I watched this last night, at a time when I was already tired from not enough sleep and a bit stressed out from the past few weeks, so that certainly enhanced the viewing experience. At the end, I was simultaneously exhausted yet needed to stay up for a while to refresh my mind before I could retire to bed. Overall, I’d say I got the full impact of the film (apart from the fact I do not have a child). The film length was about perfect at 90-ish minutes, and I liked the use of color throughout, especially in the house–all that dark blue really set the mood.
This movie is my favorite horror movie in a very long time.
I’m looking for a good scary movie to watch with the family Halloween night - no spoilers, but is this a terribly gruesome film where really bad things happen to kids?
Successful movies I selected in the past - Poltergeist, Stir of Echoes
Oops: Event Horizon
It’s not gruesome at all, but it’s not really family appropriate either. I don’t think anyone under 20 would find anything cool about this movie. It’s about loss, depression, frustration, and parental guilt. Not exactly a fun Halloween flick.
The AV Club just put out a piece on this, It Follows, and the possible trend for horror with an unbeatable enemy. Not sure I really buy into the premise, and I think the article underplays the importance of the (barely) sub-text in both films in favour of the supernatural elements, but folks might find it interesting.
. I don’t think anyone under 20 would find anything cool about this movie. It’s about loss, depression, frustration, and parental guilt. Not exactly a fun Halloween flick
I don’t know about that. This is exactly the sort of horror (alongside the goofy comedy horror stuff) that I lapped up as a teenager. Never got into slasher and monster films or other conventional teen horror genres.
I’m comparing this to the other movies Scott listed. Poltergeist, Stir of Echoes, and Event Horizon seem a lot more like standard Halloween stuff. Babadook - not so much.
Really depends on what you consider spooky.
I really liked The Awakening, but it qualifies more as a slow British horror (yah, that’s a genre…another example being The Quiet Ones). Think of the pacing of The Sixth Sense.
The Woman in Black - Another solid British horror…more about suspense than scares.
The Conjuring - If you liked Poltergeist.
Oculus- again…battling a ghost.
Sinister - this does involve kids
…I can go on and on…do you want possession, gore/slasher, monster / extraterrestrial, ghosts / haunting, regular / found footage, action / suspense…
Depending on how old/mature your kids are, you might consider Cabin in the Woods.
The Cabin in the Woods is a great choice. Scary, suspenseful, yes, but also quite fun.
Yeah, it sounds like Badabook might not be quite a good one for this, thanks for the suggestions. Cabin in the Woods would be actually kind of awesome, now I remember it. I think that’s the one. Oh, hey, I can rent it on Amazon HD for $4. Nice.
Just watched this with the missus tonight. Spooky shit! No kids either (and a hatred of them on the level of the mom in the film, as a matter of fact), so I dunno if it “hit” on all the proper levels for us, but it was a good pre-Halloween flick. Two of her picks and another of mine to come over the weekend (I’m battling between It Follows, The Host, and Incident at Loch Ness myself–the latter two as palette cleansers from the darker shit that Babadook brought and her picks probably will bring).
Here’s how The Babadook found a gay cult following:
tl;dr - Netflix accidentally put The Babadook under the “LGBTQ” category. Some people made jokes about it on social media, then long after Netflix corrected the mistake, the community started debating the merits of the movie as an actual LGBTQ allegory for coming out and accepting your own sexuality.
This is a tough one.
It did capture the latent frustrations and psychoses of being a parent preternaturally well. The scenes with other kids and parents were fantastic, generally the first half of the movie. This part was outstanding.
(Also, I loved the fact that she mentioned she was once a writer in passing, which ties into the appearance of this weird book. “I wrote some articles for some magazines, and did some kid’s stuff.”)
I’m a little less sold on the overlong fever dream of mom and son being locked up together in the house on tranquilizers and collectively losing their shit. I am a fan of the Babadook manifestations, but eesh, that generic raptor / pterodactyl / Doom monster closet sound effect – the sound design was all over the place. It felt like the movie was trying too hard in the latter half and it lost me a bit. The multiple “crazy weirdo TV clips in rapid succession” was overdone … although there was the TV report of the woman who killed her son on his birthday, and he had just turned 7. Loved the sore tooth that gets torn out in this section, that pain that just won’t go away.
As for the ending, to me, the kid making a literal dove appear in his little toy 6/7 year old magic trick – clearly wayyyy frickin’ impossible – signifies that what we’re seeing is no longer real. What we saw in the stitched together book is what happened: she kills the dog (no confusion about this point), strangles her son in the basement, and kills herself.
The fantasy sequence starts with her vomiting out the babadook; that’s her blood, not the babadook. Feeding it worms in the basement is just another metaphor for the death in the basement.
Also apparently they made a real actual pop up book of this thing. Six thousand copies of it.
That’s the true horror story here, people!
Oh, man. That is the worst thing about this movie. That one second almost killed it for me.
Nice! I like this interpretation!
-Tom
It is quite dark but I can’t make any other interpretation compute in my mind. I suppose at that point she is so delusional, who knows what we’e actually seeing?
That dove appearing in the kid’s magic trick was for me the most disturbing scene in the movie.
I like it too!
It would make the ending quite similar to another maternal horror fave, The Orphanage, where death reunites mother and child in eternal love. And you’re right, @wumpus, that there’s something almost too good to be true about the warm, happy ending…
But I think that interpretation would take something away from one of my favorite lines from the end of the movie, when Amelia is unlocking the basement door to go feed the insatiable, immortal depression-monster and Samuel asks, “Am I ever gonna see it?” Amelia replies, “One day… when you’re bigger.” I love this nod to depression as a genetic darkness haunting one generation to the next.
Plus, halfway into the movie, as she’s lying in bed, the Babadook is shown going straight down into her mouth:
So it makes sense that the monster (not just blood) would come back out through her mouth.
Either way, the ending is “happy/not happy” but I prefer the more literal read. Samuel’s dove indicating something impossibly beautiful about a child’s unique and surprising potential rather than an afterlife kinda thing. She couldn’t see the “magic” in him until now.
And how great is this sequence:
As the monster comes down through the chimney, she’s shown squirming across the floor, seemingly pressed down by an immense weight. The word “depression” made literal and nightmarish. Rather than into her mouth, here it comes right down onto the small of her back.
