10The Babadook (2014)
You know a monster’s scary when it manages to make a nonsensical phrase terrifying—The Bye Bye Man might have failed, but no one’s arguing against The Babadook. The movie’s heavily influenced by early 20th-century film styles (which have only become more unsettling in the intervening century), and the central creature’s relationship to children’s literature and old movies makes it feel like a thing outside of time. It feels almost primordial, as if this was the first thing cavemen feared when they were able to imagine a fear worse than tigers and wooly mammoths.
Director Jennifer Kent shoots around the Babadook for the first half of the movie, showing its presence through a horrifying children’s book and suspicious coat racks, but it’s the final scenes where the creature really becomes terrifying. It crawls on the walls like a black cockroach, letting out gargled screams as it tries to take a child.
When you’re worried that there’s something under your bed or in your closet, it’s hard not think of the kind of pale-faced, thin, shadowy creature that The Babadook embodies.
