World Cinema Production - The Babadook

IMDb page

Australian

Budget: $30,071

Stars: 
- Essie Davis
- Noah Wiseman

Genre: Drama, Horror, Thriller

Box Office: total gross - $4,867,792

Production Company: IFC Films, Causeway Films

Certificate: 15



Release Date: 
- 24th October 2014 (UK) 
- 17th January 2014 (USA Sundance Film Festival)

Plot:
Directed and written by Jennifer Kent, The Babadook explores the relationship between a widowed woman and her son with behavioural difficulties. The story follows them as they find a book about a children's monster who then begins to haunt them and the audience is left to wonder whether the monster is real or if it's purely an figment of her psychologically twisted imagination. The tag line 'if it's in a word, or it's in a look, you can't get rid of The Babadook' promotes the film by creating its own image and makes it memorable when advertising. 

Direction and writing

The Babadook is Jennifer Kent's debut film which she both directed and wrote. She gained experience being an extra in television and film productions and first directed a short titled Monster in 2005. The Babadook was her second attempt at directing and was released in 2014.

Stars and production
The Babadook is from the Causeway Films production company who have four more films in development, but this is their first official release, making them an unknown company. Essie Davis, the leading actress, was also seen in The Matrix Reloaded and Charlotte's Web. Daniel Henshall, a talented young child actor has also been seen in popular films like These Final Hours and Not Suitable For Children. An audience who have seen these films and enjoyed the performance of these actors could then be interested in watching other films including them, which could give it a wider audience. Money for the film was raised with the 'Kickstarter' project which earned director Jennifer Kent the modest budget she needed to make the film.

Critical Response
On the aggregation site Rotten Tomatoes, The Babadook received a 97% score based on 68 reviews from critics and an average score of 8/10. Critic from Entertainment Weekly describes it as, 'In an age when horror movies have mostly become lazy and toothless, here's one with ambition and bite.' And Los Angeles Times critic says, '"The Babadook" is a smart, darkly drawn modern-day horror movie of monsters, memories and mothers.'

Audience Response
Although the critical response to this film was phenomenal, the audience response wasn't so striking. With a 73% rating from the audience, it seemed many members of the public missed the depth that this film held, though some did thoroughly enjoy it. One person comments on Rotten Tomatoes, 'It is always a wonderful surprise to see an intelligent horror film with such profound psychological and emotional scope, making use of a rich symbolism to tell the story of a woman who succumbs to her own inner shadow and is forced to confront it as it takes over her sanity.' who seems to understand the film intrinsically.

Interview with director Jennifer Kent

This is your first feature-length film – how hard was it to get this made? We hear a lot of horror stories - no pun intended - from first-time directors.
It feels like I’ve been working towards my first feature for years, but this one didn’t really take long. It took just under three years, which is pretty quick – in Australia anyway; I’m not sure about the UK. It had a flow to it. I certainly wouldn’t say that it was easy, but there were enough leads and we were bolstered by that and we just kept going until finally they gave us the money.

This feels like it’s a horror or a thriller with a good bit more depth than some.
Yeeeaaaah. I think there are many films in every genre that don’t mean anything, but for some reason horror tends to attract a lot of those stories, and also gets a bad rap for being a rubbish genre. I think if people think sensitively and seriously about films in this canon, like The Shining and Let The Right One In, even going back to Vampyr and Nosferatu, there’s a real depth to those films – and the Polanski films as well, the domestic horrors. I guess they were my inspiration. I think the very best horror is more than just jump scares and things appearing out of cupboards and women running around half-naked.

So apart from those you’ve mentioned, were there other horror films that influenced this in some way, or that you’d recommend?
Apart from the ones I mentioned, I was really influenced by ‘70s and ‘80s horror – I watched a lot of those as a kid, way too young, much to my parents’ horror. It left me terrified but also excited. I think a lot of horror comes from a similar place to fairytales and it deals with myth. Mythical stories run through all of us, and films like The Thing and Halloween are films that I love for their simplicity. Les Yeux Sans Visage, Eyes Without A Face, is a really beautiful film to me. I could rattle off many. But I love films like Texas Chain Saw Massacre as well, because that is a really shocking film, and it has a deeper reach to it than people really give it credit for.

That fairytale aspect is important in this film, with a storybook playing a key role. There seems to be a fine line between fairytale and horror, in films like Pan’s Labyrinth or The Spirit Of The Beehive.
I heard a talk from Guillermo del Toro around the time he made Pan’s Labyrinth, and he was talking about horror and fairytales. He was saying that there are two kinds of fairytales. There are ones that are cautionary tales designed to frighten children into being good. Then there’s the other kind, the ones he likes, that really say to people, ‘The world is chaos. Welcome to it. Accept it!’ For me, the second type is also the kind I love, that embraces chaos and isn’t afraid to look at taboos. In Babadook, it’s a big taboo to question motherhood. When I looked for films or literature that did so, I was shocked at how little there was, so it made sense to put it in a horror context rather than a straight drama context.

Challenges at the Box Office

The Babadook had to compete with big-name films like Fury and Annabelle which were also released in October for the 'Halloween season'. Annabelle, being a sequel to an existing film, already had a large following and would have attracted a large audience. The film also had to compete with Gone Girl which was a popular book adaptation, making it a largely popular film. Competing with such blockbusters is difficult for independent, foreign films. Distribution was also extremely limited and the film wasn't shown in a wide variety of cinemas, inevitably limiting its popularity.