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Babadook (2014) by Jennifer Kent

The horror genre of movies is probably filled with thousands of films which serve a

single purpose: to scare and disgust the viewers. Incidentally, it is popularly known how horror

films still appeal to large audiences in spite of the negative energy they portray. This could be

due to the strong thematic focus they exhibit, hence involving the audiences all along their scary

and disgusting events. Featuring monsters on their different forms, horror films address salient

issues affecting humanity in ways that are more concrete than other genres. Jenniffer Kent’s

horror film, Babadook (2014) is among the horror films that address important aspects of human

life, even when they superficially serve to scare and disgust the audiences. There is much one

can read from this film, other than the simple narrative where a troubled mother struggles to raise

her six-year-old son (Sam) after the tragic death of her husband. Having been widowed at the

time she was delivering her son, Amelia Vanek has to content with many things: to provide for

her son’s needs; help Sam overcome his obsession with an imaginary monster, and thus suffer

insomnia; and also face the ‘reality’ of the haunting ghost – Babadook – within her house. On

top of this, she also needs to overcome her own grief while providing a stable environment for

her son. Babadook thus serves strong commentaries on the issue of motherhood and grief, based

on Amelia’s tribulations and actions within the film. Therefore, one will arguably reflect more
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closely on the nature of motherhood as well as grief, hence drawing vital lessons from what is

presumably a repulsive story.

Babadook’s presentation of motherhood is subject to discussion. This due to the way

Amelia is cast both as a loving mother and yet vulnerable to external forces which, if not check,

could turn her into a monster. According to Miller and Lee, the communication of various

themes in horror stories surround around the antagonism (173). It could be a happy family that

suddenly gets torn apart by internal or external forces; or the loving parent who turns predatory

or cruel against their own children. This is the case with Amelia in Babadook. There are

incidences where Amelia’s motherhood is brought into sharp focus.

First of all, Amelia has single-handedly raised her son as a widow after the death of her

husband in a car accident. She has to handle several issues about her son which wear her down.

She has to help her son to overcome his obsession with an unseen monster at home. This makes

her insomniac for she is woken up most of the time by Sam who reports having dreamt about the

monster. When her son is not waking her up reporting about the dream, he is doing so by

knocking things around the house, in the name of fighting with the monster. This wears her down

and even affects her regular life and career. For instance, she is at work when a call from Sam’s

school demands her urgent trip to the school to attend to her son’s case. The one delivering the

message does it so coldly that one does not even wonder what is with the son at school but

instead sympathizes with Amelia. The statement: “Amelia, your son’s school is on fire” and the

look on Amelia’s face draws more sympathy for her than curiosity about Sam’s school

(00:05:34). One can feel her dilemma: having to take care of the elderly patient or dash to

school. She chooses the latter for in the second shot, Amelia faces the school management staff

to discuss about Sam’s conduct. During the meeting, it emerges that it is not the first time
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Amelia has been discussing Sam’s conduct at school. Amelia is defensive of her son for she

insists her son could do better if he found a supportive staff. She also tells the management staff

not to call her son ‘the boy’, but address him as Sam. She demonstrates her maternal instincts

thus by giving preference to her son than anything else.

Amelia’s struggle to contain her son stresses her a lot. She is visibly sick and weary.

Amelia eventually loses her job for she cannot focus, due to her son’s behavior. Gradually, she

begins to display monstrous behavior, a trait not associated with motherhood. For instance, she is

trying to catch some sleep on bed when Sam comes over and requests for food. The boy is

hungry yet he cannot find any food in the kitchen. Her response is scary, showing how far she

has gone away from her maternal role of a caring mother. She wonders why Sam has to keep on

talking and then finally lashes out at him asking to “go and eat sh*t” (00:50:19). She then comes

back to her senses and goes to his bedroom to ask him for forgiveness. Later on, she loses self-

control while driving, ramming into another car. Even when the owner of the other car protests to

Amelia, she speeds off without apologizing. The man wonders how Amelia, carrying a young

child in the back-seat, could drive so dangerously. According to him, Amelia does not act

motherly. Her behavior borders on one becoming a monster. She transforms gradually from a

loving and protective mother into one who is consumed with hate.

Amelia’s periodic changes in her character finally lead to her acting monstrously most of

the time. After getting possessed by the babadook, she turns against her son, seeking to strangle

him. In one instance, Amelia attacks her son, aiming to kill him but his caressing of her cheek

brings her back to reality. She thus keeps swinging back and forth into her role of a mother and

the murderous monster that seeks to kill the boy. In this state, Amelia becomes the scary monster

that typifies most horror films. Her actions, viewed from her role as a mother, are what cause
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terror among the audiences and particularly her own son. This is similar to the way Norman’s

mother whose controlling effect drives him into the murderous monster he becomes in

Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960). Bother films feature a troubled motherhood. However, unlike

Psycho where the mother wants to keep her influence over her son’s life, Amelia is driven crazy

by unresolved trauma caused by her son’s obsession with the monster and her own experience

with the mysterious humanoid. She therefore begins to behave abnormally, thus disrupting what

the audiences could expect about a mother; as well as Sam’s usual knowledge of his mother

(174). This abnormality is what Millar and Lee term as horror. It is only after Amelia has

resolved her conflict with the monster that her loving relationship with her son is restored.

Grief also plays an important part in understanding Kent’s Babadook. From the

beginning, one is able to tell that Amelia is suffering from acute grief after losing her husband in

a road accident. The unexpected loss of her husband at the time they were going to have a baby

causes a “psychic wounding” that does not heal but instead remains fresh through her constant

nightmares and flashbacks (Mitchell 2). Amelia has been unable to accept the loss of her

husband six years later. This is even when she tries to erase his memory, for she still dreams

about him regularly. For instance, the film opens with Amelia immersed in her dream. Within

this dream, Amelia is trapped within a car and is evidently in anguish. The camera pans to reveal

her husband (Oskar) before sweeping back to her (00:01:28). All along, a child’s voice keeps

calling her before Amelia is shown dropping onto her bed. It is at this point that one can tell that

she has been dreaming. She wakes up immediately to find Sam at her bedside, telling her about

having seen the monster again. The dream recalls a traumatic event that happened six years back,

thus changing Amelia’s life completely: she is a single mother and still grieves for her husband.

The fact that the dream replaying the exact moment she and her husband were involved in a road
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accident indicates her inability to overcome grief long after the tragedy struck. This flashback

brought out through the dream motif lays the ground for better understanding of Amelia.

Grief manifests itself in several ways, depending on the relationship the bereaved person

had with the deceased. Some of these include restlessness, social withdrawal; sleep changes,

dreams of loss and increased sensitivity to topics of loss (Permanente 7). Amelia exhibits

restlessness, irritability and some change in sleep patterns. Her sleep is often disrupted by

nightmares, as much as it is by her son’s incessant war with the unseen monster. These

symptoms emerge gradually and towards the end, Amelia exhibits many symptoms of grief. Her

lack of sleep and restlessness are registered clearly on her face and her frame. She begins to walk

around the house absent-mindedly. It is during one of these walks as a somnambulist that she

meets the ghost of her husband in the basement. She is so elated to meet him that she hugs him.

At this point, it is clear that Amelia really misses her husband; hence his absence is the reason

she is unsettled. She only comes back to her senses when her ‘husband’ demands to be reunited

with his son. Her eyes also appear sore, due to lack of sleep. Amelia is so deprived of sleep that

she lashes out at Sam when he comes asking for food.

The fact that dreams of the loss of the loved one is a sure sign of grief can be witnessed in

the opening scene of Babadook. The sequences of shots connect Amelia and her husband within

the dream, unveiling the reason behind her troubled present self. She also has visions of her

husband, such as the one she had when she wandered in her sleep into the basement at night,

meeting him. The dreams and visions represent Amelia’s inability to overcome her emotional

attachment to her late husband.

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Other than dreams of the deceased, most bereaved people experience discomfort in

discussing topics related to death. Amelia is reluctant to discuss about her husband’s death, and

neither does she accept the fact that Oskar died in the car crash. This is evident, as noted by

Mitchell, in the dream in the opening scene that does not show how Oskar dies (4). According to

Mitchell, Amelia witnessed everything that happened during the accident. However, she only

replays the parts that show Oskar still alive, thus revealing her inner desire to remain connected

to him.

On numerous occasions, Amelia strives to repress memories of her late husband. For

instance, Amelia does not want Sam to get into the basement since it contains Oskar’s

belongings, thus a reminder of his loss. She tells Sam about it thus: “…all your father’s things

are down there” (00:21:35). She wants the basement kept shut as her way of forgetting about the

death of her husband. She also refuses to speak about the death of her husband throughout the

film. For instance, she either goes silent or responds in a hostile way when other characters speak

about Oskar. Gracie Roach mentions in their discussion how Oskar “…always spoke his mind”

(00:40:31) and draws Amelia’s outburst: “Do you have to keep on bringing him up?” (00:40:33).

Again, she chastises her son when he speaks about his father in the presence of his new teacher.

She says: “You don’t have to say everything that goes through your head” (00:40:17). These are

some of the occasions that reveal Amelia’s inability to accept her husband’s death by avoiding

talking about him.

The plot of this film also connects the monster that Sam and eventually Amelia see with

the repressed grief associate with Amelia. According to Millar and Lee, a typical structure of a

horror film connected with grief normally has three parts (175). The first part is where the

protagonist loses a loved one early in the story. I the course of the film, the monster appears,
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reflecting the protagonist’s disrupted world. The last stage is where the protagonist tames the

monster, hence returning to their initial emotional state. In Babadook, this structure emerges

clearly. In the beginning, Oskar dies and Amelia’s overwhelming grief morph into the monster

she is struggling to negate. She struggles to shield herself and her son from the monster until

when she defeats it in the end. In the end, it is clear that Amelia has accepted her husband’s

death when she confines him within the basement and even attends to him. The acute grief that

Amelia has is the monster that has refused to leave her and her son alone. In fact, the inscriptions

on the babadook book summarize the monster’s characteristics: the more one struggles to forget

it, the more it becomes present in one’s life. This is the same grief acts among people.

Kent’s Babadook is a horror film, replete with the characteristics of horror movies,

including the presence of a monster. However, it appears its core mission is to demonstrate the

issue of motherhood and grief, and how they are connected to the aspect of horror. Amelia is

gradually drawn away from her maternal feelings, hence becoming a fearsome monster that

intends to kill her own son. Grief has also been personified by the babadook monster that

terrorizes Amelia and Sam. The creature is scary and disgusting, thus causing fear among the

audiences. This is the key quality of any horror film.

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Works Cited

Kent, Jennifer. (Dir.). Babadook. (Australia). Screen Australia/ Causeway Films, 2014. Retrieved

from: https://jexmovie.com/watch_The_Babadook_2014.html#video=ed0lY41taWP_lAdA-

9_DxKRJhfu1zQz8IGJfbew

Millar, Becky & Lee, Jonny. “Horror Films and Grief”. Emotion Review, vol. 13, no. 3, 2021, pp.

171- 182. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/17540739211022815

Mitchell, Paul. “The Horror of Loss: Reading Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook as a Trauma

Narrative”. 2019. Word Document.

Permanente, Kaiser. “Understanding grief: A Guide for those grieving the death of a loved one”.

Kaiser Foundation Health Plan of Washington, 2018. Retrieved from:

https://wa.kaiserpermanente.org/static/pdf/public/classes/understanding-grief.pdf