The Babadook: Narrative and Grief as Monster
Production Context: A Debut on a Tight Budget
The Babadook (2014) was written and directed by Jennifer Kent, marking her feature debut after her earlier short film Monster. The film was produced by Causeway Films and Smoking Gun Productions, in association with Screen Australia and the South Australian Film Corporation, with distribution through Entertainment One. Cinematographer Radek Ladczuk shot the film; editor Simon Njoo assembled the cut; and the score was composed by Jed Kurzel, with production design by Alex Holmes. Made on a budget of approximately AU$2.5 million — with a Kickstarter campaign contributing to the cost of set construction — the film was shot in and around Adelaide. It premiered at Sundance and received wide international critical acclaim, establishing Kent as a significant voice in contemporary horror. The film’s central formal achievement is its use of psychological horror narrative — the Babadook is not simply a creature: it is grief made visible.
The Babadook (2014) was directed by Jennifer Kent. Cinematographer: Radek Ladczuk. Editor: Simon Njoo. Composer: Jed Kurzel. Produced in Australia and Canada, shot in Adelaide on a budget of approximately AU$2.5 million partly funded through Kickstarter.
The Storybook Frame and Narrative Disruption
The film’s narrative is structured around the arrival of a threatening object: a pop-up book called Mister Babadook, which appears in the family home of recently widowed Amelia Vanek and her six-year-old son Samuel. This storybook functions as a narrative catalyst — the classical Todorovian equilibrium the family is attempting to maintain (a bereaved household functioning, just about, under social pressure) is disrupted the moment the book is opened. Todorov’s model is particularly useful here: the prior equilibrium is already fragile (Amelia has not mourned her husband’s death, having suppressed grief for six years); the book does not create the disruption so much as give it a name and a face. The new equilibrium reached at the close is not the restoration of what was — Amelia cannot bring her husband back — but a form of coexistence with grief, symbolised in the film’s final domestic ritual.
The children’s-book opening reveal sequence is constructed in slow, deliberate cuts. Radek Ladczuk holds the camera in a medium close-up on Amelia’s face as she reads aloud; the book itself is kept just below the lower frame edge for several beats, so the spectator can hear but not see. When the page finally enters the frame, the camera tilt down is slow and continuous, as if reluctant to reach the image. The pop-up figures are shot in a shallow-focus close-up that keeps the edges of the page soft and the central figure pin-sharp. This is not the grammar of a children’s book — it is the grammar of a dread object. The formal choice signals the shift from domestic mundanity to horror before any supernatural event has occurred.
The domestic interior in which Amelia reads the book is dressed in the film’s characteristic desaturated palette: the walls are a cool, bleached blue-grey; the furniture is dark wood; the bedding is white with a grey undertone. This colour scheme is consistent throughout the film’s depiction of the family home and serves a dual narrative purpose. First, it visually represents Amelia’s psychological state — the absence of warmth in the palette mirrors the absence of joy in a house arrested in grief. Second, it makes the Babadook’s eventual appearance — constructed from high-contrast black-and-white graphic shapes borrowed from early German Expressionist cinema — feel like a graphic intrusion into an already cold, flat world. The Babadook does not bring darkness to a bright space: it fully inhabits a space that was already drained of colour.
Claustrophobic Framing and the Home as Trap
Kent and Ladczuk build the film’s horror through the architecture of the home itself. The house is shot predominantly in locked-off medium shots that place the doorways and corridor thresholds in the centre of the frame. This is not accidental: the blocking consistently stages confrontations on thresholds — the bedroom door, the top of the stairs, the basement entrance — so that the spectator always sees the boundary between safety and threat, never just one side of it. In the bedroom doorway confrontation between mother and son, Kent frames both characters in a locked-off two-shot through the doorframe itself, the corridor dark beyond. The practical lighting is a warm bedside lamp on Amelia’s side, a bare bulb on Samuel’s. The strip of darkness between them is the film’s emotional landscape — the gap that grief has opened between a mother and the child she cannot fully love because loving him means acknowledging her husband’s death.
Sound design in The Babadook is used with unusual restraint and precision. The diegetic domestic sounds — clocks, creaking floorboards, Samuel’s night-terrors — are mixed louder than naturalism requires, so the house itself seems to be listening. The Babadook’s sonic signature is a rhythmic knocking and a low-register bass presence that the score picks up and amplifies; Kurzel’s music never soars or resolves, remaining in a suspended, unresolved tonal space that mirrors Amelia’s unfinished mourning. Abrupt silence is used as a horror device in the police-station sequence: the ambient domestic sound drops completely on the cut to the fluorescent-lit waiting room, and the contrast is more unsettling than any jump scare.
The film’s desaturated blue-grey palette and locked-off doorway framings are not just aesthetic choices — they are formal correlates of Amelia’s suppressed grief. The palette drains warmth from the home; the thresholds stage the gap between mother and son that grief has opened. Together they tell the spectator that the horror is psychological before it is supernatural.
The closing basement-feeding ritual is the film’s most debated sequence. The film does not end with the Babadook destroyed; it ends with Amelia descending to the basement, where the creature now lives, and leaving a bowl for it. This is a narrative choice that refuses the classical horror resolution (monster killed, order restored) in favour of a different equilibrium: grief cannot be killed, but it can be contained, acknowledged, visited on your own terms. The spectator who has followed the film’s psychological logic understands this without explanation. The shot holds on Amelia’s face as she descends — a long take in shallow focus that keeps her expression just legible while the basement sinks into darkness below her. The spatial movement down is the film’s final spatial metaphor: to accept grief is to go beneath the surface of everyday life and look at it directly.