ARTICLE: The Story Behind Horror Hit "The Babadook"
Jennifer Kent can’t seem to get rid of the Babadook.
Back in the early 2000s, the Australian actress heard a strange story: It seems that a friend of hers had a young son who was convinced he was being stalked by an imaginary boogeyman. In order to stop the boy from freaking out, the mom would pretend to talk to this creature. Kent couldn’t quite let the idea go — and when she decided to start working behind the camera, she used the basic premise for her 2005 short film Monster, about a mother and son menaced by a malevolent creature. She then spent years trying to make several projects that were, in her words, “really strange and ambitious,” off the ground. But Kent’s mind kept returning to the image of a small boy cowering before a black-draped figure with spindly talons and face drained of blood, and a mother drawing on her primal protective instincts to banish it. “This idea of facing darkness, facing the shadows — it just kept coming back,” she says.
Ideas, as the heroine of Kent’s debut feature The Babadook discovers, are not so easily banished. An extension of her short, this creepy horror film focuses on a widowed single mother named Amelia whose six-year-old son comes across a mysterious, macabre children’s book. Inside this pop-up is a shadowy figure called “the Babadook,” a small man with a top hat, a shark-like smile and a penchant for creepy, rhyming threats. (The name, which Kent invented, is a riff on “babaroga,” the Serbian name for the boogeyman.) Soon, the already alienated kid starts to carry around makeshift weapons and claim that this Babadook is real; when Amelia ends up burning the offending tome and it reappears intact inside her house, she begins to take her son’s hysterical ravings seriously. It’s one of the most terrifying psychological horror movies in ages, as well as an extraordinary exploration of what happens when repressed emotions such as grief and loneliness are suddenly given form — as well as claws and fangs…” more.
SOURCE: RollingStone