I watch and read a lot of horror. It’s my favorite genre, probably, but I’ll be the first to admit that a lot of it is pretty bad. By “pretty bad” I don’t just mean “poorly written” or “poorly filmed” or “poorly acted,” though it can be that a lot of the time. Horror is one of those genres where you can forgive a lot of shakiness in execution if the scares are delivered. Unfortunately scares are often not delivered, or they’re delivered in a lazy way that overrelies on immediate shock rather than skillfully built tension. Some of this is because of my own familiarity with the format, which has admittedly desensitized me to a lot. It can take a lot to scare me, and more to scare me in a way that stays with me. The Babadook scared me. It stays with me.
When I first saw it, over ten years ago now, I knew it would become a favorite, and it did, and I watched it several more times. I have not watched it at all since I became pregnant with my first child. I don’t know if I’ll ever have the nerve to watch it again. That’s horror. It’s a staggering masterpiece. It makes me feel sick to my stomach. I love it and I hate it. I think about it all the time, I’m so grateful and glad it was made, and sometimes I wish I’d never seen it. It’s so good.
It’s so hard to be a mom, and Amelia has it harder than a lot of moms, but it’s hard regardless. It’s hard to have your life dominated by care work - I think it’s a deft touch that even when Amelia leaves her home to go to work, she works in a nursing home. Her whole life is about care work, she has no breaks. She has no help that doesn’t seem to come with strings. Her son bugs her, and he bugs other people. He’s always there.
It’s so hard to be a kid, too, and Samuel has it harder than a lot of other kids. He adores his mother, but he doesn’t understand her and can’t predict her. He seems to bother her without meaning to. The world overwhelms him, often, and he can’t make sense of it or predict his own reactions to it, at least not enough to not have those reactions. His mother is always there, but she’s not always like a mother to him in the way he needs.
Amelia does love Samuel, by the end of the film that’s clear, but it is in question for the bulk of the film, which is the scariest thing. The Babadook itself is her grief and frustration and rage made manifest, something that threatens to take her over and destroy her, and it almost wins, and it never really leaves. Those feelings need to be kept at bay, but that’s all that can be done with them most of the time. She does rally, she saves her kid, and learns to prioritize their love for each other, but the monster might come back. You can never know.
I struggled, quite a lot, with my mental health after the birth of my second child. I won’t go into the details here; I was never in danger. I got help when I needed it, and I’m glad I did. I’m much better now, and I continue to get better, but it isn’t a straight line from bad to good. I like to tell people that I’m on an upward spiral. Things recur, but it’s a little better each time. I hope for that for Amelia, and Samuel, within the fictional world of this film.
But they might not get it, and the film walks right up to the edge of everything being lost or destroyed, forever. There’s a scene I think of, often, from the second season of Twin Peaks. Major Garland Briggs, something of a mystical figure within the show, is asked, under torture, what his greatest fear is. His answer is simple, and revealing: he fears “the possibility that love is not enough.” This fear undergirds so much of horror about the family, and it is at the heart of The Babadook. Love might not be enough. At the end, it looks like it is, at least for now, but who knows.
Essie Davis is a genius. This movie is a masterpiece. I think you should watch it. I probably never will again.