Director Jennifer Kent on Her Sundance Horror Hit 'The Babadook'

Photo: Courtesy of Company

Heading home from any big film festival, you can't help gnawing your manicure, knowing that you must have missed something amazing. At Sundance this year, for me it was The Babadook, pegged as a horror film and repeatedly shown at midnight. When I caught up with it later, I just had to talk to its Australian writer-director, Jennifer Kent, if only on the phone from Sydney.
I love this line from your director's statement: "Despite its horror, The Babadook is a love story, a mother moving through the center of hell towards her child."

I wanted this film to be scary and have an emotional quality, but also be quite beautiful.

Is the mother in this story based on an actual woman?

I had a friend who was finding it very hard to love her son. She just couldn't connect with him, didn't like him. I felt he was killing her in a lot of ways emotionally, and it was really having an effect on him. He was seeing what he was calling a monster man everywhere, and the mother found that the only way to deal with it was to see it as real. And then I had this thought—Well, what if it was real?

How are audiences responding to this theme?

I thought maybe I'd be criticized for showing a mother in this light, but I've encountered the opposite reaction. Women have been relieved and grateful to see a complex female character up there who's struggling with motherhood and many other things.

Essie Davis is amazing as the mother, and Daniel Henshall, the boy, is extraordinary. So much is conveyed in his eyes, and you don't expect that from a child.

Davis is a highly skilled, extremely talented actress, but she's not yet someone you'd call a star. And Henshall is a very deep soul. On the set, his mother once asked him why he was so focused here but not at school, and he said, "Well, this is important."

Your movie is singular, in that most horror movies offer up a kind of cookie-cutter menu of brutality and terror.

Horror is a very underrated genre, and it's seen by a lot of people as trash, but when you look at films like Werner Herzog's Nosferatu remake, or the original one, there's a lot of beauty. I think horror gets a bad rap. Its origin lies in fairy tale—these dark, dark stories that were myths, really, and that's why they still survive. They have the power to reach us all.

This article appears in the November 2014 issue of ELLE magazine.