ABSTRACT
Like many Australian films, The Babadook initially fared far better overseas than it did at home. The Babadook’s depiction of a mother and son trapped in a nightmarish domestic setting, via a reimagining of the Female Gothic and its relationship to the horror genre and the woman’s film, both submits to and exceeds a specifically national interpretation. Arguably, The Babadook’s international success is due in no small part to the ways in which it recalibrates Gothic and horror conventions, which have become part of a common cultural vocabulary. The psychic mapping of the house in The Babadook corresponds closely to that of its Gothic predecessors. The Babadook’s international success may thus be accounted for by the ways in which it revisits and revises the representation of the mother figure in the closely related categories of Female Gothic, maternal melodrama, and the horror film, and in so doing reflects on current cinematic and sociocultural expectations of the maternal role.
