She watches TV and is disturbed by the Big Bad Wolf’s threat to the little pigs’ domestic bliss and his sheep’s skin disguise, is disturbed to see the Phantom of the Opera unmasked, is disturbed to hear other mothers offer bromides about her loss. The Babadook’s “threat” is disclosure, his name – ba ba DOOK DOOK DOOK! – becoming literally the sound of an insistent knock of truth at the door, demanding to “LET ME IN!” The great horror he visits on Amelia (who impolitely screams “It’s not REAL!” throughout) is a dreadful sexy striptease – hat hurled down the chimney, coat thrown sensuously to the floor – to reveal what’s underneath (Kent’s soundtrack here is an eldritch croaking wail building to a soul-rending cacophony she evidently requested “I Am What I Am” from La Cage, but could not clear the rights in Australia).Īmelia, like most straight people, does not want to deal with what’s underneath. He is the unspeakable, the manifestation of the undealt-with, the unprocessed, the liminal: the terror that dare not speak its name, a monster come crawling from the locked cellar (where Amelia seals her dead husband’s things), hiding under the bed, and (not too subtly) bursting forth, in fabulous sinister crescendo like a guncle resplendent, from the closet.
The Babadook – in his shapeless coat and shabby top hat, a signifier of her son and lost husband’s shared love of magic, and a fashion statement piece that has inspired the “stovepipe nightmare daddy” gay subculture – then, is the embodied, croaking shape of that grief. “Samuel already feels so different,” we are told, and like his father – and so unlike his mother – he always speaks his mind. His pop-up zine (the preferred communiqué of all goth queer artists) makes further friendly overtures: “I’ll wager with you, I’ll make you a bet! / The more you deny, the stronger I get!” It has been, we learn, seven years since the traumatic night Amelia lost her husband in a car accident and gave birth to her under-loved son – a child held hostage by his mother’s post-partum resentment at his noisy, irrepressible reminders of her bereavement, and who now lashes out.
This act of silencing, however, is precisely what gives the Babadook his power, and makes him so legendary a queer icon. In fact, the Babadook explains for himself rather ably in his own radical queer manifesto, which he leaves with the Vaneks in the form of a red pop-up storybook and which, after Amelia cruelly censors its contents and shreds, he carefully reassembles and thoughtfully leaves, with new amendments, on their front porch (the Babadook, like all good gays, lives for maximum drama and thrives at arts and crafts): “Oh come!” He invites, in the benevolent spirit of allyship, “Come see what’s underneath!!” This new edition of his book, too, is met with censure, and, in the usual custom of straight people dealing with ideas or persons they do not understand, it is promptly burnt. Tempted though we might be to bellow the same here at this impudent dismissal of one of our community’s most cherished representations (including slanderous accusations now circulating that the meme began as a simple Netflix mis-sorting into the LGBT category), in the spirit of conciliation between our divided peoples, we thought it best we make it clear. “DO you HAVE to say everything that goes through your mind?!?” Amelia Vanek (played by Essie Davis) bellows at her outspoken son, Samuel (Noah Wiseman), after his bad behaviour mortifies her for the dozenth time. What is so queer, wonders the average straight person (a very average creature indeed), about the hapless misadventures of Mister Babadook?
It has come to our attention, however, that the heterosexual community, in their usual loud and baffled way, is somewhat mystified by this icon of LGBT culture. The film is the story of a bereaved family coming to terms with their new tenant – a shambling, screeching storybook demon who lives under the stairs and, once given name or thought, can never be exorcised: “If it’s in a word, or it’s in a book / You can’t get rid of the Babadook!” He is gay. The internet is taking a moment this week amid its confetti-storm of Pride celebrations to revisit a beloved masterpiece of queer cinema, Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook (2014).