Ten years have passed since Jennifer Kent’s spectacular horror film The Babadook was released. Celebrated by a limited theatrical run in October and a screening at this year’s 40th Sundance Film Festival in January—where the film originally made its debut in the Midnight section of the festival—the film, and its horrifying emblem, have since become iconic in their own right.

“The film feels like an old friend, one that changed my life in many ways,” Kent told IndieWire.

But in 2014, being 15 years old, I avoided The Babadook; I didn’t brave the film until this year. I came to the film prepped with notions of extremes: This movie would be the most horrifying film of the decade, or, as others promised me, the most unsettling. I expected gore and guts, maybe even the dread I often associated with a prime horror film. Instead, I found a brutal tenderness, a feeling so alien to horror films I’d seen before but deeply rooted in a familiar human kindness. I felt as if I was witnessing something singular, uncovering a solitary relic whose value lay not in the stunning guild of its surface but in the jagged edges that could cut me to my heart.

We learn about Mister Babadook through his “children’s” book image, a picture that infantilizes the scuffling, sneaking creature. He does not remain in the book but emerges corporeal one night. He will knock on the door, scuttle from the pale ceiling, and travel down the throat of Amelia Vanek, a mother who raises her misbehaving child alone. 

As Amelia, Essie Davis counteracts her character’s beats of anxiety and sadness with venomous sparks of seething rage. Under The Babadook’s influence, Amelia’s anger toward her child, Sam, accelerates and manifests as vitriolic and vengeful—for Amelia gave birth to Sam on the day her husband, driving her to the hospital, died from a car accident. Her resentment toward her son oscillates between simple irritation for his delinquencies at school to a violent physical cruelty, driven by the anger that Mister B feeds upon. 

Frequently, Kent offers those moments in the dark without a score, allowing the unsettling shuffles of the parasitic Babadook to trickle through the scene. The film’s concluding confrontation is less a crescendo than a silent scream, and Kent only turns on the sound when she’s sure you won’t look away. To me, this relentlessness is more horrific than the grisliest ghoul or the bloodiest zombie. My imagination, instead, fills in the gaps.

I first experienced that deep-rooted feeling of helplessness and disgust when I watched Ari Aster’s Hereditary (2018), when Toni Collete, as Annie Graham, wails over the decapitated body of her daughter in the backseat of her car. That moment in Hereditary takes place off-screen (instead, we remain with her son Peter, who caused the accident, in his bedroom). 

Annie’s howl is inescapable in its grief—it rings on because we do not see the scene as she does, and so we fill in the gaps. So too does Kent leave us with the dread and disgust of The Babadook, the specter himself, by rarely “showing” him. He becomes more haunting in the absence of a sharp-focused face; his shadows grow more monstrous the longer Kent denies us an image to scare us. 

It’s in fact that facelessness that makes us sneak a look into the corners of each scene; it’s the reason why the silhouette of every overcoat-gloves-hat, The Babadook’s costume, in the background of the scenes loom ominously, insidious, a spider about to transform. (And when it does show his face, just for a second, it nearly shatters the illusion for me.) The Babadook’s faceless showmanship has rendered him a queer icon, an identity that at first appears incongruous with his sinister demeanor but in fact oddly captures the bombastic, campy attacks he performs for the family.

As Sam, Noah Wiseman is a delightfully impetuous child; he made me hate him, as Amelia often does. Then he turns around with such a steadfast love for his mother, a love so bursting, unconditional, heart-breaking, and candid. His doe eyes grow large, pleading, as his possessed mother attacks him; he brushes a tiny hand across her face, an anchor to draw her back.

These are the emotional planes that struck me while watching The Babadook. No one had told me about that before my first viewing–that it was most touching, most genuine, even if those phrases grow rote by a ceaseless urge to rank new films by the standard of others as if those hyperbolic superlatives could capture the feeling of revisiting that “old friend” that Kent voices: a feeling of approaching something supposedly daunting as now familiar, even friendly — that monster in the basement who needs to be fed and cared for.

Retrospective Courtesy of Arleigh Rodgers


Feature Image Credit to IFC Films via IMDb