Metaphoric Simplicity and Fake-Horror in The Babadook

Let me just get this out of the way and say that I personally do not like The Babadook as a film. Most of my reasons for my disliking are rather subjective and have more to do with aesthetics, but there is something to be said about the sheer audacity (and dubious-ness) of its centralized metaphor. The film is obviously dealing with maternity and grief and Amelia is rendered not only as the protagonist of the film, but essentially its only actual character. The role of every other character in the film is essentially to be a prop for Amelia or a plot-device to propel its narrative. This is characteristic of many horror films, but there's something particularly troubling about these screenwriting tactics when employed within this narrative. In essence, the film shrugs off Amelia's abuse of Sam by explaining at as a--what appears to be--very literal monster. To the viewer, the character of Sam is nothing but an annoyance as the film sutures us to Amelia, who views him similarly. (I guess the film could potentially do something interesting via exploring the monstrosity of children--a la The Village of the Damned, The Omen, and The Innocents--but alas).

The Babadook then is an interesting contrast to some of the films discussed by Creed, such as The Exorcist and Carrie. The Babadook constructs a monster (a crude grief metaphor) as its "other" entity, while the mother herself is meant to be relatable and (debatably) heroic, if somewhat off-putting. This is quite unlike The Exorcist, as Creed herself describes, "the world of the symbolic, represented by the priest-as-father, and the world of the pre-symbolic, represented by woman aligned with the devil, clashes head-on in scenes where the foulness of woman is signified by her putrid, filthy body covered in blood, urine, excrement and bile" (Creed, 74). The possessed pre-pubescent girl is the monstrous figure in The Exorcist (though not because she serves as some obvious metaphor for mental illness). Instead, Regan is frightening because she is incomprehensible according to the symbolic order, because she breaks down the boundaries and binaries of the symbolic. Furthermore, part of the horror of the Exorcist is that it blasphemes our sacred, pure objects and exposes the constructions of the symbolic (it's monster is, after all, an innocent little girl). The Babadook, on the other hand, is entirely grounded in the symbolic, a monster we can easily comprehend who bears no threat nor any confusion. It is simply for the mother to overcome, much like her troubled son. It is, in actuality, a drama about grief disguised as a horror film, substituting emotional beats with jump-scares. The Babadook has the potential to actually explore the trauma of maternity and of the child breaking away (and perhaps others have found such potential) but it too easily names that which is supposed to scare us. It actually builds binaries instead of breaking them.