Who Would Want To Get Rid Of A Thoughtful Horror Movie Like The Babadook?

For Amelia Vanek (Essie Davis), life as a single mother isn't easy. You can tell just by looking at her tired face that she's being run ragged by the responsibilities of her life including raising her precocious son, Samuel (Noah Wiseman), on her own. Samuel has some major behavior problems and his school is just about ready to give up on the boy and the fact that Samuel has become just as fascinated by a monster called the Babadook and telling everyone within earshot about how he's going to kill the Babadook as he is with performing magic tricks isn't helping anyone. Like I said, this isn't an easy life.


And it's about to get even less easy now that strange things have started to happen around Amelia's house. Samuel is becoming more and more convinced that the Babadook is real and the fact that strange things keep happening in her house, including a children book about the Babadook that Amelia ripped apart miraculously showing up fully intact on her doorstep, is even making Amelia think there may be some validity to this Babadook creature actually existing. But if this Babadook creature is real, is there any possible way to stop it? Can Amelia protect her boy and herself from the horrifying creature waiting in the shadows?

It should be noted that I'm as shocked as anyone that it's taken me this long to get around to finally watching The Babadook given the pop culture ubiquity it's garnered in the last three years since it was initially released. Between the rapturously positive reviews it received when it was first released and the titular monster becoming an LGBTQA icon thanks to some Netflix categorization tomfoolery, everybody loves this movie and it's not hard to see why. Writer/director Jennifer Kent has concocted quite the impressive horror film here that, like fellow recent top-notch horror fare The VVitch and Raw, works as compelling drama even before the elements that explicitly belong in horror movies show up.

The best part about Kent's screenplay is how well it fleshes out the conflict at home for both Amelia and Samuel. The latter character very much acts like a realistic kid plagued by internal problems as he bounces off the walls with his hyperactive energy and has no hesitation in speaking his mind. Basically, he's not the typically movie moppet who just spouts tidy truisms that someone his age would never speak. There's a similar level of authenticity to the performance Essie Davis puts in as Amelia, the way David portrays this characters weariness feels oh so true to life, particularly in a scene where she snaps at some ritzy mothers at a child's birthday party.
 
The fact that the plight of these two characters is so engaging means that it's impossible not to get wrapped up in their ordeal once the titular monster shows up and starts causing mayhem. Jennifer Kent is just as skillful at writing moments of horror as she is at concocting realistic depictions of familial strife as some truly unsettling events (most notably the recurring use of a creepy voice that moans the word "BABADOOK") drive the main characters mad and provide a similar level of fearful entertainment to the fear. The gradual escalation in scale of the Babadook's terrifying attack on Amelia and Samuel is particularly well-handled and means there's plenty of scares coming down the pipeline.

It's also interesting to note how The Babadook is, like many great horror movies such as Jaws or The Evil Dead, the kind of scary motion picture that uses the constraints of its lower-budget to create more terror. On a $2 million budget, The Babadook doesn't have the kind of cash to have its titular beast pop up on-screen all the time, but that's just fine since it manages to wring scares out of keeping it off-screen by either having characters reacting to it off-screen or doing Sam Raimi-escue shots done from its perspective. It's a mighty clever maneuver to be budget-conscious and generate scares and there's plenty of ingenuity to be found in the way The Babadook handles its scares .