The Babadook and It Follows: Modern "Masterpieces" of Horror

"Why can't you just be normal?"

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I distinctly remember when Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook had its limited release back in 2014. Everyone on the internet seemed to not be able to stop singing praise of this supposed modern masterpiece of horror that was void of any jump scares. The other reason I remember the time when The Babadook came out so well is because it was released within one year of another film that critics and social media could not stop calling one of the best modern horror films (also due to its lack of jump scares). This film was David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows. The closely timed distribution and some other similarities, like how Kent and Mitchell were both emerging directors filming on a $2 million budget, has often led people, myself included, to sometimes group these two films together. I will first talk about The Babadook in relation to the readings, since that was the assignment, then go into It Follows a little bit more.

While the name of the film and its promotional material relied on the all black and white creature straight out of a frightening children’s book (who’s also a gay icon?), the monster of The Babadook is not actually the titular figure. The real monster of this story is the depravity of maternity. For the past seven years, Amelia has been haunted by the death of her husband. Occurring the same day as the birth of her son Sam, he has since then served as a reminder of what Amelia has lost. Because of this, Amelia has remained cold to Sam for most of his life and grows angry when he tries to show affection toward her. This relationship is an inversed representation of the abject maternal figure, where “we can see abjection at work in the horror text where the child struggles to break away from the mother, representative of the archaic maternal figure, in a context in which the father is invariably absent… refusing to relinquish her hold on her child” (Creed, 72). Creed points out that these relationships like this are portrayed in horror films like Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho and The Birds.

In The Babadook, however, it is the child that is longing for affection, while the mother tries to break away as much as she can. Although this is a different relationship than the one Creed describes, it makes the mother no less abject. Sam frequently displays how difficult the estranged relationship between him and his mother is for him, acting out in bursts of emotion and creating weapons to defend himself. The pain Sam is in is what constructs Amelia as the maternal monstrous-feminine. It is the reason that the Babadook chooses to possess her and not Sam. Even as Amelia starts to choke her son while possessed, he chooses to show her love, which is what seemingly frees her from the Babadook’s control; she realized she needs to hold her son closer and not push her away.

Whereas The Babadook navigated the fragility of emotional connections, Mitchell’s It Follows explored the dangers of physical relationships. The film *ahem* follows the simple premise of dangerous entity that stalks people and kills them if it gets too close. The only way to evade the entity is to pass it on to someone else by having sex with them. I remember sneaking into the theater with my friend to see this film because it of the non-stop praise it was getting, and like The Babadook, I was underwhelmed with the result. The film does have some interesting ideas though and seems to be demonstrative of the concepts presented by Freud and Creed. This is particularly true when it shows how people see the entity, since it takes the nude appearance of someone who the stalked person knows, which is usually a woman. When it kills one of the characters, it is in the form of his mother. Unlike the alluded monster in The Babadook, this film is showing us a literal monstrous-feminine of a maternal figure. The motherly monster here is presumably killing her son for engaging in sexual activity, punishing him for attempting to break free of her motherly hold. Maybe I should give this one another try now that I have read Barbera Creed…