Post 1, Group B: Grief is the Real Monster By Dianesa Sanon

I came across "The Babadook" first as it made its appearance as an internet meme and again when my boyfriend suggested that I watched it. I am a horror fanatic- from haunted houses to Until Dawn and scary books to the things alike. I love to be scared. So I was down for watching a horror film at 3am made possible by Netflix, may you reign notoriously forever.

The movie stars a mother, Amelia, and her young boy in London in a dreary grey house. The movie takes place at the nearing of the anniversary of her husband's death and incidentally her son, Samuel's, birthday. The boy is really intelligent and often gets into trouble in school because he isn't social and often doesn't filter what he says before he says it. His mother is a frail woman who tries her best to make it through each day but still she never really has gotten over the pain of her husband's death. As the story progresses she becomes sketchier as a character and in some aspect more scarier than the Babadook itself, who is a crudely-drawn shadowy tall man from a children's book who is, my guess, is written by the Amelia, the mother.

The fear of grief is the theme of this horror movie. For the longest time, I believed that Amelia was the Babadook but as the movie went on i realized the only reason the Babadook was able to be manifested was because she let it. In the movie, as the day of her husband's death gets nearer she becomes less and less "human". Samuel, her son, is seen gathering weapons and setting traps because "it's coming" and is constantly telling his mother to "not let it in." As time passes through the more and more he mentions the presence of the "it" she becomes angrier and angrier insisting that he needs to grow up and stop going on about something that doesn't exist.

In the movie, while she is facing off with the Babadook, the monster takes the face of her late husband she has to fight to beat down the grief she has to save her son who has been captured. She yells "I'm not afraid of you!" until the monster is reduced down to nothing more than just a top hat and coat. Later the grey color of the movie is gone and replaced with more color. Inside the basement, she keeps the Babadook and feeds it worms. 

The obvious theme of fear is in the movie but there is also the aspect that we are our scariest monster when we are faced off with something as heavily laden as grief. When Samuel begged his mother to "not let him in" he was asking more than just letting the monster into the house after notoriously raps on the door. He is asking that she keeps out the bad depressive emotions that cause her to act like a monster. Again when he mentions that "he's coming" Samuel means more than just the Babadooks arrival. Samuel tells everyone at school that his birthday is coming, but he also never fails to mention that his father died the same day. Samuel knows that as his birthday approaches his mother becomes a whole different person. In the movie, as the day gets closer the family dog stays near Samuel and hardly ever leaves his side and meets his end after barking protectively to keep the possessed by anger and grief Amelia away from her son via neck break. Again, in the end, Ameila keeps the Babadook cellar under the stairs and feeds him worms. I made the connection that worms usually signify death and decay and her feeding it was a way of her accepting the grief and moving forward. As she feeds it the gruel she still seems to fear the creature but she isn't crippled by the fear. Before descending into the basement Samuel asks if he can come along and feed it with her but she tells him he is too young now and can maybe do so when he is older. I understood this as the author's way of saying that because Samuel is too young to understand the grief of losing someone much less the loss of someone you never knew would be too much for him so he had to wait till he could better cope with it as an adult.