The Babadook X Reader
Jennifer Curtis
What is worse: sanity or insanity? The question is at the centre of supernatural horror, and while the answer seems obvious from the experience of a reader (likely sane), things aren't so clean cut in the realm of lucid nightmares. Put yourself in the shaking boots of Amelia, the tortured mother from The Babadook, for instance, and then ask yourself which mental paradigm you would prefer.
If Amelia is perfectly sane in The Babadook, then she is perhaps worse off. The laws of our universe as we know them do not accommodate spectral, pop-up book enthusiasts who can manipulate reality and possess single mothers. The world proposed by a literal reading of The Babadook is near unthinkable. It is one in which we are wrong about everything and no one is safe. It is a reality that looks exactly like insanity.
Throughout the film, Amelia tries to hide the book and even burn it at one point, only to have it and the monster latched on to it reappear. Denying a traumatic memory and pretending it never happened to avoid dealing with grief only works for so long, before it eats you from the inside out, and you release it all in the form of a mental breakdown.
Found this after posting my own analysis of The Babadook. Great article you have here! Loved your connections to German Expressionism and classic cinema too. Check out my review when you get the chance. -babadook-2014-and-further-musings-on-mind-body-and-disease/his review after posting one for myself
Remember when she visualized the scene of the mother who killed her son on his 7th birthday and the cops and reporters are there, and the cops had to shoot the mom? It was her in the window of the place this happened.
I didnt like the ending maybe because I am a psychiatric nurse but I read the movie primarily focused on mental illness, untreated, and others attitudes towards it.The movies strongest segment was when she becomes floridly psychotic suffering from visual hallucinations and the threat you feel towards the son due to her behaviour in the house.
The reason I didnt like the ending was i felt it was obvious she killed her son and probably herself .Not to show this was abit of a cop out but of course these type of ambiguous endings can help sharpen debate and
The mother stabbed the son killing him and is living in a crazy hospital. Reasons I say this is yes this all has to do with greif and coping but the part that convinced me was when she was watching the tv and it talked about the mother that stabbed her son and then showed the mother in the window. This was her watching a report in the hospital where reporters managed to film her. You have the drug aspect from medications the doctors give her. The rape victim aspect from the vibrator scene. She can be seen in her daily life while she is doing the bingo but she tells herself she works there not that she is a patient. The community workers are actually doctors. They got uneasy when the kid talked about a broken nose because she has split personalities. The list goes on. Think of the movie suckerpunch.
From looking at The Babadook article written by Kim Newman, I have discovered a rough outline of how I could structure a film review, and what type of information I could include. Film reviews do not describe everything that happens in a film, but merely analyse and talk about the specific strengths. Or if it is a poor review the specific weaknesses. In this case, the columnist had purely positive things to report on this text.
The journalist also gives a backstory to some of the characters behaviours to cause the reader to relate and empathise even more with them. It also illustrates and explains how the situation becomes gradually out of control, as the characters start to turn insane, this builds suspense for the audience, as they are constantly kept in tension throughout the film, until the genuine jump scares occur.
I also annotated previous student examples of film reviews under this genre, as this helped me to understand the brief and the structure of which they had interpreted the task. This also illustrated to me the similarities between the structure/detail of their work and the reviews from Empire magazine.
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