The Babadook

• Made on roughly a $2 million budget, shot in Adelaide, South Australia (interiors on a soundstage per the terms of its state-government funding); the shoot ran long enough on in-camera effects that Jennifer Kent funded extra days and design costs through a small Kickstarter campaign.
• The film expands on Kent's own 2005 short 'Monster' — a black-and-white short about a mother and son confronting a monster in the house, which played over 50 festivals and which Kent has called 'baby Babadook.'
• The Mister Babadook pop-up book was a real practical prop: production designer/illustrator Alexander Juhasz joined the production in 2012 specifically to design and build it, and later co-created a real published version with paper engineer Simon Arizpe.
• Noah Wiseman was cast at age 6 after casting director Nikki Barrett reviewed roughly 500 audition tapes; Kent had originally planned to cast an 8-9-year-old for the mature material but went younger for Wiseman's innocence.
• In late 2016, viewers noticed Netflix had mistakenly filed the film under its 'LGBT Movies' category. The mix-up spun into a Tumblr/Twitter meme crowning the Babadook a gay icon, and Netflix leaned into it for Pride Month 2017 with a tweet reading 'Be the Babadook you want to see in the world.'
• Cinematographer Radek Ladczuk shot the film on a base Arri Alexa with Zeiss Master Prime lenses, using a near-monochrome palette of steel blue, burgundy and touches of teal to visualize Amelia's depression — Kent originally wanted to shoot in black and white outright.

The Babadook isn't a monster — it's Amelia's suppressed grief given a body. She locked her husband's death in the basement alongside his belongings, and the Babadook emerges from the same place. The final scene where she feeds it worms in the cellar is her accepting grief as something you contain, never destroy.

Samuel isn't seeing a demon; he's reading his mother correctly. His hyperactive behavior is a survival response to living with a parent on the edge of breakdown. The Babadook manifests whenever Amelia's mask slips, making the boy the only honest witness in the house.

A popular fan reading holds that Amelia made the book herself, in a dissociative state, without remembering it: she has unexplained charcoal stains on her hands early on (the same medium used to illustrate the book), her sister mentions Amelia used to write 'kids' stuff' for a living, and the book's own narration slips from third person ('him') into first person mid-story, as if her voice is bleeding through the page — suggesting she authored her own haunting.

Amelia is six years into a grief coma. Her husband died in a car wreck driving her to the hospital to deliver their son Samuel, and she's been running on fumes and resentment ever since. Then a children's book shows up on the shelf — Mister Babadook — and the kid won't stop reading it. Sleep deprivation, behavioral meltdowns, and a creeping certainty that something's moved in. The house rots. The boy screams. The book keeps coming back. Whatever the Babadook is, it's been waiting in her longer than it's been waiting on the page.