associated with physicality marking her as primal while the masculine is focused on the mental and societal laws that make a civilized person, ignoring anything abject. If the child is an abjection then the feminine is monstrous because she cannot let go of her child, even as the child desires to eject themselves from their mother. The mother permeates the boundary of self, where do our mothers end and where do we begin? “That which threatens to destroy life also helps to define life,” perfectly fits around the idea of the monstrous feminine, the mother is the creator of life however she also can destroy it (69:). With the Freudian idea that if a mother is too close to her son for example, she will turn him away from proper gender roles, like as Creed mentions happens in Pyscho, which leads to sex without reproduction. 

 

I did find it a bit hard to relate Creed and Kristeva’s ideas about the monstrous feminine and the abject to The Babadook. In the movie the mother is struggling to handle or enjoy being with her son, Sam, who we’re led to believe acts peculiarly because of the absence of a father. The mother, Amelia, would like to be rid of her son but can’t because of her responsibility as a mother and her need to hang on to him perhaps as a reminder of her husband, I think to an extent she does love her son and also I think in perverse way enjoys hating him so that she can be resentful of her husband’s death. Sam represents a boundary between Amelia’s life before him and her life after him, she should want to get rid of him but really doesn’t. I wonder if the death of the father is then a way to represent an anxiety that after a child the relationship between mother and father is lost which causes an anxiety of sex and death because if you no longer have sex then you are not bringing life. Amelia’s resentment and fears of having to mother a son she doesn’t love and of not having her husband with her form into the creation of the Babadook as the abject. This monster that comes from the mother is abject because it represents the boundary between mother and child because the acknowledgement of the boundary between pre- and post-motherhood. 

 

The Babadook is a materialization of the fears that Amelia has, instead of expelling the monster in the end Sam and Amelia acknowledge it exists and live with it. This is uncanny for the audience because what should be concealed to maintain a happy home is instead known by the family and deemed acceptable. This makes the home perverse, familiar and unfamiliar. I think the movie also demonstrates what Freud talked about regarding an uncanny feeling in fiction, this film starts in reality (Babadook is a children’s book that Sam is imagining as real) and surprise the audience by having the Babadook become the reality. We feel it’s uncanny when the mother begins to demonstrate strange behavior associated with the presence of the Babadook, we assume she is more grounded in reality and therefore it’s odd that she would act that way. Horror films are of course good at this, putting us in a reality we understand and then shocking us when that reality is supernatural in some way. I think this extends beyond the screen and into our own lives after we’ve watched a horror film, we begin to get an uncanny feeling being in our own homes. Our reality is distorted too, we think the regular sounds in our house are monsters lurking, or that the clothes in our room is actually a figure standing in the corner ready to kill us. It perverts our home to make the familiar everyday unfamiliar to us. 

 

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Now here are some other thoughts that sort of relate but don’t really have any direction.

 I thought it was interesting that a lot of the things that expel from our bodies (shit, urine, pus) we deal with every day but are also funny because they’re supposed to be concealed and not talked about. Things like blood or corpses are obviously going to be less funny because of the serious implications of them but can still sometimes be dealt healthily with some extent of humor. Is laughing a way to suppress anxiety or to bring taboo subjects into the light in order to work through them? 

Another thing I found weird about blood and a soulless body being abject and ‘religious abominations’ is the Christian ritual of eating/drinking Jesus’ body. Would other non-human forms be abject because they’re imitations or mockeries of a religious icon? Creed says of blood, vomit, etc., “On the one hand, these images of bodily wastes threaten a subject that is already constituted, in relation to the symbolic, as ‘whole and proper’” this makes me wonder if them being taboo is because they’re an act against God since you’re expelling his creation (73). 

 

While reading Freud define the uncanny, I was reminded of early sound recordings being uncanny and downright scary to listeners in the late 19th century. The abstraction of the voice from the human body is absolutely uncanny, the voice is something we’re familiar with but not when it comes out of a machine. The acousmatic voice being disembodied from a visual representation remains uncanny in the horror film, in relation to Creed’s reading I wonder if an audience has different reactions to hearing a masculine voice versus a feminine one? In Psycho we hear the disembodied voice of what we believe to be the mother, her voice is a representation of the abject because it’s showing the boundary or lack thereof between her and her son. In this case the voice of the feminine is monesterized as well. 

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Lastly, I was thinking about the boundary between life and death and the good that comes from this. I thought of the fear of insects and how besides from having too many limbs a lot of them eat decaying material and so when they permeate the boundary between the outside and our homes, they bring a sense of decay with them. Same with mushrooms they rely on constant state of decay in our world and yet, like mothers and insects, are vital for life. Things that are fermented like beer and wine are a balancing act of controlling rot to create something enjoyable, maybe not vital for life but certainly enjoyable. The fear comes from the lack of balance or lack of boundary.