By Jack Waterman
Let’s face it: maturing is something that everything and everybody must go through. Movie genres are no exception. When they are young, they are full of life and excitement; filmmakers attempt to push the envelope of genres in any way they can. But sooner or later, the genres grow up. It is not uncommon for there to be a single movie that rewrites the genre and forces the audience to rethink what they know about it. For Westerns, there is Unforgiven (Eastwood, 1992). For war films, there is Saving Private Ryan (Spielberg, 1998). And for horror movies, I believe, there is The Babadook (Kent, 2014).
If you distill the structure of The Babadook into basic horror movie terminology, you end up with a generic “main characters get stalked by a terrifying monster”. And judging by the lukewarm reviews of the film from casual moviegoers, this is pretty much what most people were expecting. But the actual execution of this premise is so drastically different from other horror movies that The Babadook was ultimately transformed into one of the first major “anti-horror” movies. Essentially, it is a film in which the traditional logic of horror movies is taken to its natural conclusion.
What do I mean by this? In my intro, I brought up Unforgiven and Saving Private Ryan. In both of these movies, the traditional cornerstones of their respective genres were stripped away and the cold, horrific reality of the main characters’ situations was revealed. The self-assured, morally superior, invincible heroes of old were revealed to be ordinary, flawed people, or worse, vicious and unscrupulous monsters. The real-life consequences of people’s actions were brought into focus, and the main characters were forced to confront them.
If you distill the structure of The Babadook into basic horror movie terminology, you end up with a generic “main characters get stalked by a terrifying monster”. And judging by the lukewarm reviews of the film from casual moviegoers, this is pretty much what most people were expecting. But the actual execution of this premise is so drastically different from other horror movies that The Babadook was ultimately transformed into one of the first major “anti-horror” movies. Essentially, it is a film in which the traditional logic of horror movies is taken to its natural conclusion.
What do I mean by this? In my intro, I brought up Unforgiven and Saving Private Ryan. In both of these movies, the traditional cornerstones of their respective genres were stripped away and the cold, horrific reality of the main characters’ situations was revealed. The self-assured, morally superior, invincible heroes of old were revealed to be ordinary, flawed people, or worse, vicious and unscrupulous monsters. The real-life consequences of people’s actions were brought into focus, and the main characters were forced to confront them.
Unforgiven is a gritty reinterpretation of the western archtypes.
In the case of The Babadook, this expresses itself a little bit differently, probably because horror movies aren’t particularly renowned for their strong characters. They typically rely on sheer spectacle to get by, which has led some to compare horror movies to pornography. I admit this isn’t totally unreasonable: audiences go to a movie theater, watch characters die in the most explicit ways imaginable, and then go home. What horror films don’t show are the messy emotional aftermaths of such brutal slayings. When someone’s friends, family, or lovers are murdered in real life, it has lasting psychological damage on them. The person might develop PTSD, depression, and even end up committing suicide. This is the essence what The Babadook is all about and what I mean when I say it’s an “anti-horror” movie.
There are plenty of ways The Babadook deconstructs the basic building blocks of horror movies, though it’s done in a different way than say, Scream (Craven, 1996) does. Rather than putting the characters into a generic horror movie scenario and having them be self-aware of it, The Babadook plays everything completely straight. There is an almost total lack of humor or comic relief, which is quite the rarity for a movie that is attempting to dismantle the various tropes in its respective genre. Going off the logic described in my previous analysis of Housebound (Johnstone, 2014), The Babadook could technically be considered a horror parody, albeit one that isn’t humorous.
There are plenty of ways The Babadook deconstructs the basic building blocks of horror movies, though it’s done in a different way than say, Scream (Craven, 1996) does. Rather than putting the characters into a generic horror movie scenario and having them be self-aware of it, The Babadook plays everything completely straight. There is an almost total lack of humor or comic relief, which is quite the rarity for a movie that is attempting to dismantle the various tropes in its respective genre. Going off the logic described in my previous analysis of Housebound (Johnstone, 2014), The Babadook could technically be considered a horror parody, albeit one that isn’t humorous.
Amelia eventually confronts and defeats the Babadook in a rather unconventional manner.
And what are some of these tropes The Babadook dismantles? For one thing, it redefines the nature of a horror movie’s “precursor event”. Though it’s not generally brought up in conversations about horror as a movie genre, one thing I have personally noticed in a great many scary movies is that there is almost always some sort of major happening that sets the rest of the movie in motion. In A Nightmare on Elm Street (Craven, 1984), it’s the burning of Freddy Krueger. In The Thing (Carpenter, 1982), it’s the alien spacecraft crash landing into the Antarctic. And in The Shining (Kubrick, 1980), it’s Charles Grady’s murder of his family. In these movies, the precursor events are directly tied to the plot, and the monster/killer arises as a result of the events that transpire. In The Babadook, however, the precursor event itself is the monster. Or at least, Amelia’s depression caused by her husband’s death is. This is what gave me pause and brought the film to a whole other level for me. Ultimately, The Babadook is an incredible meta-horror movie that doesn’t feel like meta-horror movie, and that in and of itself is quite an accomplishment.
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