Intensely Spooky: The Babadook

Watch if you liked: The Haunting of Hill House

Director: Jennifer Kent (her directorial debut. You go, girl)

Year of Release: 2014 (Really, it’s been that long)

Rotten Tomatoes (not that it matters): 98%

Violencemeter: 02 deaths, a broken nose, a stabbed leg, a hit to a forehead, loads of screaming

A friend and I recently got into a debate. My friend was of the view that people who perpetually stay happy are dumber than those who’re sad and depressed. Say what you will about my friend, she may have a point there. 

If there were a blue pill that could make you 10x smarter and a red pill that could make you dumber, which one would you go for? Would you choose intelligence along with the awareness of worldly despair, or would you choose the bliss of ignorance?

Would you like to be smart enough but let your dark thoughts consume you or would you want to be dumb enough to not care about them? The Babadook tries to challenge you to ask yourself something similar - whether the movie is scary or if it’s just a scary figment of the protagonist’s imagination.

Set in Adelaide, Australia (yay, accent porn), the movie centres around a widowed Amelia and her 6-year-old creepy-ass kid, Samuel. One of Sam’s ideas of fun involves building (yes, building) weapons to fight the imaginary monsters in his head, which gets a name and character one day, when Amelia reads him a pop-up storybook titled The Babadook. 

The Babadook is your average Brian Hugh Warner (aka Marilyn Manson) type dude who will ruin you if you let him in, much like the sick dickless turd Brian is. Sam starts to see the Babadook first, creating a new layer of problems for his mom. I can’t say for Amelia, but it is this point where it got really painful for me to tolerate the kid, even though he was in the movie. Only some time passes before Amelia starts to feel the spook too. Things only go downhill from there.

The actress playing Amelia does a beautiful job at portraying a helpless, chronically tired, can’t-catch-a-break widow, and as you watch the movie, you feel every bit of her misery and can’t help but feel sorry for her. 

The story progression is a bit slow at times, and you can’t help but feel like checking your phone in the middle. Don’t be that asshole. Even when it drifts forward lousily, it delivers an intense storyline, all summed up beautifully towards the end. 

Like all horror movies, The Babadook also has that final night of reckoning when the protagonist goes, “okay it either us or this evil pinhead”. The movie very graciously portrays the real image of who the Babadook really is, and you can’t help but marvel at it. And like every other horror movie, the ghost does go away…….. Or does it?

Watch it to find out yourself! 

Fun Fact: In October 2016, due to some Tumblr users saying that the Babadook was openly gay owing to his overdramatic persona, the movie gained LGBT overtones, with Netflix allegedly classifying the movie as an LGBT film. The character also made its appearances in Pride marches. Wow.

If one thing, the movie does a great job at making you question the nature of reality of things around you. And whether things would be different if you were smarter. Or dumber. That, to what extent can we simplify and choke our demons if only we didn't think about them hard enough. Whether things are really as hard as we make them out to be - similar to what my friend suggested, at the beginning of this shitty movie review. Was my friend even real, or just my own psyche making me stupid suggestions for this blog?

The Babadook is available to watch on Amazon Prime Video.

Morticia rates the movie 3.5/5. Not that you should really give a shit about my rating.