Redefining the Maternal Horror: The Babadook and Under the Shadows
Jennifer Kent’s 2014 psychological thriller The Babadook marked a turn in the tradition of maternal horror. Writer Leila Latif outlines the longstanding, polarized tropes of motherhood in horror; there is the evil shrew (Psycho, Carrie, Friday the 13th), and the screaming victim (The Shining, Rosemary’s Baby, The Omen). Kent, however, instead manages to sensitively portray the experiences of modern motherhood by reviving these tropes in order to convey the conflict inherent to most maternal sacrifices; between the guilt of being a bad mother, and the denial of not being a great one.
The journey of The Babadook’s maternal heroine Amelia (Essie Davis), hinges upon the death of her husband on the day of her son’s birth. She finds herself widowed, depressed and extremely overwhelmed by her son’s insistence on there being a strange presence in the house. Amelia’s denial of what Samuel (Noah Wiseman) sees culminates in her realization that the monster is in fact a manifestation of her repressed guilt and self-doubt. Also, as the unfortunate sibling of an uncompassionate fellow mother, Claire (Hayley McElhinney), whose fellow-mother friends fail to see Amelia as anything but the pitiful stereotype, the protagonist trudges all alone in her battle with widowhood and single-motherhood. Kent signals the trope of a dysfunctional mother; subversive to our expectations of the ideal, nurturing caregiver, Amelia lays bare for us to see her paranoia, anxiety, and inability to cope with an unyielding reality - of having to take care of her clearly distressed son without the supposedly necessary support of a husband.
The absence of a father figure here is a particularly innovative way in which, in Brendan Foley’s words, Kent, “utilizes her fear-delivery system as a mechanism to better explore the tortured landscape of the mind”. Amelia’s dysfunction is clearly, “linked to the patriarchal order and the loss of male authority within the family.” She rejects the help of her kind, elderly neighbor, snapping with, “Do you have to bring [my dead husband] up all the time?” Meanwhile Samuel accuses her with, “She won’t let me have my dad!” Both of these instances affirm that her attachment to the memory of her dead husband is the catalyst of her breakdown and maternal failings. Descending her hand to strangle Samuel by the throat, she tells him that she wants him to meet his father in that “beautiful place there”. Her manipulative, murderous motives crystallize the notion that, “the totalising experience of motherhood praised by patriarchal society becomes the source of the mother’s violence.”
The accumulation of social pressures, defined by patriarchal expectations, are what drive Amelia to her downfall. When social workers visit the house, their incredulity and suspicions about the distressed state of Amelia, (and her house), are followed by the series of babadook hauntings that finally possess and bring out the monster within her. Later, when the social workers revisit the house in the penultimate scene, we are shown a renewed Amelia sat opposite them, ready to admit; “my husband died the day that Sam was born”. When Sam drops the bomb; “he got killed driving mum to the hospital to have me”, Amelia is no longer ashamed - like she once had been - of his unfiltered honesty. She observes; “Sam’s just like his dad was, always speaks his mind.” There is a beautiful sense of resolution in Amelia’s final acceptance of her son, and of her husband’s death.
In the final sequence, we see a concrete, heart-rending allegory of this acceptance. Having faced the monster, Amelia subsumes it into her being by housing it in their basement, and by going habitually to feed and nurture it. Amelia has now fulfilled the ideal, nurturing archetype of the mother, whilst simultaneously transcending the internal patriarchal constructs that upheld it - the sense of a less worthy motherhood outside of marriage - that once debilitated her.
Babak Anvari’s Under the Shadow (2018) effectively establishes the subversive constructs witnessed in The Babadook, though in a radically different context. Set in post-revolutionary Tehran of the 1980s, in the midst of the Iraq-Iran war, married mother Shideh (Narges Rashidi) has ambitions to resume studying medicine - which are denied by the university due to her past involvements with leftist student groups. Her husband Iraj (Bobby Naderi), a military doctor posted in an area of heavy conflict, pleads for her to stay with his parents in a safer area of the country, considering the missile strikes that have driven her neighbors out of her own apartment building. However, Shideh fervently insists on her ability to take care of her daughter, Dorsa (Avin Manshadi), alone.
Shideh states; “I don’t want to hear about this lady anymore, whether she’s real or not”, referring to the Quranic figure of the Jinn that Dorsa has started seeing. Dorsa then responds; “I’ll run off with her then”, after which Shideh slaps her across the face. It is important that the Jinn takes the form of a patterned chador, representing a side of Shideh herself. As critic Mark Kermode points out; “There’s more than a touch of [The Babadook] in the way Anvari cleverly conflates Iraj’s complaints about Shideh’s maternal shortcomings with the spooky occurrences that now threaten to tear mother and daughter apart.”
In the agonizing collapse of her career aspirations, Shideh treats her textbook on medical physiology as a prized possession, throughout the film. After escaping the apartment building and therefore the Jinn lady’s possession, the final scene reveals the book in the ruins of their now-empty flat, suggesting that the denouncement of this personal value is what has salvaged the mother-daughter relationship. Shideh sits behind the car windscreen, weary-eyed and defeated, however, while she drives away in the penultimate scene - a departure from the idealized trope depicted at the end of The Babadook. Her expression betrays a sense of self-loss in her realization of the mother-daughter relationship; whereas in earlier scenes she was reprimanded by authorities for being caught outside without her chador, (“a woman should be scared of exposing herself more than anything else, so be ashamed… our men are becoming martyrs to protect these values”), she now dons it as she drives across surveilled roads towards her parents in law.
What results, then, is the sense that Shideh’s self-renouncement is what resolves both her own, and her daughter’s distress. Rather than subsuming the darker elements of her psyche represented by the spectral chador apparition, she abandons them for survival. With the loss of her career, and now her independence nullified by the need to stay with her husband’s parents, Under the Shadow imbues its ending with a reminder of the patriarchal constructs that can’t be dissolved - even by the most determined of protagonists.
Kent’s influence on the genre of maternal horror is not to be understated. Having created a compelling framework to explore the conflicts inherent to maternal sacrifice, Kent’s fear-delivery system encapsulates both the desirable and undesirable experiences of modern motherhood to proffer an intimate glimpse into them, bound as the portrayals of these experiences had been so far to preceding cinematic tropes. Inspiring Under the Shadows in this way, Kent’s methods of maternal horror have set a precedent of strong mothers that defy those dated tropes albeit operating within them; more recent films like A Quiet Place and Birdbox for example, with their all-triumphant mothers, have certainly evinced the changing face of the maternal heroine in horror in Kent’s footsteps.