For Fans of The Babadook

The Babadook's monster never needs to be explained because it already has a name: unresolved grief. Amelia cannot mourn her husband's death properly because she is consumed by keeping her son alive, and the repression of that pain is what the Babadook feeds on. Kent understood that the scariest films are the ones where the horror is already inside the protagonist before any supernatural element arrives. When the ending refuses to destroy the creature and instead confines it to the basement, fed but contained, that is not ambiguity. It is the most honest thing a horror film has said about living with loss.

Before The Babadook, literary horror by women (Shirley Jackson, Angela Carter) had rarely translated directly into the film director's chair. Kent's debut opened a door that Saint Maud, Relic, and Midsommar walked through. Each of those films centres a woman's interiority, uses genre to map states of mind that are rarely taken seriously on screen, and refuses the male-gaze framing that horror so often defaults to. The Babadook did not invent this lineage, but it proved the commercial and critical case for it.

The Babadook spent its first act doing almost nothing frightening at all. It built a specific texture: the exhaustion of single parenthood, the low hum of a child's unmet needs, the way a broken sleep cycle corrodes reality at the edges. By the time the creature arrived in force, the audience was already unsettled in a way that a cold-open jump scare could never achieve. Slow-burn horror is not patient horror. It is horror that does its real work early, so that when the climax comes, it lands on ground already thoroughly prepared.