Friday Horror Flick: The Babadook

Movie teaser: If it's in a word or it's in a look you can't get rid of the Babadook.

Friday Horror Flick: The Babadook 

Let me in!

The more you deny

The stronger I get

You start to change

When I get in

The Babadook

Growing right under your skin

Amelia Vanek (Essie Davis) carries her pain and grief.

The routine  of reading a bedtime story takes a turn for the sinister in this tale about a very evil book and the menace it unleashes upon a vulnerable mother and son. The 2014 Australian horror film The Babadook is a must-watch for any scary movie fan--whether a casual viewer or a critical-eyed scare-skeptical horror movie veteran. To say that I have a very high scare threshold is accurate. I don’t startle or get afraid easily, so when I say that The Babadook scared the living daylights out of me I’m not exaggerating! Be forewarned that this bad boy is not for the faint of heart. That being said, The Babadook does that rare thing in the horror genre where we get an actual honest-to-goodness story. It goes beyond phantoms from beyond the grave and jumpscares to paint us an image of a heartbroken and ostracized young woman and her day to day struggles raising her son alone. In The Babadook the director and screenwriters craft an authentic drama with a cast of characters that are fully realized, rounded and utterly flawed.

I was captivated from the very first scene where single-mum Amelia Vanek wakes up after having a hellish nightmare about her husband Oskar’s death. During the day Amelia spends long hours in the Dementia Ward of the Senior Centre where she works as a nurse. The building is cold, joyless and sterile- it’s a place of subtle sadness and certainly doesn’t do anything to add a smile to Amelia’s face. When she’s not on the job Amelia’s parenting her 7-year-old son, Samuel. Actress Essie Davis immerses herself in the role of Amelia and shows us a burdened and depleted woman who’s barely keeping it together. 

 

The bedtime book that doesn't unleash the beast.

From the set of her jaw and the pain in her eyes, to her colourless and drab wardrobe, and the heaviness with which she carries her body, we see a woman who carries her grief with her every step she takes. Friendless, on the outs with her once understanding sister, Claire, and barely perceptive to her fellow nurse Robbie’s feelings for her, Amelia seems to be alone even when she’s in the company of others. Ravaged by PTSD flashbacks and nightmares about the car crash that killed her husband, she also has to raise Sam who was born moments after his father died. It’s no surprise then, that Sam’s birthdays are a subdued affair and one steeped in much sadness and a pinch of resentment.

Young actor Noah Wiseman as Samuel is not just a cute face with a tousled head of  brown curls. No this kid had some serious acting chops and is absolutely a knockout in every single scene he’s in. Samuel is a perceptive and precocious child who speaks it as he sees it, often sharing the story of his birth (and his dad’s subsequent death) with complete strangers in a chipper and casual way. This first-grader isn’t very popular amongst his classmates; his fascination with magic tricks and his ever-present anxiety about monsters lurking in wait all around him, make him an odd duck. Handier than Violet Baudelaire from A Series of Unfortunate Events he’s hypervigilant about the beasts that go bump in the night that are out to get him so he’s always cobbling together trip-wire traps and weapons to keep the monsters at bay. He bangs out a makeshift crossbow and always has a ready supply of firecrackers to stun the creatures if need be. His obsession with the macabre exasperates his mum, Amelia, who is continually having to apologize for his social faux pas when they’re out in public.

One night when rifling through Sam’s bookshelf for a bedtime story, Amelia and Sam discover a picture book they’d never seen before, Mister Babadook. The pages within chronicles a disturbing little ditty about a monster. What starts off as whimsical rhymes quickly evolve into dark threats. The illustrations and the handwritten text scrawled throughout the book gets more graphic and frantic with the turn of each page. The silly and interactive pop-up elements of the book becomes downright terrifying, and before they can even finish the book, Samuel, already a high-strung bundle of nerves as it is, dissolves into a fit of tears. That very night Amelia and Sam come to discover that the tale they read isn’t just a mere story. Mister Babadook is not just very real. He’s coming for them. 

DOOK! DOOK! DOOK!

Unlike some other horror films that turn the house in a haunted attraction (think Crimson Peak, The Conjuring 2, The Woman in Black) The Babadook does not conceptualize the Vanek residency as a character of itself. This isn’t the cliched Victorian mansion or gothic manor house full of antique oddities, it’s a modest place in the Australian suburbs. As far as the creepiness factor goes, The Babadook doesn’t rely on creaky floorboards or eerie furniture. Instead, it takes a psychological thriller tack and is atmospheric as hell. The sound effects and sound mixing in this are something to behold. As the activity escalates the soundtrack thrums with noises to make your heart race and your body shiver. There’s a hum in the air that sounds like frantic beating of insects wings; then the cuts that mingle buzz saws, rattlesnake hisses and deep, throaty growls with the ominous, eerie tinkling of tunes from music boxes. During one of Amelia’s night time panic attacks, tinkling chimes are overlaid with pulses, bangs and incessant, frantic whispering. For an auditory comparison think of the stellar 1961 horror film The Innocents starring Deborah Kerr.

Visually, with the sparsely decorated rooms, and the grimy and gray color pallets saturating the screen, a chilling and deeply despairing ambiance permeates the house in the film. The scene with the cockroaches scrambling from a crack in wall and bursting out from the paper, to the scene where Amelia starts eating her to soup, only to see it’s loaded with shards of glass are especially memorable. Mister Babadook, we come to see isn’t just another CGI creation. A kind of boogeyman of sorts, the Babadook looks a bit like the Slenderman crossed with the hitchhiker ghost from Disney World’s The Haunted Mansion theme park ride. As he scuttles around the house and thumps around, he makes ghastly noises. His rasping breathing comes out like a snake hiss, cicada chirp, and a guttural death rattle that is far scarier than the onryo ghost girl in The Grudge.

Sam (Noah Wiseman) is locked and loaded

The exceptional acting pushes this above and beyond just another scary movie. Samuel’s vigilance makes him get increasingly aggressive and desperate-- a convulsive fit he falls into is the stuff of nightmares. Deprived of sleep and with tensions running higher than ever between them and plagued by the nightly exploits of Mister Babadook Amelia descends into a sort of madness. Davis has the lungs and the shrill, horrific scream of a banshee. She’s tormented and tortured and it really comes to a head in a graphic and violent possession scene that blows the one from 2013’s The Conjuring away. It’s heartbreaking seeing how terrified Sam becomes as he’s forced to bear witness to the way his mum is changing and suffering. And his panic is electric and palpable on screen! Still, his fate is better than that of his scrappy little dog Bugsy. (Animal lovers take heed: it’s not pretty.) The deliberate symbolism in The Babadook is so compelling and arresting that  rewatches of the movie are inevitable. Film-studies students and classes are sure to have a field day with the abundance of it at all! Especially the television montage where the channels rapidly change between a crocodile eating a bloody hunk of prey, an eerie retro cartoon of a wolf in sheep’s clothing, and other disturbing images.

Do mother and son make it out unscathed? Are they able to banish Mister Babadook and resume their ordinary lives? I’m going to leave the answers to those questions up to you. The closing scene is dark and memorable and will leave your heart racing and thoughts running along with it, long into the night. The Babadook is streaming on Netflix, can be bought for less than $10 on Amazon, and is most certainly in the DVD section of your local public library where you can borrow it for free. So go on. Sit a spell, dim down the lights, and press play. Mister Babadook will see you now.

All images from the IMDB