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 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) is 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) finds on the doorstep starts out as some whimsical blueprint for a future Disney attraction but soon evolves into a genuine, disturbing 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 snicker-snap. A little of both be here. 


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 seem when in the eyes small apprehensive children. I had forgotten it myself, but Kent brings it all back. 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 Kent shows how children see themselves as normal size and adults as giants. As her mood gets blacker, Amelia gradually seems to grow, our perspective changes and she's shot from low angles, and her anger at her seven year-old son Samuel (Noah Wiseman) morphs her (sans CGI or make-up--just great acting) into some dark evil thing. 

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 can still remember how she moved in those nightmares, like she was simultaneously swimming in slow motion and moving too fast to see.  When I was scared in the dead of night I'd run into wake her so she could stand guard while I went to the bathroom.  This one time though, she sat up slowly and straight like a vampire rising from a coffin and moaned really low... and it was like my nightmare was coming true. I knelt in submission, buried my head in my hands and started crying and screaming, "I'm your son! I'm your son!!" We joked about it for years, but at the time I knew true fear. 

Is there anything worse a very young boy can imagine than his mom, his one true protector, turning evil on him? It's easy to forget about that deep 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 and we're glad to forget it. 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 showing up to study it rapidly dissipates it. One is either killed like Scatman Crothers 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 it had changed, that Captain Hendry was now a sadist in league with Dr. Carrington, and no way to ever go back to the old one, 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--giving them, at the very least, a kiss, an embrace, a bottle and a place to sleep it off in, in order slowly grow them into a prince. 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

(SPOILERS) 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. Farther in fact than any horror character before, she gets all demons safely integrated rather than merely repressed or succumbed to; she learns that madness, once harnessed, becomes genius. If you're not willing to let go of all self constructs, from surface persona right down to your twitching core, you will not not re-merge with undifferentiated consciousness. Amelia's strength as a mom lies not in Ford tough Magdalene invulnerable cloaking cloyness as we might expect, but 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 swim up faster. 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, but he was 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. We all got something to draw on, is my point, the childhood trauma informs the choice of comfort. My mom as a vampire translated to a lifetime love of Dracula.


Admittedly, the children's book / nursery rhythm gimmick, while creepy, is also overly familiar: from Edward Gorey (left) and Charles Addams-ish drawings -to everything Tim Burton ever made. But they're all 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 pun, one misses the macabre tone of unedited nursery rhymes or Grimm's Fairy Tales, which offer little sugar and lots of coldly regarded suffering. I was amused by Gorey as a child but now I look at his stuff and think he's way too disturbing for my adult sensitivity. Maybe it's that as children we know where death is, we were just there not so long ago, and so death can't suddenly surprise us. 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 eternity with her). But adults have been away from death long enough that they no longer recognize its reflection in the mirror, and so when it shows up out of the blue, 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.




Shout's Blu-ray includes Kent's short, Monster, a 16mm black and white short that's basically an early draft of the Babadook. 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 her, muffled and echoed, hard to pinpoint. We're never sure if it's just a hallucination. 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.