The Babadook
All actors and roles (10)
All team (72)
Short description
Amelia is raising her six-year-old son Samuel alone, years after her husband's death. Samuel is difficult and volatile, convinced that a monster is coming for him and his mother. When a dark storybook called Mister Babadook appears in their home, his fears fix on its creature. Amelia dismisses the book at first, but unsettling things begin happening around her, and she starts to question whether her son's warnings describe something real.
Jennifer Kent wrote and directed the film, her first feature, followed by The Nightingale in 2018. Essie Davis plays Amelia and Noah Wiseman plays Samuel, with Hayley McElhinney, Daniel Henshall, Barbara West and Ben Winspear among the cast. The production was mounted in Australia and Canada on a budget of about 2 million US dollars, and it went on to take roughly 10 million worldwide, a strong return relative to its cost.
Reception divides sharply by audience. Critics gave it 8.3 out of 10 across 249 reviews, while viewers are cooler: 6.8 out of 10 on IMDb from around 269,000 votes and 6.5 out of 10 on TMDB from far fewer. The film runs 94 minutes and sits within drama and horror, using a small household and a mother's exhaustion as the ground for its scares.
What's left behind the scenes
- The rights to the film are owned by director Jennifer Kent. She firmly promised that she will not sell the rights to film a sequel for any amount of money.
- The director of the classic horror film "The Exorcist" (1973), William Friedkin, wrote on Twitter on November 30, 2014: "I have never seen a more terrifying film than "The Babadook."
- $30,071 was raised for filming through crowdfunding.
- Jennifer Kent and Essie Davis, who played Amelia, studied together at drama school.
- Some scenes use a sound effect from the computer game UFO: Enemy Unknown, produced by Mythos Games and MicroProse.
- In several scenes with the Babadook, you can hear a sound effect from the computer strategy game Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness (1995) by Blizzard Entertainment.
- During the final battle, sound effects from the computer game Resident Evil, developed for PlayStation in 1996, can be heard.
- The scream heard several times at the end of the film is borrowed from Motaro, a character from the Mortal Kombat universe.
- Director and screenwriter Jennifer Kent states that the film is based on photographs miraculously preserved from Tod Browning's lost film "London After Midnight".
- Amelia is reading a pop-up book, "Mr. Babadook," by feminist writer Alexandra Yuhasz to Sam.
- In one scene, a classic Italian horror film, "Black Sabbath," is shown on television. The following scene bears a striking resemblance to a scene from Mario Bava's film.
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