Spirits Do Come Back: Bunyips and the European Gothic in The Babadook

This chapter explores the ways in which The Babadook (Jennifer Kent 2014), in its deft and complex intertextual weaving, is not so much a Gothic narrative, as a story of a mother and son trapped inside a Gothic milieu. The film starts at the beginning of the end. Jennifer Kent inserts the audience into central character, Amelia’s (Essie Davis) nightmare, which conveniently also provides vital backstory exposition for the drama that will manifest into the monstrous form of Mister Babadook. The dream repeats the fateful night (seven years earlier) when Amelia’s husband, Oskar (Benjamin Winspear), died in a car accident on the night when she would give birth to their son, Samuel (Noah Wiseman). The backstory establishes the reasons for Amelia’s deep mourning, as well as motivating the guilt and resentment she feels towards her son; yet the film withholds definitive answers about this widowed mother and her relationship to the murderous and monstrous impulses unleashed in the story.