This is a retread of the 1961 "The Innocents".

Rating: 4/10 (30 April 2015)

Yes, there was tremendous acclaim for "The Babadook", built on the trailer that appeared long before the feature was available. Unfortunately, the resulting film failed to live up to it's hype, disappointing horror fans who were expecting something new that eschewed horny teenagers, jump scares, slashers who cannot be killed,or zombies. For this viewer, the disappointment set in early since it didn't take long for the realization that "Babadook" was a very, very thinly veiled retread of Jack Clayton's masterful 1961 psychological ghost epic "The Innocents".
Director Jennifer Kent herself has admitted to viewing and considering other, better films before making "Babadook". "The Innocents" is one of those films. Her decision to take the plot of "Innocents" (itself based on Henry James' genre groundbreaking novel "The Turn of the Screw") and transpose characters and situations across a very sleepy 93 minute running time is frankly, abysmal. Anyone familiar with James' novel or Clayton's movie will suddenly realize about 45 minutes into this re imagined sleeper that Kent was lazy, evidently supposing that no one over a certain age would remember the original source material.
In contrast: two women, both single and alone suffering emotional issues. Both are trapped in a large residence with no way out. Both women are sexually repressed and have had their fantasies interrupted by a boy whose motivations may...or not...be driven by supernatural forces.
The boy, who is adult beyond his years, is tasked with dealing with a woman who may...or not be...insane.
The titular creature, one "Babadook", is a pale version of sexually driven Peter Quint from "Innocents". No one believes the boy sees the haunting, and the female lead eventually succumbs to the nasty whats-it hanging around in the shadows.
"Babadook/Innocents" is the same film, plagiarized by an again, lazy director who evidently thought no one would notice. Her comeuppance occurs mid-film in a sequence that shows the hysterical woman watching horror movies on TV. The woman sees a short clip from the masterful Mario Bava trilogy from 1963, "Black Sabbath'. The featured clip is from that movie's most unsettling episode "A Drop of Water", in which a woman who has transgressed against the dead results in her undoing, featuring the nastiest floating corpse ever seen in color by Deluxe. A very bad move by director Kent, since anyone who's ever seen Bava's film cannot shake the vision of the corpse for the rest of the "Babadook".
Reinvention, or re-imaging source material has plagued horror movies for years now. The idea that no one will notice the sleight of hand that puts a dim version of a better offering on the screen is not only fatuous, but demeaning to the audience. Jennifer Kent may not have retread the ground tilled by both James and Clayton, but she's walked that park enough times to attempt fooling those who don't buy another revisionist, or re-imagined, or rebooted telling of a story that's been around for decades.
A massive disappointment from Down Under, which couldn't deliver on the promise (or hysteria) provided by the Internet.