The Babadook arrives in a children's book. A bedtime object, intended to help a child settle, admits something that will make sleep difficult for everyone. It is an economical intrusion. The trouble enters through an activity the household is supposed to perform together.
Jennifer Kent's 2014 film concerns a widowed mother and her young son, whose lives have been shaped by the father's death. A disturbing figure from a pop-up book becomes part of their fear. In an interview with Filmmaker, Kent described developing the film around the woman and what she was struggling with; the frightening elements supported that experience. Kent's 2014 interview
That starting point helps explain the force of the domestic setting. The threat has arrived in a place already occupied by loss, where people must still eat, sleep and respond to each other. Daily care continues to make demands on someone who is having difficulty meeting them. An ordinary room can therefore hold several kinds of danger: what the child fears, what the parent fears and what each might do when unable to understand the other.
In another interview that year, Kent discussed the importance of allowing an imperfect account of motherhood and its grief. That is a useful correction to a reading that makes the creature the only interesting presence in the film. The mother has an interior life that exceeds what her role permits her to express. The film lets that difficulty become frightening. The Cinema Australia interview
Reading the creature
Calling the monster grief can help a viewer begin, but it can also stop the reading too early. Once a symbol has a neat translation, it is tempting to believe the film has been explained. Grief would then become a puzzle with an answer written underneath. A more patient interpretation can ask how the film changes the viewer's relation to the household: when sympathy becomes impatience, how care can coexist with anger, and why a person in distress may be difficult to live with.
Those questions do not require the audience to diagnose the mother. They ask us to remain interested in a character whose feelings are inconvenient. A horror film can hold that interest without making the character agreeable. The creature supplies one reason to keep watching while the relationship supplies another.
The title character was also an invention. Kent told Filmmaker that she wanted a name without an existing meaning so that the film could make its own myth. The detail is a reminder that a monster need not be ancient to feel as though it has been waiting for us. A new figure can acquire the familiarity of an old fear when a story gives it a convincing place to live.
Another kind of haunting
Jayro Bustamante's La Llorona, released in 2019, makes a different use of a household. A fictional former military dictator faces a prosecution for atrocities against Guatemala's Maya communities. He and his family then encounter disturbing events at home, where a new housekeeper has arrived. The film draws on the weeping-woman figure of Latin American folklore and the history of violence in Guatemala. These are elements of the film's fiction; the story is not a documentary record of a particular trial. The distributor's synopsis and film record
Reading its premise alongside The Babadook brings a difference into focus. A family suffering a death and a family living with the consequences of atrocity do not occupy the same moral position. Loss cannot serve as a convenient word that makes every experience equivalent. In La Llorona, the questions include responsibility, the protection a household affords its powerful member and what the family has been able to avoid knowing.
The house gives that avoidance a boundary. There can be an inside where ordinary family relations continue and an outside where other people demand an account. A haunting makes that division unstable. The home may still shelter the family physically while failing to keep the past at a comfortable distance. The supernatural premise allows the film to ask what remains unresolved when those who have benefited from silence would prefer to resume daily life.
Bustamante has described the practical risks of making the film. In an interview with No Film School, he recalled working cautiously around a subject he considered taboo, receiving anonymous calls discouraging the project and obtaining protected locations for the shoot. These are his reported experiences of production. They make it difficult to treat the film's struggle over what can be said as an entirely invented problem. Bustamante's interview
In the same conversation, he described having to balance the effectiveness of horror with the historical suffering at the center of the work. That is an artistic problem with ethical consequences. A compelling scare might draw an audience toward a subject, then overwhelm the people whose experience made the subject matter. A filmmaker has to decide how much pleasure the frightening device should provide and where attention should remain.
What remains after the film
It would be presumptuous to take these two films as explanations of entire cultures. One does not stand for everything Australia feels about motherhood; the other cannot contain every Guatemalan account of violence or memory. They are particular works made through particular choices. Comparing them is useful because their differences make the choices visible.
A viewer can begin with a few concrete questions. Whose home is threatened? Who has the authority to describe the disturbance? Whose account sounds implausible to everyone else? When a character asks for normal life to resume, what exactly would have to remain unspoken for that to happen? The answers can change our allegiance before any creature appears.
The films also give us reasons to be cautious with the promise of closure. Finishing a story is an artistic task. Resolving grief or accounting for historical violence involves people who cannot be dismissed when the credits begin. A satisfying ending may still leave a viewer with obligations the story has only helped them notice.
The children's book in The Babadook offers an especially unsettling version of that problem. Books can be closed and put away. What they have brought to a reader's attention may continue to occupy the room. The lasting interest of a monster can lie in the conversations that become harder to postpone once it has arrived.