... |
As
I prepare to discuss in greater detail the good and bad qualities of the film
and its execution of its themes, it’s only to fair to warn you that spoilers
will, out of necessity, follow.
I
previously mentioned the sound design of the film, and I’d like to take a
moment to talk a bit more about it. Sound (and, by extension, music) is an
important part of the horror movie experience. There are plenty of good examples
of how sound cues affect us as viewers, but here’s one I was linked to a couple
years ago.
Even
though the clips shown and the ways that they are stitched together is important to creating the appropriate
effect, the music that backs them plays an significant role by telling us when
we are supposed to feel the tension rise and abate. Jump scares in horror
movies are accompanied by the “bang” I keep referring to—the aural cue that complements
the sudden appearance of the monster or killer and that makes us more likely to
jump. Music helps us figure out what we’re supposed to be feeling at a given
moment, and when it is appropriately paired with the right images, it enhances
the feelings of fear. In The Babadook,
for example, we associate the chittering bug sounds with the cockroaches Amelia
thinks that she sees in the kitchen, but we also see the film’s monster skitter
like an insect and make a similar sound; therefore, when we hear the insect
noises, we don’t think of them as simply ambient—we know that the monster is
present in some form, and we feel terror as we imagine where it might be or
what its growing influence on Amelia will make her do next.
There’s
another great sound-related moment in The
Babadook earlier in the film when the creature is first making its presence
felt, and Sam (Noah Wiseman) screams, “Mommy!” from upstairs after peering into
his closet. Amelia runs upstairs and finds him hiding under the bed. It took me
a moment during this scene to realize that even though Sam was no longer
screaming “Mommy!” I was still hearing it for some reason. During this
sequence, the music that plays is jarring, somewhat atonal, and sounds like someone
is repeating “Mommy!” over and over again. This is significant because it
frightens us with its unusual sound, but it is also indicative of the way that
Sam’s constant acting out and nagging sticks with Amelia and echoes in her head.
Additionally, it suggests the possibility of her growing madness and the
surreal quality of the world around her.
The
voice of the Babadook itself has a distorted, croaking quality to it that I
think is very effective. On the one hand, it can sound recognizably human (if a
bit off) in scenes where Amelia’s deceased husband Oskar appears. On the other,
it also has a noticeably breathless, monstrous quality that makes the cry of
“Baba dook, dook, dook” creepy. There’s only one sound in the movie that I
don’t particularly care for, and unfortunately it’s one that the Babadook makes
somewhat regularly. The “shriek” (it’s identified as such by the closed
captions) sounds like a generic dinosaur roar—like a sound a pterodactyl on an
episode of The Magic School Bus might
make.
Changing
gears a bit, the lead actors here inhabit their roles extremely well. Wiseman
plays the recognizable role of the “creepy child” well for the first third,
while Davis does the “creepy mom” to great effect for the rest. They both
convey much of the horror of these parts through their facial expressions,
despite being perfectly normal looking human beings otherwise. This
characterization is another of the film’s strengths, as it represents both its
familiar qualities and its experimentation. We’re familiar enough with the
creepy child and the slightly off parent from other scary stories, so it’s easy
to accept the early plot developments which suggest that Sam may be the root of
the problem here. His asocial behavior, including an insistence on talking to
the invisible Babadook and one chilling scene where Amelia finds glass in her
soup because “the Babadook did it,” suggests that Amelia’s frazzled appearance
and temperament are justified and that the boy will probably be possessed by
the creature. The pop-up book Mister
Babadook that the pair read even foreshadows this development by showing
the monster hovering over a child’s bed screaming, “Let me in!” When the focus
later shifts to Amelia’s possession by the creature (and the pop-up changes to
reflect this) and we start to see the consequences of her listlessness and
depression from her son’s point of view, our expectations are thwarted
somewhat. Even though we’ve experienced both these scenarios before, seeing
them used in one place (and where one proves to be a red herring) makes their
use here more noteworthy and interesting.
The Babadook is familiar enough when it
wants to be. The structure of the plot and the conceit that brings the creature
into Amelia and Sam’s lives should both be familiar to regular viewers of
horror films. After looking at a specific item (the pop-up book in this case),
the horror is essentially invited into the home. The plot then progresses
through several nights and days, with the paranormal phenomenon of the nights
becoming more overt and involved with time, culminating in a final, longer
night when a full-blown attack occurs.
The
feature-length film that is The Babadook is
actually an expansion upon Kent’s debut short film from 2005: Monster. If you watch Monster (see link below) after seeing
The Babadook, you’ll no-doubt notice
some similarities in style, tone, themes, and plot.[2] Monster is in black and white, but Kent has suggested that The Babadook, with its drained-looking
central location lacking in color, is still an extension of this visual
style.[3] The main characters of the short film are still the same—a mother and
a disobedient boy named Sam who is obsessed with killing a monster—but the
creature in Monster looks a lot more
like the mother, which is appropriate to the themes of both movies but removes
some of the ambiguity that the Babadook’s more masculine appearance creates.
Also, just for the record and as a bit of a forewarning if you choose to watch
the original short film, Monster has
a couple “bang” moments that do not exist in The Babadook.
I
have previously made a couple cryptic statements about how one should not want
to get rid of the Babadook (partly because one cannot), as well as how the
camerawork in the film steadily faces down frightening things rather than
cutting to them unexpectedly. These observations are thematically significant
to both Monster and The Babadook because both versions of
the story end with the mother and son living in the same house with the
creature and taking care of it in some capacity. In Monster, it retreats to a closet and is given milk. In The Babadook, it runs to the basement
where many of Oskar’s belongings are kept and is fed worms. In both cases, the
creature is not defeated or killed (and it does not defeat or kill Amelia and
Sam). Instead, when Amelia seizes control of the situation and overpowers the
monster’s influence with her own force of will, it flees. The endings of both films
suggest that it is possible to live with the creature still in the house,
whereas many other horror films either have the structure destroyed, the beast
exorcized, or the family fled or dead.
There
is a YouTube edit of the ending of the film (linked below) where a user
shortened the film’s ending in a way that eliminates this peaceful
co-habitation.[4] Instead, the edit has the screen go black as Amelia reaches out
to the Babadook’s deflated clothes, with Sam reciting the line “You can’t get
rid of the Babadook” as the credits begin to roll. While this fan version of
the ending could be interpreted in a manner similar to that of the original
(the Babadook abides, as do Sam and Amelia), it’s altogether more ambiguous in
a negative way, suggesting as well that Amelia may become possessed by the
creature again and that the cycle will continue. In the actual ending to The Babadook, we see Amelia confront the
creature one more time in the basement when she brings it a meal. Again, the
creature is hidden (we inhabit its point of view in the scene). We hear it roar
and see Amelia react to it with fear, but she ultimately leaves the basement
unscathed and the movie ends instead with her sitting together with Sam.
Obviously,
The Babadook (and Monster) is a film about learning to
cope with darkness. I say “obviously” because the movie drives the point home
quite clearly that Amelia is someone who does not deal with her problems. She
simply does not talk about them. She says she has gotten over her husband’s
death because she no longer mentions him, but we know from her behavior that
she has not moved on. She reacts strongly when Sam talks about Oskar and his
death in public, and she keeps all of Oskar’s belongings downstairs while
insisting that Sam leave them alone. That the Babadook later manifests as Oskar
is hardly a surprise. His death has been the catalyst for Amelia’s depression
and ultimately is the way that the Babadook gets a hold on her. In this film,
though, the Babadook is both an actual creature (we see Amelia vomit it up from
an objective point of view at one point) and a representation of Amelia’s
repressed feelings—her depression, but also her sexual frustration which
results from her unwillingness to move on from Oskar (and possibly date again)
and her responsibilities as a mother which keep her from finding enough time just
to masturbate.
This
issue of sexual repression finds an interesting symbol (as well as a connection
to another film) in the strange hole filled with cockroaches that Amelia
discovers in her kitchen. I was watching the film with a friend, and we both
simultaneously came to the conclusion that the hole was probably a piece of Yonic
imagery—that is to say, vagina-like or representative of the vagina. The
cockroaches suggest decay or neglect, of course. Tellingly, when we see them
again during the scene where Amelia and Sam are in the car crash, they seem to
be congregating on her skirt. Because the Babadook is closely associated with
the sound of these insects, we can infer that there is a sexual component to
its symbolism, though it generally stands for everything Amelia refuses to
acknowledge or deal with.
As
for the hole in the wall, it bears a startling resemblance to an image from the
poster for the Canadian film Thanatomorphose
(2012), which falls hard into the category of body horror while also
addressing sexual decay through an abusive relationship that starts the literal
decomposition of the main character’s body:
 |
| The hole from The Babadook. |
 |
| The hole from Thanatomorphose. |
If
there’s a connection between these two films, I am not aware of it at this
time.
The
aforementioned issue of Amelia’s sexual frustration, however, is still a result
of her unwillingness to engage with a problem and find a solution. She won’t
let Sam stay next door with the kindly Mrs. Roach, even though the older woman
is good with him and volunteers to help out any way that she can. Likewise,
Amelia is unwilling to admit that Sam has behavioral problems, whether they are
his alone or stem from her own at-times lackadaisical approach to parenting and
repressive attitude toward her late husband and everything associated with him.
She breaks down in front of the doctor, but she refuses to be honest or openly
acknowledge her problems in front of other people who might be willing to help
her.
As
I keep suggesting, the fact that the film ends with the Babadook still around
but with Amelia and Sam learning to live with it sends a powerful message about
how Amelia’s problems are resolved. We see her opening up more at the ending of
the film. She and Sam both agree that there is a monster in their basement,
where she had previously (repeatedly) denied the possibility of the creature’s
existence, thus indicating her unwillingness to be open with her son about the
dark forces exerted on their lives since Oskar died the day that Sam was born.
She previously avoided engaging with the issue by holding Sam’s birthday on
another day without comment. At the end of the movie, she is celebrating Sam’s
birthday on the day of his birth and Oskar’s death. She no longer takes issue
with Sam’s openness about his father’s death, and she also begins to involve
Mrs. Roach in their lives. She is working through her problems, and the
Babadook’s continued existence suggests strongly that she is working toward a solution. Getting over
her grief will take time. There is no vanquishing the creature outright (you
can’t get rid of it, after all) because these problems that Amelia faces are
ones that cannot be overcome immediately.
The
problems of human characters in horror movies are usually resolved fully by the
end—either through their death (suggesting that the darkness was too much to
handle) or the expulsion, exorcism, or destruction of the evil force
(suggesting that darkness can be obliterated). Sometimes the latter types of
stories end with a resurgence of the evil force after its seeming defeat, which
sends a message similar to The Babadook’s—though because these
other films end on that note, they ultimately communicate a message of personal
powerlessness and cynicism: the darkness will always return, and next time it
will be overwhelming. The fan edit of the ending of The Babadook suggests something similar. Meanwhile, the true ending
of the movie strikes a balance. It is altogether more human and even realistic
in its portrayal of that darkness. It sends the message that, even if you
cannot get rid of a monster, you can deal
with it. Darkness is survivable if not conquerable; if it is conquerable,
it is a process that takes time. In this regard, The Babadook sends a feminist message of personal empowerment in
the face of mental illness or other travails. Trying to bust through to the
other side, defeating evil in the process, does not work. Denying that one has
been complicit on some level with one’s personal monsters is likewise
fruitless. You can’t get rid of the Babadook, but you can learn how to live
with it and prevent it from gaining too much power again.
The
emphasis the film places on its resolution and message is what prompts me to
consider it a sort of modern fairytale, though that by no means undermines its
use of horror and terror. In fact, because The
Babadook has something to say and a reason to exist, the fear it creates is
more powerful. Given that Kent says that she begins her projects with “an idea
or something [she] wants to say first,”[5] the fairytale association seems apt,
as those were fun (sometimes grisly, sometimes frightening) tales with
something more to them than just the surface-level entertainment value. The Babadook feels like such a story,
and I hope that other directors, writers, and producers of similar stories take
note of its strengths.
---
Notes:
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ann_Radcliffe#cite_note-3
(Summary of Radcliffe’s concept of “terror.” I first encountered it in the
class notes for a Gothic literature class; therefore, while this is not a link
to the original source, it does seem accurate insofar as I am aware of
Radcliffe’s writing on the subject.)
