The Babadook, or, It’s Nice to Have a Man About the House

Since I’ve already broken the seal on Spooktober 2026, and I’ve been in the mood to make through my movie backlog this extended weekend, I figured I was finally ready to watch The Babadook from 2014. I was absolutely not ready. I’d been avoiding it because it seemed way too heavy for me. It’s become a cliche about “elevated horror,” but I think this might have been the first movie I’d heard of that was described as being a metaphor for grief. I assumed that if I just kept it in the backlog long enough (it’s available streaming on Kanopy), I’d eventually have steeled myself enough to handle such a downer. And early signs were encouraging. It has a pretty great opening sequence, that recounts the car accident that left main character Amelia (an outstanding performance by Essie Davis) widowed, via dream-like imagery. Knowing the basic premise, of a monster from a children’s book that torments a single mother and her son, I’d been hoping that it would all be far enough in the realm of the…