Ten Years Later, ‘The Babadook’ Remains One of the Scariest Movies Ever Made
Every year, a new “scariest movie ever made” is released. Last year, I’d argue it was either Skinamarink (which, according to science, might be) or When Evil Lurks. The year before, it might have been Barbarian or Incantation. I think it’s great, personally, even if I’m being facetious about them being the scariest of all time. As a marketing hook, however, it’s perfect. Cull from the collective well of critical responses and reasonably argue that the public writ large agrees—this movie is the scariest of all time. A decade ago, it was undoubtedly Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook, Tara Carpenter’s favorite scary movie. The Babadook was the horror moment of 2014. So naturally, it was met with just as much ire as praise. Ten years later, does it hold up?
Yes. Mostly. Total transparency, I’m a much bigger fan of Kent’s sophomore feature, The Nightingale, but The Babadook remains one of the most assured horror debuts of all time. Like the most influential horror classics, contemporary critics and audiences are likely, in some part, holding The Babadook’s impact against it, even if Kent, despite being one of the first, isn’t singularly responsible for the subsequent deluge of trauma-informed horror that followed in the wake of the movie’s release.
A Harbinger of Things To Come
The Babadook is a lot of things, but a decade out, it’s too often, perhaps regressively, conceptualized as that movie where depression, not a children’s book character, is the real monster. An entire decade of horror would follow its lead, and while The Babadook wasn’t the first to dabble in metaphor—the horror genre, for the history of forever, has done just that—it was the most pronounced contemporary example.
Since then, Michael Myers became a vessel for community trauma, Smile’s demon had some problematic mythos, and even PG-13 outings like Lights Out and Insidious: The Red Door dabbled in mental illness as the real monster all along. Those creepy Tiny Tim-loving demons were just the friends we made along the way.
That has no doubt sullied The Babadook’s reception in some circles. I’m somewhere along the periphery, frustrated broadly with the present state of trauma-informed horror without necessarily blaming The Babadook for it. And that’s mostly because reducing The Babadook to That One Thing diminishes how crafty and effective the movie is.
Defying Audience Expectations
The Babadook follows the rhythms of this century’s horror without feeling beholden to it. Regularly, Kent is content to swerve when audiences expect one thing, grounding her central menace just enough to terrify without risking overexposure. The narrative arc would crumble in less talented hands, with Kent treading in “is this real or all in her head” territory without dredging up its most hoary cliches. It’s real enough for both the audience and Essie Davis’Amelia to resonate, whether it solidifies itself as a metaphor in the third act or not.
And that casting, truly, remains unmatched. Davis, a sterling performer, lends Amelia a kind of unhinged empathy that could easily have gone awry with another actor. Noah Wiseman’s Sam, the subject of some questionable (and ableist) horror discourse, matches Davis at every turn, leaning into the unbridled horror of The Babadook’s story without forgoing the requisite humanity at his core. After all, Sam is just a grieving kid making sense of a world (and audience) that refuses to understand him on his terms.
The Scares In The Babadook Still Hold Up 10 Years Later
That, however, doesn’t even touch on The Babadook’s sensational scares. From a critical perspective, I’ve long questioned the merit of hyping up horror releases on a kind of nebulous scale of scares. Scary isn’t the same for any one person, so when the poster for The Babadook features a William Friedkin quote that reads, “I’ve never seen a more terrifying film than The Babadook. It will scare the hell out of you as it did me,” it undoubtedly generates unfair expectations the movie—any movie, really—could never possibly live up to.
I think It Comes at Night is one of the scariest movies ever made. I could say that, and while it would be true to me, the odds of it being the same for others would be decidedly less likely. Like Skinamarink, The Babadook does rank as the 16th scariest movie ever made (according to science), but the physical metrics used to make that determination are, too, constrained in their own way. A movie can terrify me without accelerating my heart rate. In fact, a lot of what The Babadook does most successfully would be hard to measure on any psychosomatic scale.
Still, to me, The Babadook is terrifying. It has aged remarkably well. The Babadook himself remains one of the century’s best horror villains, and few have managed trauma-informed horror as thoughtfully, and earnestly, as Jennifer Kent. If it’s been a while, I encourage you to revisit it when you get the chance. It’s in a word, it’s in a book… and it’s streaming for free right now on Netflix. Get to it (for Mister Babadook’s sake).
Categorized:Editorials
