Jennifer Kent: Women's Interest In Horror Films

Jennifer Kent is a writer/director born in Brisbane, Australia. She has said she found an interest in writing from a very young age and wrote stories as a child. She decided to start her career with acting due to having doubts as to if women could direct films properly. As she lost interest in acting, she decided to move on to directing after being inspired from watching Dancer in the Dark (2000). She has always been interested in horror and has said previously said that women can and should direct more horror movies as she says in one of her interviews (O’Sullivan, 2014), “It will shift, as the world shifts,” Kent says, noting that there’s no lack of female horror fans. “Women do love watching scary films. It’s been proven, and they’ve done

The camera turns around to show the face of a man on the driver’s seat. A little kid’s voice is shouting, “Mom!” in the background in the entirety of the shot. The shot ends with showing Amelia waking up from a nightmare on her bed by the screams of her son’s own nightmares. The setting is 6 years post death of Amelia’s husband and the birth of her son, Sam, as is mentioned by Cooper (2015). An almost juxtaposed symbolism of life and death. The beginning and the end of one. Perhaps this is the reason why Amelia can’t seem to unconditionally love Sam as we see in a shot during the beginning of the movie where Sam tries to hug her and she pushes him away saying, “Don’t do that!”, in a sharp and loud tone. Sam is the sole, living and walking remembrance of her beloved husband’s death and Amelia is reminded of it every day by her own child. Kent conveys Amelia’s psychological state very well through the setting of the whole movie. It is always damp, never too bright even when they are in Amelia’s sister’s garden. This even adds to creating a suspenseful mood. The color schemes we see are saturated where every color is tinted which creates a subtle demeanor reminiscent of an ominous, overcast day. What makes the mood somber is the outlook of the whole movie. A dark, cloudy almost hazy setting is portrayed by the

The introduction of The Babadook is where the horror escalates. The son makes his mother read a book called “The Babadook” and this is the point where Master Babadook is conjured up. Even at this point, we are lead to believe that the annoying, uncontrollable Sam who can’t keep out of trouble is the focal point of where the horror might generate but as Cooper (2015) points out, “Kent pulls a shrewd reversal, midway through the movie, which both redirects and magnifies our dread. The boy is not the problem; his mother is.”, where we learn that Amelia is the one who is losing her sanity.

Kent’s physical depiction of the Babadook ghost is also interesting to analyze. A clichéd but a brilliant portrayal nonetheless. The Babadook wears a hat and a black suit, almost reminding us of clowns with the distinct difference being that the ghost wears everything in black. Many people for reasons unknown associate fear with clowns and when you add the little horror tidbits like gory outstretched hands and a face that is always hidden in the shadows in the physical form resembling a clown, it