Since I’ve already broken the seal on Spooktober 2026, and I’ve been in the mood to make through my movie backlog this extended weekend, I figured I was finally ready to watch The Babadook from 2014.
I was absolutely not ready.
I’d been avoiding it because it seemed way too heavy for me. It’s become a cliche about “elevated horror,” but I think this might have been the first movie I’d heard of that was described as being a metaphor for grief. I assumed that if I just kept it in the backlog long enough (it’s available streaming on Kanopy), I’d eventually have steeled myself enough to handle such a downer.
And early signs were encouraging. It has a pretty great opening sequence, that recounts the car accident that left main character Amelia (an outstanding performance by Essie Davis) widowed, via dream-like imagery. Knowing the basic premise, of a monster from a children’s book that torments a single mother and her son, I’d been hoping that it would all be far enough in the realm of the fantastic.
Unfortunately for me, the bulk of the movie feels like a very grounded and real account of a woman struggling with a troubled child who’s dealing with behavioral problems and near-constant anxiety. Neither of them are able to sleep well. The movie makes you feel every new burden that’s placed on them, as the problems just seem to keep compounding with no end and no solution in sight.
So The Babadook is a frustrating movie for me, because it’s undeniably well made and incredibly effective, but it made me feel as if I were being punished for being capable of empathy. I think it’s an excellent movie, but I hated watching it.
By the time the monster is making its presence more overtly known, it was too late to feel like much a relief or a catharsis. It already felt so overwhelming that it didn’t function for me like putting a face on the horror, giving the characters something tangible to fight against. It just felt like yet another horrible thing piled onto characters who were already dealing with too much.
It is well documented that it’s pretty easy to make me cry, and there’s a long, ever-growing list of movies that push my buttons exactly the right way to get me overemotional and start tearing up. The Babadook was the first time in a very long time, maybe ever, where I was moved to tears by the horrific scenes in a horror movie. They’re not gory or graphic, it’s just that the horror didn’t seem to allow me any feeling of detachment.
The last time I remember being so upset by a horror movie was watching Talk to Me, but that was more due to a bleak tone that undermined everything fantastic from its premise, and then an overwhelmingly (for me) violent sequence. The Babadook is, bluntly, a much better movie, but it’s upsetting without feeling as manipulative. Its characters don’t feel like horror movie characters, so much as characters from a drama that have found themselves inside a horror movie.
And I should probably say that it’s not as overtly manipulative. While looking for screenshots on imdb, I noticed one still after another showing Amelia looking absolutely exhausted, even if she’s got a smile on her face. And then shot after shot after shot of people staring at her with coldness, or judgment, or anger, or pity. Her sister, her sister’s awful friends, her boss, the police, social workers, a psychiatrist. I hadn’t quite registered it while watching the movie, but the same idea gets driven home over and over again: almost no one is willing or able to help her.
So while I was upset during the horrific moments, there’s a scene where the neighbor Mrs Roach visits, and she says “I love you,” and that broke me. The moments of kindness that get thrown out like life preservers before someone goes underwater for the last time.
I was actually grateful for a pretty hokey and cliched visual effect near the climax of the movie, for helping snap me out of it. I was able to jump out of the story and go back to being someone watching a horror movie happening to fictional characters. (The rest of the effects are well done, if a little modest, and I did wish that we’d gotten to see more of The Babadook outside the pages of the story book).
Over the past several years, I’ve been gradually desensitizing myself to horror movies, and I’ve become more and more a fan of them. But I’ve learned that I’m still far too soft for a movie like The Babadook, which is too well made to keep me from caring about what happens to the characters.
As a meaningless aside, for years, I mistakenly thought that this meme:
was Jessica Lange in a scene from American Horror Story that I’d never seen. Now that I know that it’s actually from The Babadook, I’ll have a harder time laughing at it. She’s dealing with an awful lot, you guys!
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