Echoes of the Unseen: Trauma’s Relentless Pursuit in Smile, It Follows, and The Babadook
When trauma takes form, it does not scream—it stalks, it smiles, it pops up from the shadows of the mind.
Modern horror cinema has evolved beyond mere jump scares and gore, embracing the intangible horrors of the psyche. Films like Parker Finn’s Smile (2022), David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows (2014), and Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook (2014) stand as pillars of trauma horror, where supernatural entities serve as metaphors for grief, shame, and inherited pain. These movies transform personal anguish into communal dread, forcing audiences to confront the inescapable nature of mental suffering.
- Smile‘s grinning curse exposes the fragility of professional detachment, turning a therapist’s empathy into her undoing.
- It Follows reimagines pursuit as a metaphor for sexual guilt and mortality, with its entity walking inexorably towards its victims.
- The Babadook crystallises maternal grief into a storybook monster, blurring the line between imagination and breakdown.
The Genesis of Trauma’s Monstrous Forms
In the landscape of contemporary horror, trauma horror emerges as a subgenre that weaponises psychological wounds against its characters. Unlike traditional slashers reliant on physical violence, these films personify inner turmoil through relentless supernatural forces. Smile, It Follows, and The Babadook share this core premise: an affliction that defies rational escape, mirroring real-world experiences of post-traumatic stress disorder, bereavement, and repressed guilt. Parker Finn drew from his short film Smile (2020), expanding it into a feature that probes the horrors of vicarious trauma, where witnessing suicide infects the observer like a virus. This concept echoes the contagious dread in David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows, where a sexual encounter passes on a deadly stalker visible only to the afflicted. Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook, meanwhile, roots its terror in widowhood and parenting, with the titular creature arising from a children’s book that manifests the family’s suppressed sorrow.
The power of these narratives lies in their specificity to emotional states. In Smile, protagonist Rose Cotter, played by Sosie Bacon, encounters a patient who smiles maniacally before self-harm, igniting a chain of suicides that culminates in Rose questioning her sanity. The film’s opening suicide scene, lit in stark clinical whites, sets a tone of institutional failure, where mental health professionals become the next victims. Similarly, It Follows begins with a frantic beach escape, establishing the entity’s plodding gait as a symbol of inevitable doom. Mitchell’s Detroit suburbs provide a mundane backdrop that heightens the surreal pursuit, forcing Jay (Maika Monroe) and her friends into desperate countermeasures like boat chases and pool electrocutions. Kent’s film unfolds in a claustrophobic Adelaide home, where single mother Amelia (Essie Davis) battles her son Samuel’s outbursts amid anniversaries of loss, the Babadook’s pop-up illustrations invading their reality.
These stories draw from folklore and urban legends, adapting them to modern neuroses. The grinning curse in Smile evokes Japanese onryō spirits or the Welsh tale of the Smiling Man, but Finn grounds it in therapy culture, critiquing how society outsources emotional labour. Mitchell cites 1970s slow-burn horrors like Halloween as influences, yet infuses It Follows with adolescent sexuality, transforming STD fears into literal embodiment. Kent pulls from Expressionist cinema and fairy tales, positioning the Babadook as a Mr. Baba Yaga figure that demands acknowledgment rather than exorcism.
Grins That Conceal Agony: Dissecting Smile
Smile masterfully captures the dissonance between outward composure and inner collapse. Rose’s journey from sceptic to paranoiac unfolds through hallucinatory vignettes: colleagues grinning unnaturally at parties, her ex-fiancé’s corpse reanimating with a rictus smile. Finn employs wide-angle lenses to distort domestic spaces, amplifying paranoia as family gatherings turn sinister. The film’s sound design, with its dissonant piano stabs and echoing laughter, underscores the curse’s auditory infiltration, making silence as menacing as the visuals.
A pivotal basement confrontation reveals the curse’s mechanics: victims don grotesque masks, performing ritual suicides to transfer the entity. This sequence, shot in dim crimson hues, symbolises trauma’s performative aspect—how sufferers mask pain to protect others, only to perpetuate the cycle. Bacon’s performance anchors the film, her subtle tics evolving into full hysteria, earning comparisons to Toni Collette in Hereditary. Critics have noted how Smile reflects pandemic-era isolation, where unseen threats loomed large.
Production hurdles shaped its raw edge; shot on a modest budget during COVID restrictions, Finn improvised with practical effects like prosthetic smiles crafted from dental moulds. The result critiques capitalism’s commodification of care, as Rose’s hospital job becomes her tomb.
The Walking Dread: It Follows and the Pace of Shame
David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows innovates pursuit horror by throttling its monster to a walking speed, instilling dread through anticipation. The entity shapeshifts into familiar faces—grandparents, lovers—personalising the threat and evoking guilt over past intimacies. Jay’s pool finale, with gunfire and flames illuminating the water, exemplifies mise-en-scène mastery, water symbolising emotional submersion.
The film’s synth score by Rich Vreeland (Disasterpeace) pulses like a heartbeat, its retro analogue waves evoking 1980s VHS horrors while commenting on timeless fears of consequence. Mitchell avoids explicit backstory, letting ambiguity fuel interpretation: is it death, STDs, or original sin? Group dynamics shine as friends wield lamps and shotguns, highlighting communal support against individual curses.
Filmed in Detroit’s derelict lots, the movie captures economic decay paralleling personal ruin. Its influence permeates indie horror, inspiring copycats like The Endless, yet remains unmatched in sustained tension.
Pop-Up Nightmares: The Babadook’s Grief Incarnate
Jennifer Kent’s debut The Babadook elevates grief to gothic horror. The creature’s top-hat silhouette emerges from shadows, its rasping voice demanding “If it’s in a word, or in a look, you can’t get rid of the Babadook.” Amelia’s arc from denial to rage peaks in a wrench-wielding frenzy, subverting final girl tropes by embracing monstrosity.
Kent’s black-and-white flashbacks and storybook animations blend mediums, with the pop-up book as a tactile curse object. Davis’s tour-de-force performance conveys exhaustion turning feral, her screams raw and unfiltered. Sound layers creaks and whispers, building to cacophonous climaxes that mimic panic attacks.
Australia’s funding system enabled its intimate scale, though international acclaim followed festival buzz. The film challenges repression narratives, advocating coexistence with pain—Amelia feeds the Babadook in the finale, a poignant metaphor for managed mental illness.
Convergences of the Curse: Shared Traumas
A unifying thread across these films is inescapability; no bullets or banishments suffice. In Smile, killing the host rebounds exponentially; It Follows requires passing it on, ethically fraught; The Babadook demands integration. This reflects trauma therapy’s stages: confrontation, transferral, acceptance.
Gender dynamics prevail: female protagonists bear society’s emotional burdens, their bodies battlegrounds for curses transmitted via sight, sex, or reading. Class undertones emerge—Rose’s middle-class stability crumbles, Jay’s suburbia hides voids, Amelia’s poverty exacerbates isolation.
Cinematography unites them: shallow depths isolate victims, slow pans track pursuers. These choices immerse viewers in fractured perceptions, akin to Repulsion or The Shining.
Crafting Nightmares: Special Effects and Auditory Assaults
Practical effects ground the supernatural in tactile reality. Smile‘s smiling corpses use silicone appliances for hyper-realistic rictuses, decaying progressively to evoke rot within. It Follows relies on stunt performers in period attire for the entity’s forms, no CGI, preserving uncanny valley unease. The Babadook employs stop-motion pop-ups and a lanky puppeteered suit, its elongated limbs defying physics.
Sound design elevates terror: Smile‘s laughter dopplers like tinnitus; It Follows‘ synths drone relentlessly; The Babadook‘s scrapes mimic claws on bone. These elements forge sensory immersion, proving low-fi ingenuity trumps digital excess.
Influence spans remakes—Smile 2 (2024) expands the lore—while memes and scholarly papers dissect their metaphors, cementing cultural resonance.
Director in the Spotlight
Jennifer Kent, born in 1969 in Brisbane, Australia, emerged as a formidable voice in horror after years honing her craft. She studied at the National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA), where she developed a passion for psychological depth influenced by Ingmar Bergman and David Lynch. Kent’s early career included acting in TV soaps like Home and Away and assisting on films, but her directorial breakthrough came with short films such as Door (2005), a tense domestic thriller that presaged The Babadook.
Her feature debut, The Babadook (2014), garnered international acclaim, winning 18 Australian Academy Awards and launching her into the spotlight. Guillermo del Toro championed it, noting its emotional authenticity. Kent followed with The Nightingale (2018), a brutal colonial revenge tale starring Aisling Franciosi, which premiered at Venice and earned her Best Director at the Australian Film Critics Association. Exploring Ireland’s famine history in The Monarch’s Mistress? No, her projects include scripting for del Toro’s Pine Barrens and developing Clara (2023), a sci-fi drama. Upcoming is a Babadook sequel series for Netflix, expanding the monster’s world.
Kent’s style emphasises atmospheric dread, long takes, and social commentary, often centering marginalised voices. Influences include German Expressionism and Australian gothic like Picnic at Hanging Rock. Her filmography includes: The Babadook (2014, psychological horror on grief); The Nightingale (2018, historical revenge drama amid 1820s Tasmania); contributions to Babylon (2022, uncredited consultant); and TV episodes for Spookers (2018 documentary). She advocates for women in film, mentoring through Screen Australia programs.
Actor in the Spotlight
Essie Davis, born Esther Louise Davis in 1970 in Hobart, Tasmania, embodies fierce independence in her roles. Raised in a creative family—her mother a dancer—she trained at NIDA, graduating in 1992. Early theatre work with the Sydney Theatre Company led to TV roles in Water Rats, but film breakthrough came with The Matrix Reloaded and Revolutions (2003) as Lady Emily, followed by Gillian Armstrong’s Charlotte Gray (2001).
Davis’s horror turn in The Babadook (2014) redefined her, earning AACTA Best Actress and international stardom for portraying Amelia’s descent. She reprised maternal ferocity in The Justice of Bunny King (2021). Versatility shines in Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries (2012-2015) as the glamorous Phryne Fisher, netting Logie Awards. Blockbusters include Legend of the Guardians (2010, voicing owl warrior); Assassin’s Creed (2016); and His Dark Materials (2019-, as Mrs. Coulter).
Her filmography spans: The Silence of the Lambs? No—Absolute Power (1997); Holly Cole? Key works: Girl with a Pearl Earring (2003, drama); The Invisible (2007, thriller); Oranges and Sunshine (2010, historical); The Babadook (2014); The Dressmaker (2015, comedy-drama with Kate Winslet); Lion (2016, Oscar-nominated support); The Nightingale (2018); True History of the Kelly Gang (2019); The Justice of Bunny King (2021); Nitram (2021, Cannes winner). Awards include Helpmann for theatre and Emmy nods. Davis champions indie cinema and animal rights, residing between Australia and the UK.
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