Australian director Jennifer Kent didn’t set out to make a queer classic when she wrote and shot The Babadook, a clever, sneakily terrifying independent film about a single mother and son terrorised by a strange supernatural entity sprung from the pages of a shabby children’s picture book. Certainly no critics read it as such as the film made its way round the festival circuit in 2014, scooping acclaim and awards aplenty.
However, the internet had other ideas. Over the next few years, various wags of Tumblr began to insist that the film’s eponymous monster – a towering charcoal-sketched ghoul with a stovepipe hat, icepick fingers and an inordinate number of sharply rectangular teeth – was in fact a gay icon. Gradually, what began as a joke became a meme, and eventually an insistent theory: LGBTQ+ fans of the film, declaring themselves “babashook”, likened the onscreen family’s fear of the weird, fangy beast to the panic and hostility that often greets the presence of queerness in predominantly straight households. Sure enough, Babadook images and costumes began to appear at Pride events; in 2019, the film’s US distributor IFC Films even issued a limited Pride edition of the film on Blu-ray. “I feel it’s really quite beautiful, but I still have no idea why,” Kent said of the film’s queer appropriation. “I guess he’s an outsider of sorts. It’s funny.”
