'You start to change when I get in. The Babadook growing right under your skin': Monstrous intermediality in Jennifer Kent's The Babadook. Issue 1 (1st April 2019)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Thomsen, Morten Feldtfos
• Is Part Of: Horror studies. Volume 10:Issue 1(2019)
• Page Start: 61
• Page End: 72
• Publication Date: 2019-04-01
• Subjects: Horror in mass media -- History and criticism -- Periodicals; Horror -- Periodicals; 700.4164
• DOI: 10.1386/host.10.1.61_1
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 2040-3275

Abstract

This article investigates intermedial strategies in Jennifer Kent's 2014 film The Babadook, arguing that such strategies are a key feature of its aesthetics of horror. Employing concepts from the field of Intermedial Studies, it traces the presence in Kent's film of bookishness, that is, different intermedial strategies that serve to mimic the formal properties of books in general and pop-up books in particular. It also demonstrates how the film's many references to early silent film, and in particular the trick films of French cinematic pioneer, Georges Méliès, function as a self-reflexive exploration of the form and function of the bookishness evident in the film. Based on this analysis, this article then coins the term of 'monstrous intermediality' to describe intermedial strategies that unsettle but do not subvert the processes of integration and immersion characteristic of narrative cinema, thereby destabilizing the distinction between screen and viewer.