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Babadook (2014) is a psychological supernatural horror film, written and directed by Jennifer Kent. The film follows the family of Amelia (Essie Davis) and her son Samuel (Noah Wiseman), who receives an unusual children's book “Mr. Babadook” with creepy drawings and a menacing story. Eventually, strange and horrible sequence of events, connected with the monster from the book, start to happen. While on the surface the film is a typical possession horror film, it manages to raise issues of depression, guilt, mental health and the relationships between a single mother and her son.

In the film, Amelia is struggling from ongoing depression, caused by the fact that her husband had died in a car accident, while taking her to give birth to her son. Even seven years after the tragedy, the guilt is still strong, as her son remains a living reminder of these tragic events. Samuel himself, is a strange child, who keeps inventing handmade weapons and dangerous contraptions, his behavior is suspicious and sometimes even dangerous to other children, as he is even thrown out of school, and makes his cousin Ruby hurt. Moreover, he often screams for no reason and in overall his behavior in the first half of the film hints that, perhaps, there is something wrong with him. However, at the middle point of the movie, mother – Amelia, starts to act more and more strange, seeing hallucinations of cockroaches and strange images in the TV and finally she gets possessed by the demonic essence of Babadook. Since the possession scene, she becomes menacing, screaming and swearing at her son and violent towards him. Finally, the demonic entity is in total control over Amelia, killing their dog and threatening to kill Samuel, who uses his devices and contraptions to capture her and perform some sort of an exorcism, which forces the demon from his mother. Finally, Amelia herself confronts the entity, and traps it in the basement and the family seems to turn normal.

There is no established existing horror mythology behind The Babadook demon in the film, neither religious nor from other popular lore. It is even difficult to call the entity a demon, because, while it behaves like one: uses fear of the characters against them, frightens and possesses them and inhabits a possessed object (the book), the entity turns out to be a product of Amelia’s mind, a metaphorical embodiment of her grief, guilt and depression. The monster itself, a dark figure in a coat and a hat with pale face, seems to be a combination of Amelias’ husband's costume, which is stored in the basement, and images from silent horror movies she is watching on TV. The researcher Amanda Howell suggests that even the book itself, with its hand-made horror aesthetics, could have been created by Amelia herself, who supposedly was trying to become a children's’ writer (Howell 131). The monster's black and white look also heavily resembles the decoration of the house, which is also painted i black, grey and white (the color palette which is constant throughout the film). All these aesthetic decisions hint that the monster itself is an embodiment of the family’s isolation, depression and repressed trauma (Balanzategui 107).

Like the more intelligent horror films, Babadook becomes rather about its characters and the social fears and anxieties they go through, than about the demons and monsters, and while the basic elements of the supernatural horror lore (the monster, the cursed object, the possession and the exorcism) are still present, the film is about a mother and a son going through a dark period of their lives and, managing to fight their issues. Interestingly, the monster is not totally defeated in the end of the film, it is just captured in the basement and Amelia (characteristically dressed in a more optimistic pink dress) is feeding it with worms, collected in the garden. This suggests that her depression and mental issues are not totally fixed, but suppressed once again, and can return in a more violent form, because they are rooted in her subconscious hate of her child, as a living reminder of the traumatic incident (DiGioia 40). Thus, while the film is filled with horror imagery, jump scares, surreal dream sequences and other traditional horror film instruments, it is effective because of how it is rooted in human psychology.