In many ways, the horror genre is as popular and prevalent as it’s ever been. While the genre continues to expand and introduce countless new voices, though, its past decade has been dominated by the emergence of elevated horror. Once upon a time, horror movies that used ghosts, monsters, or demons as metaphors for their protagonists’ emotional and psychological issues were a bit of a rarity. Nowadays, it’s hard to find a new horror movie that doesn’t try to connect its story and scares back to its characters’ underlying traumas.
These films, depending on the level of artistry with which they’re made, often fall into the elevated horror category because they’re made with the intent of doing more than just scaring audiences and terrorizing their characters. The subgenre, which is both beloved and derided by horror fans, has become so pervasive and its tropes have become so common that even 2022’s Scream made room for a meta joke about it. Lately, horror movies about the terrors of, say, grief or survivor’s guilt have started to feel tired and overly familiar.
That wasn’t the case 10 years ago when The Babadook perfected this style of horror storytelling. The film, a low-budget Australian supernatural thriller, has become one of the most acclaimed and influential horror movies of the 21st century. However, while countless films and filmmakers have spent the past 10 years trying to match The Babadook‘s chilling power, none of the elevated horror movies born from its success have been able to truly replicate its magic.
An oft-imitated tale of monsters, both internal and external
The Babadook follows Amelia Vanek (a spellbinding Essie Davis), the widowed single mother of her six-year-old son, Samuel (Noah Wiseman). The pair are haunted by the recent death of Amelia’s husband and Samuel’s father, Oskar (Ben Winspear), but their attempts to move on and build a new life together are hampered by the sudden emergence of the Babadook, a top hat-wearing monster who seems to lurk in every dark corner of their house and feeds on their misery and fear. The entity systematically terrorizes Amelia and Samuel, stalking them in the night and assaulting them with visions that threaten to destroy their already fragile mother-and-son bond.
As Amelia is tormented by images of her late husband and ghoulish visions of a dead and bloodied Samuel, the Babadook’s function as a supernatural stand-in for the character’s unrelenting grief becomes gradually clear. Writer-director Jennifer Kent doesn’t hit you over the head with The Babadook‘s central metaphor, though, nor does she let it get in the way of the film’s visceral impact. As she proved again in her follow-up to The Babadook, 2018’s The Nightingale, Kent is a master of atmosphere and tension. In The Babadook, she and cinematographer Radek Ładczuk use the film’s predominantly black, white, and gray production design to immerse viewers in a world that has been seemingly sapped of all color and life.
Amelia and Samuel’s home is dominated by shadows that don’t just shroud the far corners of each room but spread and cover entire walls of their home. This choice doesn’t just give the film a heightened, almost storybook-like aesthetic, but it also instills in the viewer a constant fear that the Babadook, which lives in the shadows, is always present and lurking just beyond our and the characters’ view. Kent further builds on this by employing wide-angle lenses that make the rooms of Amelia and Samuel’s house seem unnaturally expansive at times, which only adds to the pernicious feeling that we have found ourselves in a world that doesn’t make complete sense. As a horror movie, this is an extremely effective sensation to create, and it’s also fitting for one about a pair of characters whose world has been so torn asunder by grief that they have been left utterly exhausted.
The Babadook isn’t ashamed of being a horror movie
Unlike a lot of the imitators that have followed it, The Babadook isn’t ashamed to be a horror film. Not only is there a dark sense of humor coursing throughout it that feels uniquely tied to the horror genre, but Kent also isn’t afraid to treat the Babadook itself as a genuine movie monster. There is a playfulness to the way the creature is used and shown that perfectly matches its actual physical design and movements. From a purely superficial perspective, this is why The Babadook works not just as a horror-fied exploration of grief but as a modern riff on a classic monster-in-your-closet thriller as well.
The Babadook is, in other words, something that a lot of contemporary, so-called elevated horror movies aren’t, which is entertaining. It’s a film that wants to grab you by the throat and scare you, and it does just that multiple times. One need only look, in fact, at the below sequence where the Babadook breaks into Amelia’s room and attacks her from her ceiling for proof of both Kent’s clear talent as a horror filmmaker and her love of the genre.
The Babadook is seen by many as the spark that ignited the elevated horror boom of the mid-to-late 2010s and the early 2020s, and for good reason. While it has spawned countless, less-successful imitators, though, the film still holds up, regardless of how many of its tricks and tropes have been repeatedly stolen over the past 10 years. It’s a gripping, moving, and, at times, darkly funny horror movie that is cohesively bound together by a battle with grief that still feels just as raw now as it did in 2014.
To its further credit, The Babadook follows its central conflict all the way to its natural, cockeyed conclusion. In doing so, it arrives at an epilogue that posits that grief isn’t ultimately something you beat but rather, eventually, hopefully gain some level of control over. There is something both deeply moving and also terrifying about that, and The Babadook‘s ability to balance both of those emotions at all times is why it is even better than its enduring influence suggests.
The Babadook is streaming now on Netflix.