BabaDOOK! Jennifer Kent's Psychotropic Fairy Tale comes to Blu-ray

Most soap operas are trite, cliche'd and overwrought but doesn't mean we should dismiss Douglas Sirk; costume dramas are often barrenly obsequious but that doesn't mean we should dismiss Jane Campion; fairy tale monster under the bed tropes are often overly whimsical and hackneyed but we can't dismiss The Babadook. A Sheila, a quick Sheila, can take the Gorey-Addams-Grimm signifiers overused by Tim Burton and go deep into nightmare parable, where men (and boys like tim Burton) dare not go. She can reach down for the unpopped black brass kernel of the genuine Jungian nightmare of 'the return of the repressed and make pop-books scary again. Australian filmmaker Jennifer Kent's The Babadook (2014) ia out on DVD and Blu-ray this week, a Shining-Repulsion (1) collapse of the consensual real, as a mom and son come to fear each other and collectively engage a poltergeist-ish manifestation and if--with its magician's hat and bony fingers--the title monster can come off a little This Way Kruger Comes Depp-ensian Dr. Caligari Cat in the Hat high on mercurochrome on-the-nose, it still has more than enough originality and genuine menace to make it closer to Kubrick than Disney. The pop-up book Amelia (Essie Davis) starts out as some whimsical blueprint for a future Disney attraction but a genuine, disturbing threat. What starts out whimsy ends up being creepy and then a direct personal threat with drawings of Amelia herself, possessed, stabbing her child to death like James Mason almost does in Nicholas Ray's Bigger than Life. (1956). The Babadook said Abraham kill me a son, and/or turn the page and pull the tab to see the knife go sincker-snap. 


At the core of the archetypal mysterious ghost intruder archetype present in Kent's gutsily straightforward Jungian fairy tale horror lurks the unassimilated animus, who waits until you're almost asleep, or trying to spend a little me-time before thumping on doors or rattling chains, hammering away at your nerves as you try to repress your inner rage, until it breaks off and comes back in poltergeist form and your sense of reality shifts and the border between dreams and reality collapses. And Kent gets--probably better than any filmmaker yet--how nightmarishly gigantic adult caregivers loom when beheld by small apprehensive children. Even Kubrick never quite dared deal with that monstrously large element. The one time Jack Torrance seemed bigger than normal he was looming over a model of the maze, but in that case too large to resonate this way. Children don't just look small to us, they look from a small position. In Dook, Amelia gradually seems to grow, not like a giant but that our perspective changes and she's shot from low angles, and her anger at her seven year-old son Samuel (Noah Wiseman), who's ruined her life in a million different ways. When I was very young I used to have nightmares about my mom creeping into my room like a vampire to drink my blood. I woke her up a lot as I'd be super scared to go the bathroom by myself in the dead of night. Once my fear came true and when I worked up the nerve to wake her she sat up slowly and straight like a vampire rising from a coffin and moaned really low, she seemed like a different person. I buried my head in my hands and started crying and screaming "I'm your son! I'm your son!!" We joked about it later. She said she felt bad. I'd never felt such extreme despair or terror. Is there anything worse a very young child can imagine than his mom disappearing and/or attacking them? Turning on them all of a sudden? It's easy to forget about that fear once you get past the breakwaters of adolescence; the passage of mom from benevolent giantess to a sweet if nagging allowance-payer is a one-way street. We modulate our perceptions so that we presume we've always seen from the same height, but a Babadook can remind us, as good horror movies do, of all the terror we grew so hard to forget. 

As I wrote about The Shining, cabin fever is a very hard thing to study, as just being showing up to study it rapidly cures the subject is either killed or sucked up into the madness, as with the semi-sympathetic father whose poor brain oscillates between giggling sadism and paternal sympathy for Marilyn Burns in Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974). Those kind of characters are so rare in horror that when they show up we take notice. Like Frederic March becoming Mr. Hyde halfway through the terrorized Miriam Hopkins' plea for help, Amelia in The Babadook or Ray's ogres in Bigger than Life and In A Lonely Place exhume that fear our source of comfort will turn on us. Having very little (adult) experience reading children's books I can't be too scared of the Babadook book in theory. But I have relied on The Thing (1951) for most of my life to save me in times of trouble, and if I put it on during one of my regular dark nights of the soul and saw Captain Hendry beating up Nikki and helping Dr. Carrington bleed his men to feed the baby pods, then I would be utterly lost, that yawning terror of my mom sitting up in bed and moaning like some beanstalk vampire giant in the dead of night would come roaring back. 

But the Babadook terror rolls in both directions: The vulnerability and trust involved with familial love hinges on acceptance of uncanny extremes, for a mother must love even the most loathsome of creatures, the beast, the frog, the rat, the touched and wayward Richard, all requiring, at the very least, a kiss, an embrace, a bottle and a place to sleep it off in, in order slowly grow into a prince, just until we can get a new geek. If the mother can't provide this, the child snaps and begins to darken into something worse, trying to create for others the terror he feels as a result of his mom's ambivalence. And the mom, via the uncuttable psycho-umbilical root that connects them even past death, that root no machete or pill can sever, comes tumbling down the well after him, barking at him not to put her in the root cellar. 

Coraline

But while, for example, the horrors of cloistered sexually dysmorphic animus shadow-projectors like Catherine Deneuve in Roman Polanski's Repulsion (or Mrs. Bates in Psycho) ended their isolation with their murders and sins exposed, pinned to the patriarchy-enforced consensual reality cork board like still-twitching wasp wings, and old Jack Torrance never quite made it out of his maze, the mom in Baba passes through the Repulsion needle and out of the Overlook cabin fever, past even Ring 2's child services and suspicious neighbors, into the safe "hero" clippings of the Taxi Driver "hero" fantasia; all demons safely integrated rather than merely repressed or succumbed to, madness, fully harnessed, is inseparable from genius, from self realization. If you're not willing to let go of all self constructs, from surface persona right down to your twitching core, the traumatic separation from the giant glowing orb of undifferentiated consciousness where one isn't just oneself, nor just "Human" but all things from ancient monuments to the weedy parking lot of a long-closed dollar store. Amelia's strength as a mom lies not in Ford tough Magdalene invulnerable cloaking cloyness, just raw Aussie gumption and the power that comes when you finally get down so low, as the saying goes, you can touch off from the bottom and shoot up faster than you would by just flailing about to keep at the same approx. depth. John Ford had the Depression, war, the harshness of the era, and drink. Spielberg though, had only his childhood, traumatized by schoolyard bully anti-Semitism and saved by the power of fantasy and Ford's westerns. I've got a history with drugs, alcoholism, recovery, decadence, years of undiagnosed depression, spiritual enlightenments and disillusionments, W.C. Fields, Camille Paglia, and Howard Hawks. 


In the end, it's that more than the admittedly children's book / nursery rhythm gimmick (that while creepy is also overly familiar from Edward Gorey (left) and Charles Addams-ish drawings - at least at first, the nightmare threats of a children's book are usually tempered with some degree of levity - "Good fright, pleasant screams," as the creepy narrator of The Inner Sanctum radio show used to say. When the death threat implied is tempered with 'just kidding' bad puns and levity, one misses the macabre tone of unedited nursery rhymes or Grimm's Fairy Tales, which offer little sugar and lots of suffering. I was amused by Gorey as a child but now I look at his stuff and think he's way too disturbing. Maybe it's that as children 'remember' Death, remember how she cried as she dropped them off at the nunnery doorstep of existence if you will. They know where death is, and so death can't suddenly surprise them. For very young children the big fear is never death, but of being separated from one's mother (i.e. an unpleasant moment without her is far scarier than entombed eternity with her). But adults have been away from death long enough that they no longer recognize her reflection in the mirror, and so when she shows up out of the blue to pick us up from the nunnery now that she's clean and sober, we freak out. And so Babadook's children's book gimmick would be just cliche if not for its blunt unremitting threat --moving slowly and gingerly from playfully macabre to outright hostile, threatening, malicious, obscene even as it never strays from the psychosexual Lynchian ostrich nasal lampshade imperiled dog Joe Campbell crucible, to become like a 'next stage in a woman's life" sequel to Twilight, Maleficent, Frozen, and Snow White and the Huntsman. In returning to the dark heart of the feminine-centric fairy tale myth, the blueprint for maturity and unification of spirit which is, at its most simple, recognizable and familiar. It's a trilogy through which nightmare animuses become, Red Riding Hood, Bluebeard, and finally the prince in Sleeping Beauty, before devolving into the Fisher King, with good capon lined, before crumbling back to the freedom of the dust.




Shout's Blu-ray includes Kent's short, Monster, a 16mm black and white, lean little thing, with the Babadook itself more of a Goth kid who likes to run up on people through the old 'cutting out every other frame' trick so beloved of Nine Inch Nails. And of course trailers, interview full of nice tidbits that really stretch out. The Blu-ray brings excellent tactile depth to the powder blues and grays of the walls, a color scheme that I'll confess is not my favorite, but it works to suggest color is draining out of this bizarre family. "I'll make you a bet, the more you deny, the bigger I get!" It's pretty Freudian, especially when the pop-ups begin. And the score emphasizes and distorts Amelia's disintegrating mentality, in one great scene Amelia looks for her son and you hear his calling but muffled and echoed, hard to pinpoint. This Babadook is like their unholy 'third heat', borne perhaps of their collective psychic blocks, the horror of losing the father, Oscar, the build-up that comes from never allowing the gushing destruction of grief and tears to overtake you.  It's never suggested otherwise; while the kid is being terrorized, she's downstairs and the cuts back and forth exhibit a profound grasp of the way the repressed emotions and sexual frustrations of a widowed parent can spontaneously generate autonomous external threats, as in Dr. Morphius' monster "from the Id" in Forbidden Planet or (single mom) Jessica Tandy's Birds.