On Friday evenings my brother and I would stay up until midnight to see scary movies. Ever since, I have had a fascination with them – really good ones – mind you. Have you ever wondered why the greatest directors in cinema have gravitated towards the genre? Think Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, and Roman Polanski among others. I have thought a lot about this. It’s really easy to scare you – to make you jump – yet it’s really difficult to get under your skin. It’s not a coincidence that none of the directors I mentioned were interested in the supernatural – but their movies navigate the landscape of the mind. None of them rely on cheap scares – but focused on layering their work with rich meaning and psychological observation. Kubrick concentrated on the descent into madness of his main characters in “The Shining” – not in ghostly apparitions. These directors didn’t make horror movies – they made great films. For the audience – there’s a cathartic transaction that takes place. Through Rosemary and other characters in great horror movies – you confront your own worst fears. You and Clarice are able to stare at Hannibal straight in the eyes.
In 2014, Jennifer Kent wrote and directed a great film called “The Babadook.” It deals with a mother grappling with the death of her husband and having to raise a young son on her own whom she finds difficult to love. Samuel believes there’s a monster who is coming to get them both. What is extraordinary about Jennifer Kent’s work is that she totally immerses you inside the psychological state of the mother. This brilliant director visually articulates complex ideas like the possibility of maternal incapability and the difficulty of grief and overcoming great loss and pain. “The Babadook” is ultimately one big metaphor for what happens if we allow our own worst fears take over our everyday lives. Now more than ever – we cannot let worries take over us – we need to learn to manage nightmare scenarios – and to keep demons under control. That’s what Jennifer Kent teaches us in this movie. “The Babadook” will not go away but we can learn to control it!
Essie Davis in the lead role is a force of nature. Jennifer Kent’s filmmaking is inventive. Her usage of lighting, color – angles and framing and even animation are all startling – and this is her film debut. It is rare to see such intelligence in moviemaking.
And yes, it’s scary.
Love,
Roger
Available to stream on Hulu. Available to rent on iTunes, Amazon Prime, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
Written by Jennifer Kent
Directed by Jennifer Kent
Starring: Essie Davis, Noah Wiseman, Hayley McElhinney, Daniel Henshall, Barbara West
and Ben Winspear
94 minutes
About Writer and Director Jennifer Kent
Jennifer Kent was born in Brisbane, Australia. Kent graduated in 1991 from the National Institute of Dramatic Art in Australia with a degree in Performing Arts. (Empire) Before she began directing, Kent appeared in a number of television shows as an actor including, The New Adventures of Black Beauty, Murder Call and All Saints. The Babadook was her first feature film as a director. Her latest film is The Nightingale which was released in 2018.
Choosing The Babadook
In an interview with The Guardian, writer and director, Jennifer Kent discusses her film, The Babadook. “I love horror and I don’t look down on it, even the bad stuff,” she says. She cites David Lynch as her favourite director, the films of John Carpenter and Carl Dreyer as influences, and insists she’d rather watch Saw if it popped up on the TV than an Oscar-winning drama. But she didn’t conceive of The Babadook as a horror film. “I think where horror excels is when it becomes emotional and visceral. It was never about, ‘Oh I wanna scare people.’ Not at all. I wanted to talk about the need to face the darkness in ourselves and in our lives. That was the core idea for me, to take a woman who’d really run away from a terrible situation for many years and have to face it. The horror is really just a byproduct.” (The Guardian)
Making The Babadook
“As a kid, I was attracted more to scary stories than Disney cartoons…I think it was for me a way to integrate the whole of life. Getting scared was a way of developing courage to face the world.”Kent shared that perspective with the then 6-year-old Wiseman, who, essentially, learned to act during the film’s six-week shoot in Australia in 2012. The director said she and the rest of the “Babadook” cast and crew set out to shelter the boy from the movie’s more intense scenes — during sequences when Davis’ character was required to hurl verbal abuse at her child, an adult stand-in was brought in. “We worked hard to make sure he was loved and protected and cared for,” Kent said. “He drew pictures of himself as Sam … pictures of the Babadook so he was processing it all. It was helping him understand that the film was really a positive story. It’s heading right through the center of hell to get to the light.” (The Chicago Tribune)