My Time with the Babadook
By Andy Butter
The first time I woke up with a cockroach on my chest, I was more frightened than grossed out—the disgust settles in after the shock fades. It was August 2020. I had just moved into a new studio apartment on Ralston Street, near downtown Reno. I had been renting a room in the house of an elderly immunocompromised woman. After a few arduous months, I decided to move out and live alone, to allay the fear of getting her fatally sick. The relief I found in my new apartment was swiftly waning. When you see one cockroach, it’s already too late. You know you’re never going to be the sole tenant.
I called an exterminator. Sure, he helped my condition materially. But emotionally and spiritually? Less so. Three hours after spraying, he called to let me know the chemicals’ toxicity had faded and I could return to my apartment. He talked in biblical hyperbole: “...poured out of the light switches,” “....dropping from the ceiling….,” “.....littering the kitchen…,” “Good luck.” Something happens when you are insect-paranoid in your own living space; your peripheral vision gets attuned to the smallest movement. Even though ostensibly there were fewer cockroaches in my apartment, there I was, snapping my head at the slightest ruffle of a curtain or any play of light on the wall.
It’s an experience I share with the protagonist, Amelia, from the 2014 Australian horror film The Babadook.
In the film, Amelia grieves the sudden death of her husband and takes care of her increasingly distressed son Samuel, as an entity known as the “Babadook” haunts her house. In a series of escalating confrontations, a mysterious figure of a large man in a jacket and top hat terrorizes Amelia and Samuel. A lot of horror films progress like that. At first we see a little of the monster then, closer to the end, we see a lot. Along the way in The Babadook smaller, more subtle things in Amelia’s world go awry in a way that adds to the oppressiveness of her experience. At one point she hallucinates (or does she?) that cockroaches pour out of a hole in the wall. She too has been festooned with chitinous neighbors.
I watched The Babadook a couple months after the cockroach incident and wasn’t pleased that my quarantined life had begun to share aspects with a horror movie. Amelia and I shared other experiences. Like tooth pain.
After weeks of rubbing at a sore spot in her jaw, and in a fit of horror film-appropriate glory, Amelia rips out a rotten molar.
At some point in the pandemic, I’m not entirely sure when, I cracked one of my molars. Specifically, molar number 19. Bottom. Left. Almost to the back.
“Most likely from stress. From clenching and grinding at night. You’re not the only one,” the dentist told me, when it was safe to visit, after weeks and weeks of rubbing my jaw. He’s not wrong, the rates of fractured teeth, hair loss, and other chronic health problems exacerbated by stress increased dramatically during the pandemic.
After such a subtle and drawn-out pain, I wanted to do what Amelia did and rip out my own tooth. I wanted to hold a little bit of myself ringed in blood in my palm, and scream. At anything. At nothing. There was no one thing to scream at, no single entity to blame. The days just kept happening in a wash of chaos and boredom. I was, as you were too, haunted by a huge formlessness.
Amelia and I share one last experience: a moment with an unexpected creepy face.
While Amelia does dishes late one night, she peers through her kitchen window into her elderly neighbor’s living room. Amelia checks in on her often, kind of taking care of the aging woman. They have a good relationship. As she looks up, while scrubbing a bowl, she sees her neighbor sitting in her recliner watching television like always. She also sees the hunched figure of the Babadook standing in the corner, a smirk visible on his heavily shadowed face.
How would you describe the feeling of knowing you are being looked at? What is the perceptive sense that feels the pressure of a strange eye?
It was 11 pm. I was laying on top of my bed in my boxers, scrolling, again, endlessly, through TikTok. It was early September, 2020 and my tiny air conditioner could barely keep me cool, even after the sun had set. I had strung a sheet in between my room and the small corridor that led to the front door of the apartment, to keep the space smaller, thus cooler.
How would you describe the feeling of knowing that you are being looked at? Is it the ears that pick up the shift of a changed soundscape? Perhaps the nose catches a whiff of pheromone?
There is a moment when your subconscious brain relates to your conscious brain someone’s looking. That signal hit me. I looked up from my phone and saw a woman’s wide-eyed twisted face peeking around the curtain. The blood fell from my hands and feet and face into my body’s center; I started sweating. We stared at each other, long enough for me to see, really see, the grey-green color of her left eye, then the strangely darker shade in her right. She let the curtain drop and walked away. I swear I locked the door. I always lock the door.
I’ve looked up from my phone or behind a closet door countless times because of a tiny paranoia. It’s a specific kind of terror to have your paranoid inkling confirmed and, in the flesh, looking, looking, looking at you. That’s why so many horror films take place in domestic spaces, in homes. Once your innermost sanctum has been violated, all bets are off.
Horror deals in metaphors of grief, trauma, and loss, in ways other genres can’t. Which essentially is what the figure of the Babadook is: a manifestation of this woman’s grief, haunting her, chasing her as she tries to prepare for a life, suddenly, without her husband. At first she denies the monster’s existence, then she rages against it, and then accepts it.
What can be so transformative about horror, how its overwhelming shock can be soothing during times of loss, is that it acknowledges closure is not always possible. Some things can’t be resolved. Some things can’t be left in the past. Some things are just too, well…horrible. Don’t take it from me—just ask Sally riding away in the back of a pickup truck watching Leatherface wildly wave his chainsaw at the end of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Sally makes her way home and what, heads to the farmers market!?
Amelia never banishes the Babadook. She doesn’t burn the house down and move far away. She doesn’t get the satisfaction of stabbing the monster through the heart and watching his essence dissipate. She lives in the same house, the one she happily shared with her late husband. At the end of the film, Amelia is triumphant, in a way. The Babadook lives in the basement, tied-up, relegated to a knowable corner. Amelia feeds the Babadook a bowl of earthworms and dirt then heads outside to the backyard with her son on a beautiful sunny day.
I guess that is the final way The Babadook resonated so strongly with me during quarantine and now as I prepare myself for this era of seeing friends, of travel, of a life bigger than my small Ralston Street studio apartment. The pandemic years will always be somewhere inside of me, and there is no getting rid of them. I see false bugs everywhere. I have a fake tooth because I cracked my real one. I always, always, always, make sure to lock my door. Like Amelia, I still live with my Babadook.
So if you’re like me and on a beach at Lake Tahoe on a beautiful late summer day, and a friend cracks a joke, and the bluish-gold mirth fills your chest but you feel it ping against a monster-shaped hole in your center, I would say, don’t spend too much energy trying to banish your new malicious inhabitor. Instead, I hope you find a way to accompany the ache, the weirdness, and yes, even the horror of the pandemic years.
I guess what I’m getting at is that after a lot of time, and a little bit of sunlight, a haunting doesn’t have to be scary.
Photo/Evan Flom.
Andy Butter is a lecturer at the University of Nevada, Reno, where he recently earned his MFA. His work has appeared or is forthcoming from Sierra Magazine, National Geographic Explorers Journal, Passages North, Southeast Review, and elsewhere.
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