The recent Australian horror film has garnered reverence from viewers and critics, and is currently sporting a dubious 98% on Rotten Tomatoes. Realistically, it's an unremarkably average film, brandishing heavy-handed metaphors and kitsch, emotional fast-food.You know, like critics love. And the internet has no shortage of blog posts lauding these purported strengths.
But try as they may to convince you, they didn't watch it to feed their dilettantism. It's a horror movie. They watched it for horror, of which I saw none.
So why did everyone else see it?
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| All I see is Edward Scissorhands doing an impression of a rorschach. |
In the film, The Babadook itself is a tophat-clad manifestation of a children's book, brought into existence by the reader's awareness.
The protagonist's son and walking advertisement for 30th trimester abortion, Sam, [laughably poorly acts as if he] suffers from frequent nightmares and delusions that he and his mother are in danger of being attacked by monsters. He insists that they are real, despite her objections, and like a 40-pound MacGyver constructs makeshift weaponry so inexplicably convoluted for a six year-old that Rube Goldberg would use them to turn himself over in his grave.
One night after a rich, full day of being just an awful fucking headache of a child, he requests that his mother, Amelia, read him a story, reaching for Mister Babadook. Accompanied with the book's Gorey-esque illustrations is a rhyme:
If you're a really clever one, and know what it is to see,
Then you can make friends with a special one, a friend of you and me
A rumbling sound, then three sharp knocks, that's when you'll know that he's around
You'll see him if you look
This is what he wears on top [a tophat], he's funny, don't you think?
See him in your room at night, and you won't sleep a wink.
I'll soon take off my funny disguise (take heed of what you read)
And once you see what's underneath, you're going to wish you were dead
Sam squeals in fear like Ned Beatty on a roller-coaster made of Appalachian dicks, and his mother disposes of the book where she can be sure it can never again harm her family: atop a 5-foot high dresser. Because her child can construct bone-piercing crossbows out of three sticks and a string, but is incapable of standing on a chair.
Cue standard haunted-house cliché: objects move on their own, doors creak open, shattered glass finds its way into her soup, and the creature hovers over her, croaking its name while she cowers underneath the covers for 6 hours. Still, she refuses to acknowledge the creature's existence.
And so my first point: no reasonable person would so strongly resist the reality that their home is haunted. Not in 2015. Supernatural horror films used to pull their horror from the existence of ghosts, but we tired of that narrative; it's no longer even supernatural to us. For fuck's sake, ghost-hunting is a legitimate career choice. Not only do we accept that the supernatural exists, but ridiculous or not (it is), it's a casual experience. People will gleefully share with you that their clock-radio is haunted. Every creek and shadow is a late widow, trying to possess your faulty microwave. People call exorcists like pest exterminators. It's not horrifying to be haunted, because everyone already thinks that they are.
The horror now is that no one will believe you. The horror now is that no one will help. The horror now is that you can't escape. Saddle up, move the family to a new house, spend all night searching for discount ex-crime scenes on justdontgodigginganyholesintheyard.com, but the creature will follow you wherever you go.
You can't get rid of the Babadook.
In keeping up with her neglect of the living nightmare occupying her Nordstram, Amelia destroys the book, and begins to notice everywhere cockroaches...
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| Ever feel...Not so fresh? |
in her wall, and
Sam screams some more.
So she takes her son to a doctor to treat what those in the psychiatric field refer to as The Batshit Crazies (Type II), but lacking the necessary shotgun full of Risperdal, offers her a prescription of sedatives to lull her little tumor to sleep through his screams.
Amelia drugs her child and tucks herself in for another night of staring directly into the gaping maw of the croaking monstrosity hanging above her head, and then sharing with no one like he was just a drunken hookup.
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| When the bar lights flick on, it's this or nothing. |
In the morning, she finds the book on her front doorstep, repaired, and upgraded with popup scenes of her strangling her son -- and worse -- their dog, and then slitting her own throat. The book is accompanied with four new lines:
I'll wager with you, I'll make you a bet,
The more you deny, the stronger I get.
You start to change when I get in,
The Babadook growing right under your skin.
The rhymes serve to prove my ultimate point, I promise, but I'll get to it later because I'm a terrible writer.
Amelia receives a phone call from The Babadook (which I have to assume he awkwardly made from a payphone somewhere), once again throatily reciting his ridiculous name like a bronchial Pokémon. She finally decides that sharing a home with Tim Burton's wardrobe will not stand, and visits the police station to report it. As she tries to report to the man at the desk the children's author tormenting her, she sees hanging with the coats in the back:
Shit. The Babadook is Five-O.
She runs.
And goes crazy. Could really use that shotgun about now.
She cuts the phone lines, locks the house down, and sits down to pull an all-nighter watching silent films, apparently directed by the darker, crazier uncle of David Lynch.
She ultimately falls asleep and is possessed by The Babadook, repeatedly chanting in an attempt to ward him off "it isn't real".
Spoiler: it is.
She breaks the dog's neck, gets shot in the shoulder by one of those ludicrously complex traps, tries to strangle her son, the kid gets thrown around like a rag doll in a wind-tunnel, and she is defeated with the motherfucking power of motherfucking love. They keep the Babadook as a pet in the basement and feed it worms.
The end. Didn't care for it.
But why does anyone find it scary?
Frankly, I didn't see the appeal, and I still don't find it scary. But I gave it some thought. More importantly, I gave it some thought alone, in a dark room, staring at the ceiling. And I started to see what others might. Everything adopts a Babadook-shaped form, every thought is molded by his suggested existence -- the mere thought of a Babadook manifests him in whatever you see.
If it's in a word, or in a look, you're made aware, and it solidifies not as a tangible creature, but as a manifestation of your own mind; a twisted simulacra brought into being not due to, but of its own suggestion.
See it in your room at night, and you won't sleep a wink. You know it's not there, you know you're safe, you know there's no Babadook.
But what if?
If you're a clever one, and you know what it is to see, you can try and return its innocence, and try and rationalize "it's the fan, it's a shadow, it's a hat on a coat rack"
But the more you deny, the stronger he gets. Even with a stupid name like The God Damned Babadook, the suggestion is there, inside of you, growing right under your skin, becoming ever-more terrifying.
The Babadook is written to represent a litany of poorly executed metaphors, be it mental illness, or our own "inner darkness", but what the creature so purely, excellently, and perhaps even unintentionally represents is the fear in all of us, imagined into existence not in lieu of rationality, but despite it. If you found yourself as terrified by this film as the rest of the internet seemed to, ask yourself: would this film be the slightest bit terrifying if the father was present? No, I'm not saying the man could stop it, but put yourself in her shoes and ask yourself: is the Babadook the slightest bit frightening with another person there, sleeping beside you?
She seemed to think not, as halfway through the film she ventures into the dank basement included in every Hey, The Murderer Was Never Convicted home package, and retrieves an item with which to sleep. Her dead husband's violin.
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| It's a slippery slope, liberals. |
This violin is a partial object meant to represent her husband, not just to the audience, but to her. If the father was there with her and her son; if they were together, the Babadook wouldn't be frightening -- the Babadook wouldn't even exist.
The Babadook is powerless; it's not an unstoppable juggernaut that will sweep through and go for the hat trick. It's that fear that bubbles up inside of you when you're alone, the fear of what you know couldn't be, but somehow simultaneously just primally know is. Maybe it's harmless, maybe it's a shadow, maybe it's a hat on a coat rack. Maybe you can live with it, and maybe you can't. Maybe you soldier on, or maybe you jolt up and rush for the lightswitch. You know that it's not real, and you know that it's just in you.
But you can't get rid of the Babadook.
