Movie Notes: You Can't Get Away from 'The Babadook' (2014)

The Babadook is a story of Amelia who grapples with the loss of her husband Oskar and raising alone her son Samuel. One day his son discovers a pop-up story book he mysteriously finds on his shelf. Samuel asks her mom to read it to him one night and they were soon disturbed by its content. The book tells of an entity called Mr. Babadook, and once he comes to your life, he will torment you until you wish you were dead. 

Merely watching the trailer of this movie will give you the creeps and the whole movie was amazing. It is a genuine and amazing horror film because it is tapping into a deeper level of fear and deviates from than the usual jump scares we always see in this genre. 

The film's horror is effective because it lingers and creeps into you. This is because it creates an atmosphere of unsettling danger with subtle sounds, lights and  emotions from its actors. 

Its dark and gripping narrative leaving a lot of room for thinking and speculating to the audience adds to its charm. Everything seems to fall into place, from Samuel's erratic behavior driving his mom crazy to the intrusion of an entity into their lives which manifested itself to them both physically and metaphorically.

The narrative is not a straightforward one and will make you think after watching it. It presents a lot of layers of meaning in the story but it will make you feel fear regardless how you look at it.

There are a lot of ways of looking at this movie: one is the obvious scary story it narrates of an evil entity intruding into their home and threatens the lives of a relatively quiet home.

A deeper interpretation of this is it is a story of grief. It depicts how grief when unchecked can be a destructive and scary to a supposedly loving home.

Since the loss of her husband while trying to bring her to the hospital when Samuel was born, Amelia has repressed her grief and developed the feeling of having Samuel as a burden. The movie showed hints of repressed negative feelings on Amelia such as her strangling him in the height of the story.

It was later revealed that The Babadook manifested as her dead husband. This represented the root of all their troubles which started with his death. The distraught and distress of raising by herself Samuel and the boy's extreme possessive and protective behavior towards his mother. Their grief and loss eats them inside and manifests into a more destructive behavior in their lives.

This movie is a breath of fresh air from the stale and superficial horror movies we usually have now.