This chapter situates The Babadook as a text that can be read to explore the haunting of the Australian landscape and its legal subjects. It explores the idea that the settler subject’s repression of the violent origins of its subjectivity can be interrogated and give way to a negotiated space by engaging with the ‘uncanny’ and ‘the spectre’, or ‘the ghost’. The Babadook, a genre-subverting tale of a mother and son whose vintage terrace house is haunted by a storybook monster come to life, was critically acclaimed following its release in 2014, and praised by critics for its complex psychological story, emotional impact and meticulous production design. It locates and contextualizes Australian socio-political relationships against its colonial history and present and reveals ongoing social relations between settler subjects and First Nations people as entrenched in violence, trauma and repression - with the existence of one being premised on disavowal of the other.
This chapter considers The Babadook in the context of Australia’s settler past and present. Despite the film’s apparent placelessness, its story unfolds in suburban Australia, where the protagonist is haunted in her home by the spectral ‘Mister Babadook’. Theyre now at 1928 Greenville Ave., in the space most recently occupied by Eastside. In its visual framing, the horror film The Babadook, directed by Australian director Jennifer Kent, appears placeless due to its non-particularized Northern aesthetic, which avoids tapping into all things conceivably Australian - favouring the generic urban interior rather than the Australian wide-open landscape. The Babadook may have you checking under the bed for monsters.
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