the babadook, and what i read in october and november
Over Thanksgiving weekend, AK and I saw an Australian horror movie called The Babadook , about a woman whose husband died in a car crash as he drove her to the hospital while she was in labor. Six years later, she’s a single mom struggling to raise a son who sees invisible monsters. She’s frazzled. She wishes he would just go the fuck to sleep . The movie has a great Tim Burton-ish aesthetic, but with more restraint. One day a spooky children’s book about a monster called the Babadook shows up in their house. The book promises a terrible fate for any who ignore it and, the text cautions, the monster never goes away. At first, only her son sees the Babadook in their house, and he seems like one of those classic creepy horror movie kids, crazed and possessed. Nothing like an old-timey rocking horse to make a kid seem creepy. Then the mother begins to see it. Her son promises to protect his mom, even as she swallows the amorphous monster like so much black ink, becoming a...