“If it’s in a word or it’s in a look, you can’t get rid of the Babadook…” On balance, it may not have been the best idea in the world to watch that movie by myself, in the dark, in bed. For those who may have missed it, The Babadook is a low-budget Australian horror movie about a widow, her disturbed six-year-old son and a mysterious, top-hatted monster from a children’s book which invades their house and her collapsing mind. The tension in this film builds until, about halfway through, you wonder why you’re finding it difficult to breathe, and you realise that you’ve crammed your fist into your mouth up to the third knuckle.
Well, I say halfway through. Actually, I was about 20 minutes in when I decided that on reflection, perhaps I’d instead spend the evening watching Wreck It Ralph, a children’s movie about a character from a computer game who wants to win a medal. Watch it—with the door locked and all the lights on—I duly did.
I am in my early forties. What the hell is wrong with me? The Babadook, with its apparatus of creaking doors, black figures, mysterious noises and sinister children’s rhymes is on the face of it no less silly than Wreck It Ralph, and yet—when actually submitting to its spell—I found myself rigid with fright.
What’s more, the following evening I went back and watched The Babadook through. Why? Evidently, I like to be scared. Millions of us do. Stephen King once said that he wrote for the sort of people—adults—who know with absolute certainty that if they stick their foot out of the duvet and place it on the floor beside their bed, a clammy dead hand will not shoot out to grasp their bare ankle, but who don’t stick their foot out of the bed nevertheless, just to be on the safe side.
That seems to me a very good description of the pleasure of the supernatural horror: of being scared not like you’re scared when a mugger pulls a knife on you; rather, scared with the sort of half-pleasurable frisson you get when you’re wading into a cold sea and a wave comes and lifts the water up to your armpits, causing you to yelp.
But it’s still hard to pinpoint exactly what the appeal is. In childhood, horror fiction—I grew up with James Herbert and Bram Stoker, HP Lovecraft and, of course, Stephen King—has the whiff about it of the forbidden, and, come to that, a strong likelihood of containing sex scenes. Horror films likewise: the fact that the video carried an 18 certificate added to its appeal. Wes Craven’s death was a big thing for people like me; I had nightmares about Freddy Krueger before I even saw A Nightmare on Elm Street. But the appeal extends beyond the hope of titillation and the lure of the transgressive: with all the filth in the world a wireless connection away, and well past the age when slipping into an 18 is a dare, millions of us are still drawn to scary movies.
King, in his excellent but little-regarded sort-of memoir Danse Macabre, offers, roughly, an Aristotelian account of the appeal: catharsis. He thinks that you put your real anxieties on the shelf while you engage with the burlesqued, fictional anxieties of horror. There may be something in that, but there’s also something about the essential childishness of horror material that commends it to us, isn’t there?
Here are fears that, in reminding us of the arbitrary and lurid terrors of our childhoods, in some way return us to them. The terrors are based on obscure but consistent rules, as sent up by Wes Craven in Scream—where high-schoolers who have sex are first for the chop, and the black guy never has much of a life-expectancy—and there, surely, is the magical thinking of childhood. Like childhood’s night terrors vanishing in the sunny morning: they are unreal, and you are exhilarated because you braved them.
Well, up to a point. I’m in the house by myself, now, and I can’t get rid of the Babadook. Knock, knock, knock.
