THE BABADOOK: You Can't Get Rid of the Babadook

Director: Jennifer Kent
Writer: Jennifer Kent
Cast: Essie Davis, Noah Wiseman
Runtime: 93 mins.
2014

Welcome to the very special 50th post of Post-Credit Coda! Numbers are accidents, but it just so happens that we have a very special movie review to go along with the milestone. Earlier this month I wrote up It Follows, which is part of an exclusive new club of excellent high concept horror films that don't rely on cheap jump scares, retrogressive morality, and victims who aren't turning lights on for no reason. I would like to think this club was founded by The Cabin in the Woods, a metafictional horror masterpiece from a few years back that laid the smackdown on contemporary horror and all its infantile malarkey. Perhaps the club's only other member is our current topic of discussion: The Babadook. Even with only two or three movies in the club, folks are eager to herald these films as the sign of a high quality horror resurgence, the likes of which we haven't seen since Scream torpedoed the slasher genre, as I wrote about long long ago.

In many ways, It Follows and The Babadook are of a piece, but one major thing keeps them distinct in my experience. It Follows is easy. The Babadook is not.

After seeing It Follows with a friend, it was immediately clear that we had the exact same visceral, unsettling, enjoyable experience, for all the same reasons. The merits of that film are clear. But I've seen The Babadook with three different people at this point, and none of us had a remotely similar viewing experience. In fact, The Babadook has led to some of the more in-depth and difficult movie discussions I've ever had.

I say the movie is brilliant, beautiful, terrifying, feminist, singular, and thematically resonant. My friends say the movie is decent, too revelatory, a wee bit sexist, and unresolved. Who's right?

I'm right, of course.

IT FOLLOWS: STDos and STDon'ts

Director: David Robert Mitchell
Writer: David Robert Mitchell
Cast: Maika Monroe, Keir Gilchrist, Olivia Luccardi, Lili Sepe, Jake Weary, Daniel Zovatto
Runtime: 100 mins.
2015

The first and only thing I knew about It Follows before walking into the theater was that it is an allegory for STDs. That's already interesting, but what breaks the movie out of "interesting" and into "fascinating" is that it's so much more than that. Just when you think the film is sinking into its subtext, it's abandoned for pure horror movie thrills. Not to worry though, it always returns to its themes in more complex and circumspect ways than you could reasonably expect from a slashy horror film starring beautiful, sexually active young people. It Follows doesn't fall into the oldest of horror cliches: sex is bad, if you have sex you get killed. Instead it makes that trope the premise, thereby setting it on a pedestal for us to examine its subtleties.

It Follows is a horror movie with a lot on its mind that never forgets to be a horror movie.