the stars will hurt your tired eyes

Last night I watched The Babadook, a psychological horror film from 2014. The plot concerns a mother and her son and an evil spirit called The Babadook that is introduced to the story via a creepy pop-up storybook (the actual storybook, shown in great detail, might have been my favorite part of the movie.) Amelia, the mother is raising her son Samuel alone because her husband died driving her to the hospital to give birth to Samuel. The Babadook enters their lives and things don’t go so well. One of the strengths of the film is that you can interpret the The Babadook multiple ways: as a true “other” entity, as a projection of grief, or some combination thereof. Though the film ultimately doesn’t quite achieve its aims, failing to fully coalesce and hurt by one poorly-drawn character, there is a stretch in the movie that is very affecting and powerful.

The Babadook is a movie that any parent with a kid who just won’t behave and just won’t sleep can relate to. Amelia gets very little sleep throughout the movie. From roughly the middle to the last third of the movie, the scenes of her utterly exhausted face hit home with force. What parent hasn’t been there, with the kid whining “Mom? Momee? Momee!?!” In the most powerful scene in the whole movie, Amelia (ostensibly under the influence of The Babadook), in reaction to Samuel’s endless talking/whining and desperately wanting nothing more than to sleep, lets loose a torrent of verbal abuse at him. The scene is shocking and very real and will be the one thing I will remember about this film when the rest of it fades away in my mind.

After I got over the shock of that scene, I said aloud to the screen “I hope they are paying Wes Craven royalties on this” because in many ways the movie echoes the first Nightmare on Elm Street. And that is no bad thing since the original Nightmare is, for my money, one of the best horror movies ever made. The engine that drove Nightmare was the sheer exhaustion of teen protagonist Nancy, who could not fall asleep lest Freddy kill her in her dreams. The line between wakefulness and sleep becomes blurred, and the movie strikes its most effective notes when we aren’t sure which reality we are in…or, ultimately if we can *ever* be sure. The Babadook works along these same lines, this time from the perspective of the parent, who just wants the kid to shut up so they can get some rest. When exhaustion settles in that deeply, it takes over every aspect of your life; you do not know whether you are awake or not and the simplest household chore becomes an exercise in surrealism. You wonder if you might be going insane…and you’re too tired to care.

This is very rich territory for horror to work in. Horror is at its best when it blurs the boundaries of real and not real. Horror is uniquely suited to address the changing nature of reality, and this is one of the main reasons I’ve been drawn to the genre for as long as I remember. The question of what is real and what is not is a question that can never be fully answered. In extreme states such as exhaustion—and terror, anger and all other states where you lose your equilibrium—our mental houses crumble, and we stand in the ruins. Destruction or rebirth? Both? One incomprehensible world or many? A violent shift in perspective and when you look up, the stars will hurt your tired eyes.

The main reason that The Babadook didn’t fully succeed is that the boy, Samuel, is so unlikeable that later in the film when you should be scared for/pulling for him, you just wish The Babadook would get him already. A character-driven film like this needs you to have sympathy for the characters, and while I certainly did for Amelia, Samuel was so unlikeable every moment he was on the screen that by the climactic battle you just want him to die and the movie to end. But I’ve seen hundreds of movies that have left me with the taste of disappointment. The difference with The Babadook is that middle third’s exploration of complete exhaustion and parental wipeout. For a little while the film touches on something larger, something unsettling and universal. In Amelia’s exhausted eyes I relive those nights with my small children when you just start to nod off only to snap up again to the sound of crying or whining. Those nights when the dream life and waking life are the same. When the stars hurt your tired eyes.