THE BABADOOK (2014) | The Monster You Keep In The Basement (High)

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THE BABADOOK (2014) | The Monster You Keep In The Basement (High)

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We went High on The Babadook, because this is the kind of horror movie that gets scarier the more you sit with it. Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook (2014) is not just about a monster in a top hat with long fingers and a creepy children’s book. It is about the thing you lock in the basement, the thing you refuse to name, and the thing that gets stronger the longer you deny it. That is the central argument of this episode: there is the thing coming for you, and then there is the thing coming from you. The Babadook works because it collapses those two horrors into one. If you want to watch it as a literal boogeyman movie, you can. But for us, it becomes much scarier as a psychological horror story about grief, parental rage, resentment, exhaustion, and the terrifying thoughts good people are not supposed to admit they have. In this episode, we revisit The Babadook, written and directed by Jennifer Kent, starring Essie Davis as Amelia and Noah Wiseman as Samuel. Released in 2014, this is a movie that critics embraced but audiences have always seemed split on. We understand why. This is not comfort horror. This is not a funhouse ride. This is a movie that asks you to sit inside a house with a mother and child who are both drowning in grief, fear, loneliness, and emotional neglect. The story follows Amelia, a widow still haunted by the death of her husband Oscar, who died in a car accident while driving her to the hospital to give birth to Samuel. Six years later, Amelia is barely functioning. Samuel is intense, imaginative, loud, frightened, and obsessed with building weapons to fight monsters. Then a disturbing pop-up book called Mister Babadook appears on their shelf, and once they read it, the thing that has been buried in the house starts clawing its way out. One of our biggest conversations is whether the Babadook is real or whether it is inside Amelia. Our answer is basically yes. The movie is powerful because it refuses to make that separation clean. There may be a supernatural force in the house, but the monster also represents everything Amelia has spent six years refusing to feel: grief, anger, resentment toward her child, exhaustion, guilt, and the taboo thoughts that motherhood does not allow her to say out loud. We talk a lot about Jennifer Kent’s vision and how specific it feels. There is a lesser version of this story that could have been a straightforward domestic drama about an overwhelmed widow on the verge of hurting herself and her child. Instead, Kent gives that internal horror the shape of an old silent-film nightmare: the top hat, the cloak, the long fingers, the stop-motion movement, the German expressionist look. The Babadook feels like something ancient, like a monster that has always existed because the feelings it represents have always existed. The children’s book is one of the movie’s smartest choices. Amelia and Samuel do not buy it. It is not gifted to them. It is just there, sitting on the shelf like it was always in the house. That is the metaphor. The grief was already there. The rage was already there. The book just opens it. The biggest High of the movie is Essie Davis, who gives one of the great modern horror performances. In the first half, she is performing “good mother” with every ounce of strength she has left. She is gentle, patient, soft-spoken, and clearly decaying underneath the mask. We can see the effort it takes to keep the monster down. As the movie goes on, that mask starts cracking. Her line readings become sharper. Her face changes. Her body changes. There are moments where she feels like she is channeling Jack Nicholson in The Shining, especially once the Babadook is fully inside her. But the performance never becomes empty horror-movie madness. It stays rooted in the terrible truth of the character: Amelia loves Samuel, and she is also furious at what his birth is tied to. That contradiction is the movie. We also defend Noah Wiseman as Samuel, because the criticism that he is too loud, shrill, or irritating misses the point. Samuel has to be difficult. If he were a sweet, quiet movie child, the story would not work. His behavior is part of the horror, but it is also a symptom of the house he has grown up in. He is the carbon monoxide detector going off while everyone else keeps blaming the noise. He knows something is wrong before anyone else will admit it. And beneath the screaming, weapons, tantrums, and chaos, Samuel is heartbreaking. He loves his mother. He wants to protect her. The scene where Amelia is choking him and he strokes her face instead of fighting back is devastating. That moment only works because the movie understands Samuel as more than an annoying child. He is scared, traumatized, and still trying to save the only parent he has. We also talk about the importance of Amelia’s support system. Robbie, her coworker, and Mrs. Roach, her neighbor, are small but crucial points of light. Mrs. Roach especially breaks our hearts. ...

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