The horror is in our own society

Submitted by AWL on 11 November, 2014 - 5:46 Author: Harry Davies

The Babadook is an unexpected box office hit which seems to have left some of its audience rather confused, to judge by online comments. Is it a Nightmare on Elm Street-style ghostly slasher film?  An homage to The Shining?  An indie psychological horror?  Actually I'd call it one of the finest horror films ever made. 

The Babadook tells the story of Amelia, struggling to raise her "troubled" son whilst barely clinging onto a precarious zero hours nursing home contract.  The mechanistic forces of an uncaring, target driven state surround her; the teachers who don't seem to know her son's name and want to exclude him from mainstream education, the police who giggle openly at her fears even as she weeps in front of them, the supercilious social workers, so clearly judging everything they observe in her troubled home; Amelia is broke, depressed and isolated.  It's a powerful performance by Essie Davis, a deeply affecting account of what it is to be working class and in pain in a society that would rather not think about either subject.

And then there's Mister Babadook himself, a rather nasty piece of work, inclined to communicate through the medium of an unpleasantly graphic pop-up book, or occasionally whispering his name late at night.  Represented by a combination of puppetry and stop motion animation, the Babadook is everything that children are irrationally scared of.  He's the monster under the bed, the dark in the wardrobe and also, the manifestation of some very adult terrors too.

The power of this extraordinary film lies in its ambiguity.   Like all good horror films, it balances the oldest fears of the night with a believable set of very contemporary real life terrors.  We're shown a situation tragically all too common, as Amelia's identity collapses under external economic and social pressures and internal psychological trauma.  Soon, we're almost desperate to see the focus shift back to the Babadook again; his supernatural frights are somehow far more palatable than the grim and all too common domestic situation which unravels with painful inevitability, until the unexpected and (almost original) ending which carries a powerful and unsettling resonance, especially for anyone who's ever had to deal with overwhelming personal issues of their own.

The tagline is a gift to reviewers: "You can't get rid of the Babadook"; I couldn't agree more.

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