When a horror movie is good, critics praise it for being more than a horror movie. It’s also social commentary, a love story—anything other than just cheap thrills prodding masses to the theater. When Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook debuted in November 2014, critics called it a “Freudian study” and a “psychological thriller.”
The movie’s only flaw, many said, came in the climactic scene, which Kent jams with horror tropes. The bed rocks violently and rises (The Exorcist). The boy gets sucked up a staircase by an invisible force (Insidious . . . and, like, every horror movie).
But for me, horror is the genre most suited to the subject matter of the film, centered around a single mother and her young son. The afore-unmentioned father dies in a car accident driving his wife, Amelia (Essie Davis), to the hospital to give birth to their son, Samuel (Noah Wiseman). Seven years later, the boy and his mother rattle about in their grey-toned house trying to parse out what to remember and forget. Watching The Babadook, I was replaying the years after my own dad died.
It’s easy to dismiss that rattling house, that rocking bed, as tropes. It deflates the threat. But the tropes in The Babadook don’t serve to score cheap scares. They raise the stakes of the central horror, grief. It’s the best movie about grief I have ever seen precisely because it is a horror movie. As a fatherless child, sometimes your world is actually that terrifying. My mom feared for ten years that my grief would suck me into trouble (as it did) and depression (as it still sometimes does). She and Amelia were constantly haunted by the prospect of “losing” their sons.
My mom and I lived in a tall house out in the woods. Minus one person, the house became immense. Surrounded by dark trees that tapped on the windows at night, I appointed myself my mom’s protector-in-chief, but still checked under my bed every night.
After my dad died, lights seemed to constantly burn out and doors closed without reason. Surely that was because my mom wired the house herself and we lived in the windy Miami Valley in Ohio, but it all took on a sinister vibe.
Sam walks into his mother’s room in the beginning of the movie–he had the dream again. For me it was a flood rising in our house, trapping my dad in the basement as my mom and I swam to safety.
I knew my dad for eleven years. Sam never had that luxury. Both of us tried to recreate our fathers out of bits of memorabilia. Amelia strips the house of every photo and memento of her husband and stuck them in categorized boxes in the basement. One day Sam ventures down, curious. He strews his father’s papers around the basement and performs magic tricks for his photos. When his mother catches him and tries to restore order to the memories, he rebels: “He’s my father! You don’t own him. You won’t let me have a dad.”
Sam disrupts Amelia’s chance of developing a friendship with a male coworker, trying to stop his mom from being intimate with someone who isn’t his father. Some reviewers have attributed Sam’s actions to Oedipal impulses. But the scene struck me only for the familiar desire to protect the supremacy of his dead father’s memory.
It took my mother six years to start dating. Last summer, she married a wonderful man whom I love, but for those early years after Dad’s death I looked with suspicion on any man who came near the house, mailmen included. I thought they were the first step toward all the photos of my dad vanishing into the basement. I outgrew this; my stepdad and other father figures helped honor my dad’s memory.
I had to remember him. “The more you deny me, the stronger I get,” the Babadook says. Amelia spends the first half of the movie denying the existence of the Babadook. But unlike most horror villains, it doesn’t wait for cover of night. It appears when Amelia drives her car, visits the police station, eats her morning cereal. Meanwhile her son invents elaborate medieval weapons in preparation for the impending violence. Like grief, the Babadook doesn’t wait for the time you’ve set aside for it.
Amelia struggles to face her grief in part because the people around her refuse to acknowledge it themselves. Her own sister asks her why she still acts like a zombie after seven years. The movie nailed the difficulty of connecting with non-grievers over loss. To support a griever takes bravery and empathy. I found those qualities at a group formed by students in my middle school who lost parents, but most others tried to talk to me about God and the afterlife, which apparently urgently needed my father (maybe God required a bass player).
I turn into a surly, moody storm cloud every October without fail. Trying to explain that to people feels like convincing them of a monster only I can see.
Two emotionless Children Services representatives “visit” Amelia’s home to investigate Sam’s absence from school, largely ignoring the obvious absence in the house. They have the power, like that invisible force, to take away her son. She isn’t like most slasher-flick victims, often vacationers exempt from the struggles and horrors of everyday life for the sake of making their death less emotionally taxing for us. The Babadook blends the horrors of the imagination with the horrors of the real world.
It’s often unclear in the Babadook whether terrifying occurrences are real or the product of hallucinations brought on by Amelia’s days of sleeplessness and years of hidden horror. In my dad’s last week alive my mom sat with him on the bed and held his hand. They listened to bagpipes that no one else in the room of relatives could hear. Beautiful hallucinations, but hallucinations neverthetheless. The grieving imagination can run wild. For my mom and I, it took years to grasp the reality of what happened to us.
For Amelia and Sam, it takes fighting a monster. Possessed by the Babadook in a murderous rampage, Amelia chases her son to the basement, but he manages to incapacitate her. It’s the first time in the movie, and evidently their lives, when mom and son are in the basement–surrounded by memories– together. “You have to let it out,” he screams, and inspiring a Linda-Blair-style exorcism complete with an unhinged jaw and spews of black bile. The purge allows her to face the Babadook head on, but it puts up a fight. It makes her re-watch her husband’s bloody death, which she had been trying to push from her head.
This is why facing grief is so hard: talking about it often brings up unspeakable trauma. When I first tried to think about my dad’s death, I saw images of a skeletal man, wretched, soggy from chemo, bitter. I banished these. In the process I banished the man entirely. For the first four years after he died, I simply had no father in my memory.
But trying to erase the grief only creates a monster. As Sam reminds Amelia, you can’t get rid of the Babadook. Amelia forces the Babadook to retreat, but only as far as the basement where her husband’s memory lives. We cut forward about a year to Sam gathering worms for the seething but tamed monster. “It’s alright,” Amelia tells the Babadook. She soothes it, acknowledges it, lets it exist, and returns above ground to live. My bowl of worms is a journal Patrick O’Donnell left me to read after he died. I read it every year. I discuss it with my cousin, my mom, my friends—anyone who wants to share in his memory. I speak his name aloud lest the other monster return.
By Kevin O’Donnell ’16
