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 theme of the film is the horror of untamed grief and the monster it can become. The movie stars a mother, Amelia, and her young boy in London in a dreary grey house. The movie takes place as the anniversary of her husband's death, and incidentally, her son, Samuel's, birthday, approaches. 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. 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 scarier than the Babadook itself, who is a crudely-drawn tall shadow man from a children's book.
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 manifest 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 the more and more he mentions the presence of the "it" she becomes angrier, insisting that he needs to grow up and stop going on about something that doesn't exist. Her denial of the existence of “it” is ultimately a denial of her own sorrow. In the movie when she has to come face to face with the Babadook, the monster takes the face of her late husband and I realized that the “it” Samuel kept going on about was his mother’s vicious grief and the violence that accompanies. This would explain his prepared reaction to his mother’s gradual change in behavior that’s timed as the anniversary of her husband’s death comes around each year which is also coincidentally Samuel’s birthday. Internally, I believe, that Amelia has a buried hatred for her son. She hates him for being born on the rainiest day, for forcing them to rush to the hospital and surviving the wreck and while she does a good job hiding that fact throughout the year she slips when poor Samuel’s birthday comes about.
This may be a bit of a stretch but my guess is that the Babadook, the main antagonist, was never really there. In fact, I think the Babadook was a product of Amelia’s psychotic break. As Amelia becomes more distraught with the anniversary coming up she is the first to see the Babadook and she seems to be the only person who can see it. We view the events of the movie through Amelia’s eyes so it makes sense why we can see the things that Amelia sees while Samuel would just shout at his mother to keep “it” out. From Samuel’s view, he can only see when his mother is getting a far-off look in her eyes or is quietly fighting some fearful hallucination. The hallucinations start off minor and then eventually the Babadook is everywhere she is and even disrupts her sleep. Sleep depravity and depression don’t dance together smoothly. The hallucinations change her and she becomes a woman ravaged with hate for her son. She is “possessed” and is so controlled by her grief that she puts her son’s life in danger. The movie shows the Babadook snatching her son but if the Babadook is a result of her psychotic break then the danger her son is in is because of her. If the Babadook was never real then the strangling of her son, the battering from an “outside force” was all because she let her pain bring out her hate for Samuel. In the lieu of it all though she realizes she needs to protect her son and that means actually coming face to face with the real monster. She defeated the real monster, Grief, by shouting: "I'm not afraid of you!" until the monster was reduced to nothing more than just a top hat and coat.
The movie progresses to better days and there is more color the scenes compared to the grey tone most of the movie was in. Interestingly enough, inside the basement, the Babadook is being kept. That would be enough to break my theory that he was constructed by Amelia’s grief but till the end, Samuel doesn’t see him and Amelia doesn’t either. Instead of seeing the Babadook we get the essence of his presence instead. She sometimes visits the basement and feeds it worms. I took the worms as a symbol of decay. Amelia is trying to bury her grief and while the pain of the loss of her husband still remains she is trying to lay it to rest. Samuel asks his mother if he can go down and see the Babadook but she tells him no and replies “you’re too young, maybe when you’re older.” Because the Babadook represents pain and grief Amelia doesn’t want her son to know about it. What Samuel really doesn’t understand is the loss of someone who was never there to begin with. He’s too young for the pain of know the pain of not having a father present. Or maybe his grief is along the lines of something else- regardless he is “too young” to know real pain.
The theme of grief manifesting as a monster is congruent with the statement: when dealing with grief the monster that is the scariest to put down is the one we create ourselves. Despite this, the way to move forward from the pain is to come face to face with it and make it your pet? In other words, being in complete control of your pain.
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