Whether it’s in a word or in a look, you can’t get rid of The Babadook’s possession hook!

I once read someone describe the Babadook as, “like “The Shining” if the main character, Amelia, is both the Jack Nicholson and the Shelly Duvall character. This is a hilariously apt description.

Instead of a snowed-in mountain, however, Amelia’s isolation takes place within the very bowels of our alienated 21st century society.  She’s the overtaxed single mother of a troubled child.  But underlying this all-too-common modern parent/child relationship is the horrific reason for her single motherhood.  The father, Oskar, died in a car crash while driving Amelia to the hospital to give birth.  Her son, Sam, was born the day her husband died. 

“The Babadook” is not a pleasant moviegoing experience, but it is fairly unique amongst the horror movie landscape for focusing on the intersection between mental health and spiritual oppression.  

What begins as a realistic portrayal of mental illness brought on by tragedy transforms into a fairy story exploring themes about possession that will look very familiar to anyone familiar with traditional Christian beliefs concerning demonic oppression. 

Six years after the death of Oskar, it’s clear Amelia is still struggling to come to terms with his loss. She does not celebrate Sam’s birthday.  She locks her deceased husband’s belongings in their basement. Amelia involuntarily rebuffs Sam’s childhood affection. In one striking moment she avoids reciprocating the words “I love you” when Sam says them. Her hurt is debilitating, and Sam’s needs aren’t helping her overcome her trauma. 

The other adults in her life range from well meaning but unavailable, such as a kind neighbor with Parkinson’s Disease, to wearily hostile, as portrayed by her burnt out sister fed up with Sam’s strange and sometimes dangerous behavior.  Even a potential love interest is quickly driven away by the unhealthy atmosphere of Amelia’s house, a product of her strained relationship with her son. In short order, the only humans engaging Amelia reflect various levels of “threat,” such as a CPS visit or menacing police officers.  Her isolation becomes palpable.

It’s in this milieu that a creepy children’s book mysteriously shows up, “Mr. Babadook”. Its opening lines are iconic for the film: “If it’s in a word or in a look, you can’t get rid of the Babadook!” 

Soon, strange phenomena begin to afflict the household and it’s not clear who is responsible.  Amelia finds shards of glass in the soup that she made. Sam claims to see the Babadook character everywhere, and soon enough so does Amelia. Not to mention ongoing flickering lights, moving furniture, nefarious phone calls, and cockroach infestations that seem to appear and disappear on a whim. Is Amelia going crazy due to exhaustion and traumatic stress?  But then why does the psychosis seem to be affecting Sam as well?  Is the Babadook real?

Pop-culture’s impression of demonic possession has been forever informed by depictions in movies such as “The Exorcist” from 1973.  While it may be a thrilling movie, its depiction of spinning heads and levitating beds has the unintended effect of replacing our understanding of the very real phenomenon of demonic oppression with something more akin to a spooky film baddie like Freddy Kreuger or Jason Voorhees… and just as ignorable. 

Our culture has relegated our perception of the demonic to fictitious representations and the negative feelings we experience are diagnosed with modern sanitized categories like “depression,” “PTSD,” or “mental illness.”  

Any exorcist will tell you that there IS a difference between a mental illness such as schizophrenia and demonic possession.  

However, the boundaries between the biochemical and the spiritual are porous. Christianity considers both categories when dealing with something as omnipresent in our society as, say, depression. 

Christians are not Gnostic. Our Faith unifies our material and spiritual realities.  You can no more disentangle a person’s spiritual and material self than you could disentangle the flour and water from a baked loaf of bread.  

That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t factually define a chemical reality and provide medication to alleviate negative symptoms, but to cultivate a purely materialistic understanding of the human is to learn half a truth.

The Catholic Church has delineated 4 levels of demonic influence: infestation, oppression, obsession and possession.  

1. “Infestation” is basically “haunted house” stuff: footsteps, moving objects, strange smells. 
2. Examples of the next category, “oppression” involve physical attack or illness, nightmares, insomnia, major depression and anxiety or relationship problems.  
3. “Obsession” refers to an increase in demonic awareness, paranoia, or suicidal ideation, and a break-down of the victim’s ability to focus or function in day-to-day life.  
4. Finally, “possession” refers to when a human is so broken from the attacks previously described that they become a vessel for the demon to operate upon the material world through their body.

Amelia’s journey in “The Babadook” exhibits various examples from all these categories of demonic influence, but at no point is there a Catholic priest in sight. 

Whether intended or not, writer/director Jennifer Kent depicts a perfect representation of how the Catholic Church perceives demonic attack in a way that allows the modern secular mind to notice it in their own struggles with mental despair.  

Perhaps an audience member may not be able to identify with vomiting pea soup, but they certainly know what it is to feel sad and alone.  Extreme examples of such feeling truly are a sign of demonic oppression.

Ultimately Amelia, through the consistent love shown to her by her son Sam, recognizes the source of the Babadook’s power, the resentment and anger festering inside of her, and reject it.  

By acknowledging and confronting this parasitic embodiment of trauma, she comes to understand that her son is not the source of her despair, and by embracing her role as Sam’s mother she is able to control the Babadook in her life. 

By the end of the film, the Babadook has not been destroyed.  The Babadook still resides in the basement of the home, but it lives in the shadows and has lost the ability to possess Amelia’s behavior patterns.  Like any trauma or mental illness, the Babadook is not something that we can pretend doesn’t exist.  

Christian’s understand the role of sin in our lives this way as well.  Accordingly, Amelia’s journey is a type of repentance.  Christians must acknowledge the disease of sin in order to fight and control it.  But we can learn to live with our demonic passions by embracing the power of Christ and his saints in our lives so that those passions do not come to control us.

The Babadook begins with a compelling look at how someone’s mental health can realistically deteriorate and ends with Amelia and Sam managing the demonic entity safely in their basement.

It’s the blurred lines the story weaves together between the mundane world of mental illness at the beginning of the movie and the fantastic demon-inhabited world of the end of the movie that make it a unique and important film.  

It is not a coincidence that Amelia’s lack of community leaves her vulnerable to stress and oppression – Christians understand the importance of the Church in our walk with Christ.  And it presents illness and sin, not as easily disposed of or ignorable problems, but as forces we will likely need to struggle with for our entire life.  

Demons are as real as mental illness, and they destroy us just as readily.  “The Babadook” reminds us that this fight is real, and in so doing points us towards Christ as the ultimate source of salvation from the wiles of our enemy.