‘The Babadook’ Has 1 of the Worst Movie Cliches of All Time
One of the most acclaimed horror movies of all time is an unassuming little Australian film called The Babadook. The film is top-notch, but it still incorporates one of the worst cliches in modern movies. Maybe it couldn’t do any better in that regard.
‘The Babadook’ showed that it was a low-budget movie in the worst way
The Babadook is from 2014 and it’s set in the modern day. At multiple points in the film, the protagonist, Amelia Vanek, watches television. She sees a lot of silent films on TV. At one point, she views the famous unmasking scene from The Phantom of the Opera starring Lon Chaney Sr. The film’s titular monster inserts himself into some of the clips to scare her.
This is part of a big movie cliche sometimes called “the public domain channel.” Low-budget movies can’t always afford the rights to clips from other films. For that reason, film characters will sometimes watch public domain (often silent) movies on television to keep costs low. It always feels inauthentic. Have you ever stumbled across a TV channel that plays nothing but silent films?
Other films have taken a slightly different direction than ‘The Babadook’
Some horror movies like Halloween II or Southbound try to make their frugal use of public domain clips less obvious. They’ll use scenes from sound films in the public domain, such as Night of the Living Dead and Carnival of Souls. In that case, only real horror fans who are obsessed enough to know a film’s copyright status can tell something is amiss.
But someone watching a silent film channel on TV feels off. Horror films feature a lot of unrealistic things, like monsters. But silent film channels are even less realistic than any creature from the Black Lagoon or outer space.
The director took inspiration from 1 public domain silent movie
Perhaps Babadook director Jennifer Kent incorporated silent film clips into her movie because she drew inspiration from Nosferatu, one of the most famous silent horror films. During a 2014 interview with Empire, a journalist told Kent that some horror movies have shallow stories. “Yeeeaaaah,” he said. “I think there are many films in every genre that don’t mean anything, but for some reason horror tends to attract a lot of those stories, and also gets a bad rap for being a rubbish genre.
“I think if people think sensitively and seriously about films in this canon, like The Shining and Let the Right One In, even going back to Vampyr and Nosferatu, there’s a real depth to those films — and the [Roman] Polanski films as well, the domestic horrors,” she added. “I guess they were my inspiration. I think the very best horror is more than just jump scares and things appearing out of cupboards and women running around half-naked.”
Kent explained what drew her to horror. “I think a lot of horror comes from a similar place to fairytales and it deals with myth,” she said. “Mythical stories run through all of us, and films like The Thing and Halloween are films that I love for their simplicity.”
The Babadook is on the level of other horror classics — even if its use of clips is a little annoying.
