The Babadook...What's Next?

Rating: Null/10 (24 June 2016)

My Babadook Movie Review: By Suphie Wesner
Babadook, well, what can I say? It is an interesting movie, no doubt. It has fairy-tale-like elements, as it is all based on a children's book gone sour. Really, it (the actual Babadook creature) looks a lot like a masked robber who has just finished robbing a bank. The old clichéd elements of "combine storybook idyll, serenity, and child-like tranquility" and "utter horror, gore, and vileness" work here to create a spine-tingling horror film. It is chilling from beginning to end: the themes of forbidden knowledge/fruit (from the actual action of the woman reading a children's book that is obviously inappropriate to her seven-year-old son's impressionable imagination) to the actual act of crossing the borderline of reality to the imperceptible really makes for a killer (pardon the pun) horror film that knocks the teeth out of many modern-day competitors. It is really scary, really engrossing, and really intriguing from the get-go; you quickly learn to care about the characters and how they are going to fare in the end, with this horrible monster on the loose.
It is scary in itself, how, an innocent children's book, gets mocked, and in a sense, because this children's book gets mocked, it serves to mock the entire genre of scary children's books by saying that they are not just children's book but they can serve a larger function, representing true evil that lies underneath the world's exterior.
The only parts to me that were reprehensible were the utterly predictable scenes where the crazed woman, possessed by the Babadook, kills the sweet white pooch, snapping its head back. I knew knew knew that that was going to happen. Other than that, it serves as a cheery element of mercy that the boy himself and that the woman herself (whom the second Babadook book predicted would kill herself, with a knife) do not get "killed off" by the Babadook, becoming not easy prey of the ghoulish robber and adulterer of souls, instead surviving, and with an eerie twist of capitulating to the Babadook by feeding him, who now lives in the basement, worms...
Come to think of it, for animal-rights lovers, it would have been nice if the woman had killed herself, for killing her beloved dog, Samuel, who committed no sin except for noticing her odd behavior, but that wasn't in the cards for this film.
I think that the scariest parts of the film were the times when the Babadook character actually showed up on her doorstep, wreaking havoc by his entrance into her holy household, with dire predictions of the bloodshed, vile sins, and unspeakable crimes that would ensue, due to the Babadook's wrath. Whence the Babadook's motives for his torment stem, are hard to come by, the movie does not explain them; he is just a torturer, an evil spirit. We know that the book just appeared on the boy's shelf one day, that is all we are told.
All in all, it is a great film, with some really terrific terror plots, that do not fail to build up a slow-broiling suspense that slowly terrorizes but sucks you in because the overall story-line is built up so interestingly, you really care about the characters and what is fated to happen to them.
This is because from the beginning we are shown the two characters Amelia and Sam, who are drawn closer together, necessarily, by a chain of horrible events which led to her husband's, and his father's, death (he died in a car accident on his way to deliver Amelia to the hospital, when she was pregnant with Sam). They really defend each other and stick up for each other; it is really a vision of true love.