The Monster In The Basement Is A Metaphor

Parenthood can be really tough. We all know that from the get-go when we’re starting a family, but no amount of wisdom or cautionary tales can quite prepare you for how challenging it is when baby finally arrives. Your whole world changes, and I say that from the perspective of a father who went out to work and lived a semi-normal life while my partner was at home with our two kids when they were very little. I can only imagine just how difficult it was for her at times, especially in the early years when they needed 100% of her attention.

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Then you get to watch them grow up and dream that they will become good people who are happy and successful in all they do. You have a big part to play in helping achieve that and hope it will be enough. But what if it doesn’t work out? What if they turn out to be a wrong ‘un? What if the challenges of being a parent turn you bad? They’re all fears that we might experience during our most weary and doubting moments of parenthood, which is perhaps why there is a long tradition of horror movies that focus on evil offspring and/or parents who become a threat to their families: “The Bad Seed,” “The Midwich Cuckoos,” “Rosemary’s Baby,” “The Omen,” “The Shining,” and “Possession,” to name just a few.

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Of all the movie genres, horror has a particular knack of showing us our greatest fears and forcing us to come to terms with them. Maybe that’s why many of us find horror movies so cathartic. They may scare us while we’re watching them, and their themes might linger for much longer, but we get to face our monsters lurking under the bed or in the closet. 

“The Babadook” is a particularly relevant example of this. Jennifer Kent’s acclaimed psychological horror drops us into the headspace of a grieving and frazzled single mom, whose problems are manifested by a sinister pop-up book. Can she stand up to the bogeyman lurking within its pages, or will she succumb to the Babadook’s malevolent presence? Let’s take a look at how that confrontation plays out, and what the ending of “The Babadook” means.

Amelia Vanek (Essie Davis) is a single mother struggling to cope with her difficult six-year-old son Samuel (Noah Wiseman), a child who suffers from behavioral issues. Amelia is a caring and dutiful person but she has found it hard to accept Samuel after her husband Oskar (Ben Winspear) died in a car accident while taking her to hospital during labor. Privately, Amelia blames her son for Oskar’s death, and she finds herself increasingly isolated as Samuel’s erratic outbursts alienate almost everyone who comes into contact with him.

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Like many kids, Samuel has a fertile imagination and he is scared of the usual monsters under his bed and in the closet. He’s also pretty brave and builds home-made weapons to defend himself and his mom from the bogeyman. His obsession grows worse when they discover a mysterious pop-up book called “Mister Babadook,” filled with sinister illustrations of a looming top-hatted ghoul preying on children at night.

Samuel’s behavior worsens as he starts to experience seizure-inducing visions and becomes more aggressive, even injuring his cousin at her birthday party. Amelia also fears the Babadook lurking in the shadows and attempts to destroy the book to rid herself of it. But Mister Babadook isn’t finished yet and the book reappears, apparently repairing itself, with even more disturbing imagery of a mother killing the family dog, her child, and then herself. After Samuel is kicked out of school for his behavior, Amelia’s mental state deteriorates. Even burning the book doesn’t help and the creature’s manifestations grow stronger, seemingly targeting the mother rather than the child. Will the terrifying images turn out to be a ghastly omen?

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Locked away in the house with Samuel heavily medicated by a doctor, Amelia fears sleep and becomes dangerously distanced from reality. Seemingly possessed by the Babadook, her behavior towards her child grows abusive and threatening. Exhausted to the point of hallucinating, she has visions of slitting Samuel’s throat.

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Amelia is lured into the cellar by a vision of Oskar, who promises that they can be together again if she brings him the boy. She realizes that it’s just a ruse by the Babadook, but the creature apparently has full control over her now. She fulfils one of the book’s premonitions by murdering their dog before turning her attention to Samuel. Amelia goes all Jack Torrance on him, but the kid is resourceful and defends himself by going all Kevin McCallister with his homespun arsenal. He knocks her out and ties her up in the basement, refusing to leave her side. Amelia manages to free her hands and tries to strangle him. But Samuel’s love for his mother is unconditional and he tenderly strokes her cheek even as she is throttling him to death. This loving gesture rouses Amelia from her murderous trance and she vomits black goo, purging her body of the entity possessing her.

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But you can’t get rid of the Babadook. It whisks Samuel away, setting up the final confrontation. Finally standing up for herself and her child, Amelia breaks the spell with a scream of cathartic rage. 

Amelia is a changed person after these traumatic events. She is now able to accept her son for who he is and shows him far more love, preparing to celebrate his birthday on the actual day for the first time since he was born. Yet the Babadook is still locked in the cellar and she takes a moment to feed it, assuring Samuel he can look when he’s older. The Babadook tries to attack her but she is able to resist. Returning to the garden, Amelia tells Samuel that the Babadook was quiet today and they enjoy some cuddles before people arrive for his party. It’s a surprisingly happy ending for such a dark movie, but it’s only tentatively so. Amelia still looks fragile and she will need to keep working hard to stop the Babadook overpowering her again.

Writer and director Jennifer Kent was inspired by a variety of horror classics including “The Shining,” but perhaps the one that comes through most in terms of the film’s visual style are 1920s German Expressionist films like “Nosferatu” and “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.” The influential movement is known for externalizing disturbing moods and themes through the use of exaggerated shadow, lighting, and set design, and this stylistic choice informs how the movie plays out. Although the naturalistic performances from Essie Davis and Noah Wiseman ground us in day-to-day reality, the horror moments make it clear that Kent’s story is an allegory for depression, trauma, and the grieving process. This approach makes “The Babadook” one of the best horror movies about grief to date.

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You don’t need to read between the lines too much to see that the Babadook is a manifestation of Amelia’s bereavement. She is shown as a caring person, but years of bottling up grief has allowed it to fester and grow to dangerous proportions. Whether she wants to or not, she blames Samuel for Oskar’s death, and the exhaustion of dealing with a difficult child makes him the focus of her repressed anger. Amelia seems locked into the depression stage of the grieving process and she is unable to move onto acceptance until she finally finds the inner strength to confront the Babadook.

By the end of the movie, she has accepted her husband’s tragic passing and is able to keep the monster under control. Her grief will never completely go away and neither should it, but now she is in a space where she can manage it on a day-to-day basis. Some days it will be worse than others, but the film’s loving ending suggests that she is over the hump and determined not to let it ruin their lives any longer. As for Samuel, Amelia’s refusal to let him see the Babadook in the cellar is also important. He never knew his dad and he is still very young, so his time for reckoning with his father’s death will come when he is mature enough to handle it.

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Jennifer Kent’s ghoulish Babadook is one of the scariest horror movie monsters ever, but it has also become an unlikely gay icon. This began after Netflix reputedly listed the movie under LGBTQ+ content and grew through a series of jokey social media posts that argued that the Babadook is, in fact, gay (and in a relationship with Pennywise, the child-murdering clown from Stephen King’s “IT”). The idea took off, manifesting in the real world as Babadook imagery and costumes became a fixture at Pride events, and “RuPaul’s Drag Race” contestant Miles Jai dressing as the creature for the Season 9 finale.

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This gives us an interesting alternative read on the movie. What started out as a bit of a lark has turned into semi-serious discourse about the Babadook’s queerness and the clues are there if you look for them. Some have cited the creature’s gothic-drag “Baba-lewks” and its fondness for jazz hands-type gestures. Others have noted that the Babadook’s physical point of entry into the house appears to be Samuel’s closet, the doors of which burst open as the creature refuses to let Amelia ignore it. Some also insist that the Babadook shouldn’t automatically be gendered “he.” On a general level, some proponents of the queer Babadook theory suggest that its suppression represents the rejection that the LGBTQ+ community experience on a regular basis.

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Another source suggests that Samuel can be read as gay: Nobody understands him, he is given medication to make the Babadook go away, and his mother is exasperated that he can’t be “normal.” If this is the case, then the Babadook may represent Samuel’s latent queerness, something that frightens Amelia and that she refuses to accept. By the end, she has confronted her prejudices regarding Samuel’s sexuality and loves him for who he his, but she still needs to manage those old doubts daily. Locking the Babadook in the cellar may be her way of acknowledging it but also postponing Samuel’s contact until he is old enough to discover it for himself.

Jennifer Kent has said that she sees the film as tackling a taboo about maternal love, in the respect that not all mothers find it easy to connect with their child. She told the Guardian:

“We’re all, as women, educated and conditioned to think that motherhood is an easy thing that just happens. But it’s not always the case. I wanted to show a real woman who was drowning in that environment.”

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Kent herself doesn’t have children but, despite her worries that mothers might object to how Amelia is portrayed, she discovered that many struggling moms have found solace in seeing something similar to their own ordeal on screen. As she explained to Rolling Stone:

“I think it’s given a lot of women a sense of reassurance to see a real human being up there. We don’t get to see characters like her that often.”

“The Babadook” is a movie that wears its metaphors on its sleeve as a portrayal of grief and depression, but it is also a deceptively simple tale at its core. Essie Davis revealed how Jennifer Kent explained the ending to Noah Wiseman: “Ultimately, it’s about a child who is able to save his mother through the power of love.”

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“The Babadook” didn’t make a huge impact at the box office but it was still a financial success, grossing more than $10 million worldwide against its $2 million production budget. It was also a huge hit with critics, with a rare 98% score on Rotten Tomatoes, and has gained a reputation as one of the best horror movies ever made. Naturally, anything successful automatically prompts the question: Will there be a sequel? Jennifer Kent has addressed the possibility in no uncertain terms:

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“[Co-producer] Kristyna Ceyton and I had the rights… to any future merchandizing or sequels. Offers did come, and lucrative ones, to make sequels. But why? To make money? If I had wanted to make money I would have been a merchant banker, or something that involved money, not filmmaking. I’m always very disappointed when a great film comes out, especially a horror, and immediately there’s a sequel. And I’m not saying they can’t be good, but it often feels like a cynical exercise.”

Kent’s attitude towards a sequel is commendable, especially since there are so many brilliant horror movies that have had their legacy tarnished by awful sequels: “Jaws,” “The Blair Witch Project,” “A Nightmare on Elm Street,” and “Hellraiser,” to name just a few. Nevertheless, despite her firm stance, Kent hasn’t completely ruled out the idea of a sequel to “The Babadook.” She told Screen Rant:

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“If there suddenly became some desperate urge to tell a story related to that, I would probably say, ‘Okay, all bets are off. I’m going to go and make the sequel.’ But I just can’t see that happening. I feel that the idea has really been explored.”

Given how Kent appears to prioritize art over money, hopefully she would be the person behind “The Babadook 2” if it ever happened. For now, the film is such a perfect standalone horror that it’s hard to see how a sequel could add anything more.