Oh, my beloved “The Babadook”. It could so not work, but it really does. So well-directed. A genuinely scary movie. Mother and young son deal with the pain of losing dad, and a monster which may or may not be the manifestation of that loss.
I consider this one a classic, full stop.
I’ve had friends say they found it disappointing. And I can understand that, I suppose, considering how some viewers may have grown used to being spoonfed by modern horror. This film has actual plot and character development that you have to sit through. A lot of this film’s runtime is just the psychological dynamics of a deteriorating mother/son relationship (and possibly also the deteriorating mental health of one or both) with the scenes of traditional scares only coming as brief emotional punctuation marks.
Consider, on the other hand, that this also has a 98% critics’ approval rating on “Rotten Tomatoes”. And William Friedkin, director of “The Exorcist”, after seeing it, updated his Twitter profile to read, “Psycho, Alien, Diabolique, and now THE BABADOOK” and called it “the scariest movie I’ve ever seen.” A number of critics called it not just the best horror film of its year or decade, but one of the best films of any genre.
So, it’s not for everyone. But it’s very much for a lot of people. I’m one of them.