The Babadook (2014): the reigning champ of modern horror gets the reissue it deserves (Review)

Is seven years too early to call something a classic? Second Sight are hoping it isn’t, with this hulking 4K remaster of Jennifer Kent’s 2014 feature debut The Babadook clocking in with the weight of extras they’ve previously given to canonical works like Walkabout and The Colour of Pomegranates. The easy, attention-grabbing thing to do would be to say it doesn’t deserve it, but rewatching the main feature I found it just as singular, confident, stylish, brilliantly written and acted and deeply unnerving as I did the first time around. Back then, the horror competition wasn’t as fierce as it is today. The ‘torture porn’ cycle of the 2000s had burned itself out, splitting the scene between low-key ‘mumblegore’ efforts and the first wave of Blumhouse films, which tended to provide enjoyable ghost-train thrills without getting into the deep, real-world terrors Kent specialises in. Today, horror’s bleeding edge is represented by directors like Robert Eggers and Ari Aster, whose signature style – sombre, transgressive, subtext-led films about grief and trauma – is so close to Kent’s debut we might as well christen the scene cinema du ‘dook.

For those who enjoy such films, The Babadook is required viewing. For those who don’t, it’s still required viewing. The usual criticisms of this school of modern horror – self-seriousness, cod-Tarkovsky pacing, unjustifiably bloated run-times – simply aren’t present in Kent’s film, which successfully balances out its dark, experimental, psychological elements with a sense of loopy invention that outdoes its multiplex rivals at its own game. Indeed, you could argue the film becomes more fun as it becomes more adventurous, with the mighty invisible forces, bisected heads and thunderous sound design of the final reel resembling nothing less than a Sam Raimi remake of Eraserhead.

Kent has a laudably broad range of influences, many of which pop up in its heroine Amelia (Essie Davis)’s insomniac bouts of channel-hopping. These take in everything from Segundo de Chomón’s glorious silent horror-comedy The House of Ghosts to Skippy the Bush Kangaroo, and they’re also frequently invaded by hallucinations – or are they? – of the film’s iconic villain Mister Babadook, who appears to have escaped from a creepy children’s pop-up book Amelia has read to her troubled son Sam (an incredible performance by Noah Wiseman). Since the film’s release, he’s been lovingly parodied in everything from memes to the TV series What We Do in the Shadows, and yet he remains completely effective on home territory.

When Kent was told about the “gay Babadook” memes – sparked, apparently, by a Netflix glitch which listed the movie under “LGBT films” – she found an ingenious way of wrapping this most random of online phenomena into her film’s world. “I thought, ‘ah, you bastard!'”, the director laughed. “He doesn’t want to die so he’s finding ways to become relevant”. Indeed, what brings the Babadook into Amelia and Sam’s home is nothing more than reading about him and talking about him. The Babadook is, surely, an adherent to the old adage that there’s no such thing as bad publicity. The only thing that can defeat him is forgetting about him, which is why it is so resonant to hear that Kent based the design on Lon Chaney’s vampire character in the long-lost Tod Browning horror film London After Midnight. In our world as well as the film’s, then, this creature was dormant for decades until Amelia found that book. Now he’s loose and he’s all over the internet. Even laughing at him feels within the spirit of the film’s ending, which judging by The Nightingale – and the plot synopsis for her upcoming film Alice + Freda Forever – has gained an unexpected status as the most optimistic moment in Kent’s filmography.

The extras are, as mentioned previously, colossal, and yet I suspect many people will make a direct beeline for the interview with Alexander Juhasz, who created the film’s central prop; that wonderful, terrifying book. There’s a commentary with horror scholar Alexandra Heller-Nicholas and critic Josh Nelson, featurettes on the effects and the unforgettably expressive set design, and interviews with everyone from editor Simon Njoo to Jed Kurzel, composer of the film’s Carl-Orff-meets-The Exorcist score. The accompanying hardback book includes essays by major-league horror critics like Anna Bogutskaya and Kat Ellinger, and there’s also a chance to see Kent’s 2005 short film Monster, which proves a gratifyingly large amount of the central ideas for The Babadook were already in place nine years before she made the film. All this for a package assembled during the so-called death of physical media! It turns out you cannot, in fact, get rid of The Babadook.

THANKS FOR READING GRAHAM’S REVIEW OF THE BABADOOK

This month’s Pop Screen exclusive sees us (big) suit up for what many people consider the greatest concert movie of all time – Talking Heads’s wildly inventive, Jonathan Demme-directed masterpiece Stop Making Sense. Graham is joined once again by Talking Heads superfan Ewan Gleadow to discuss the band’s career, the wild visual concepts and their possible meanings, the band’s excursions into unexpected genres, Chris Frantz’s moany autobiography and so much more. 

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