From Atlaspix/Alamy Stock Photo.
Artists cannot predict how their work will be received by the world. Just ask Australian filmmaker Jennifer Kent, who premiered her horror movie The Babadook at 2014’s Sundance Film Festival. The allegorical film—named for the sinister, top-hatted monster who haunts a single mother and her son—earned rave critical reviews and high praise from The Exorcist director William Friedkin, who declared it “the scariest film I’d ever seen.” That alone would have been a perfectly lovely legacy for The Babadook. But the Internet had something greater in mind.
The Babadook’s snaggletoothed title character began receiving unexpected Internet recognition in February 2017, when a Tumblr user posited that he is, in fact, gay.
This reading of the misunderstood character so resonated within the L.G.B.T.Q. community, that brilliant Internet memes followed.
But when Netflix seemingly applauded this theory—by coyly promoting the movie during the first week of 2017’s Pride Month—Babadook baba-became something greater—an honest-to-god gay icon. He inspired Halloween costumes, Baba-discourse, a comic story line, a RuPaul’s Drag Race homage, and deeper analysis.
“[T]he Babadook’s new fabulousness seems to align, quite reasonably, with queer readings of better-known beasts such as Frankenstein and Freddy Krueger,” wrote The New Yorker’s Eren Orbey. “Like those other misunderstood figures, he originated in anonymity, shunned by the traditional folks whom his presence threatened. . . . Fearing the creature’s transgressive influence—his shameless oddity, his aggressive manner—[the film’s mother character] attempts to burn his manifesto, only to learn that attempting to get rid of the Babadook actually enlivens him. His book reappears on her doorstep, replete with the brash self-assertion of most coming-out anthems. ‘I’ll wager with you,’ the monster writes, in what could be a Lady Gaga lyric. ‘I’ll make you a bet. The more you deny, the stronger I get.’”
At the time, Vanity Fair’s chief Babadook correspondent Laura Bradley reached out to Kent in hopes of finding out what she thought of her title character being heralded as a gay icon. Bradley never heard back, but now, a year and a half later, and on the occasion of Kent’s latest Sundance Film Festival premiere, The Nightingale—(sadly, not a Babadook sequel)—Kent has finally commented on her character becoming an unlikely queer icon.
Asked about the Internet’s belief that the Babadook is gay, by Bloody Disgusting’s Fred Topel, Kent said, “Of course, I love that story.” As for the memes and icon status, she said, “I think it’s crazy and just kept him alive. I thought, ‘Ah, you bastard.’ He doesn’t want to die, so he’s finding ways to become relevant.”
Kent has previously said that she wrote The Babadook because she “wanted to talk about the need to face the darkness in ourselves and in our lives.” Speaking to The Guardian in 2014, she explained, “That was the core idea for me, to take a woman who’d really run away from a terrible situation for many years and have to face it. The horror is really just a byproduct.”
Back in 2017, the actor who played the Babadook, Tim Purcell, described the cumbersome costume and elaborate makeup he had to wear while filming. Asked about the surprise popularity of the Babadook, who was such a pain to portray, the actor responded, “I didn’t feel like a gay icon at the time, I can tell you that much.”
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This story was originally published by Vanity Fair
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