Where the mind unravels, true terror takes root: Repulsion and The Babadook redefine the boundaries of psychological horror.
Half a century apart, Roman Polanski’s Repulsion (1965) and Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook (2014) capture the harrowing descent into mental fragility, transforming domestic spaces into labyrinths of fear. These films eschew jump scares for a slow, inexorable build of dread, rooted in the protagonists’ fractured psyches. By pitting Carol’s sexual repression against Amelia’s inconsolable grief, they illuminate how personal traumas manifest as inescapable horrors, inviting viewers to confront the darkness within.
- Both films masterfully use confined settings to mirror their heroines’ crumbling minds, turning apartments into prisons of hallucination and hauntings.
- Repulsion explores raw sexual dread through stark black-and-white visuals, while The Babadook weaves grief into a pop-up monster, blending metaphor with menace.
- Their legacies endure, influencing a wave of introspective horror that prioritises emotional authenticity over spectacle.
Unzipping the Silence: Carol’s Claustrophobic Collapse
In Repulsion, Catherine Deneuve delivers a riveting portrayal of Carol, a Belgian manicurist living in London with her sister Helen. The film opens with close-ups of Carol’s unblinking eyes, signalling her detachment from the world. As Helen departs for a holiday with her lover, Carol is left alone in their flat, where the mundane unravels into nightmare. Walls seem to crack and expand, hands emerge from doorframes to grope her, and the sound of ticking clocks amplifies her isolation. Polanski, drawing from his own experiences of alienation as a Polish-Jewish émigré, crafts a portrait of schizophrenia intertwined with sexual aversion.
The narrative meticulously charts Carol’s breakdown: a rejected suitor’s advances trigger auditory hallucinations of frantic rabbit screams from a neglected meal rotting in the kitchen. She barricades herself, murdering two men who invade her space—a landlord and a suitor— in blunt, unflinching acts. The film’s 105 minutes pulse with escalating tension, culminating in Helen’s return to find Carol catatonic amid bloodstained chaos. This synopsis reveals not mere madness, but a visceral rejection of male intrusion, symbolised by phallic imagery like razors and corridors resembling vaginal passages.
Production faced hurdles typical of Hammer Films’ distribution deal, with censors demanding cuts for its graphic rape flashback and nudity. Yet Polanski’s insistence on authenticity prevailed, making Repulsion his first English-language triumph after Knife in the Water. Legends of Polanski’s method acting coaching—immersing Deneuve in silence—underscore the film’s immersive quality, building on psychoanalytic theories of repression akin to Freudian hysteria.
Pop-Up Phantoms: Amelia’s Grief-Stricken Haunt
The Babadook centres on Amelia (Essie Davis), a widowed nurse grappling with the loss of her husband on their son’s birthday seven years prior. Her six-year-old Samuel (Noah Wiseman) fixates on imagined monsters, wielding homemade weapons in frantic defence. A pop-up book, Mister Babadook, appears unbidden, its top-hatted figure with razor claws proclaiming, "If it’s in a word, or in a look, you can’t get rid of the Babadook." As Samuel’s behaviour worsens, Amelia’s exhaustion morphs into rage, until the entity materialises, forcing her to confront suppressed sorrow.
Kent’s script, born from her short film Monster, details Amelia’s unraveling: sleepless nights, hallucinations of the suited spectre, and a brutal kitchen confrontation where she wields a hammer. The film’s third act pivots as Amelia accepts the Babadook, banishing it to the basement— a metaphor for compartmentalised grief, fed worms in ritualistic care. Clocking 94 taut minutes, it blends supernatural tropes with maternal horror, echoing The Exorcist‘s child peril but grounding it in postpartum depression and widowhood.
Shot on a shoestring in Adelaide, the production overcame funding woes through crowdfunding and Kent’s persistence. Myths surround Wiseman’s naturalistic performance, coached without full script knowledge to preserve terror. Influenced by silent cinema and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, it positions the Babadook as grief incarnate, drawing from Julia Kristeva’s abject theory where loss disrupts identity.
Repressed Desires Versus Unlived Loss: Thematic Fault Lines
At their core, both films dissect how unprocessed trauma festers. Carol’s aversion stems from implied childhood abuse, her beauty a curse that invites violation; Amelia’s denial of her husband’s death poisons her bond with Samuel. Yet Repulsion fixates on solitude’s erosive force, with Polanski’s camera prowling empty rooms to evoke agoraphobic panic. In contrast, The Babadook externalises pain through a familial lens, where motherhood amplifies isolation—Amelia’s screams merge with Samuel’s, blurring victim and aggressor.
Sexuality threads through both, but inverted: Carol weaponises celibacy against predatory men, her murders cathartic eruptions. Amelia’s celibate widowhood curdles into violent fantasy, smashing a glass panel in futile rage. These dynamics critique gender roles—1960s repression versus 2010s emotional labour—without didacticism, letting performances carry the weight. Deneuve’s porcelain fragility contrasts Davis’s raw volatility, each embodying era-specific femininity under siege.
Class subtly underscores tensions: Carol’s working-class flat symbolises entrapment, while Amelia’s suburban home, cluttered with self-help books, mocks aspirational failure. Both invoke national psyches—Polanski’s post-war Europe versus Kent’s Aussie underbelly—revealing horror’s societal mirror.
Sonic Assaults and Visual Vertigo: Crafting Dread
Sound design elevates both to mastery. Repulsion‘s sparse score by Chico Hamilton relies on diegetic noises: dripping taps swell to thunder, footsteps echo like heartbeats. Polanski’s editing fractures time, superimposing memories in hallucinatory dissolves. Gilbert Taylor’s black-and-white cinematography, with high-contrast shadows, renders the flat a gothic maze, inspired by German Expressionism.
The Babadook employs a screeching refrain from the pop-up book, Jed Kurzel’s score mimicking warped lullabies. Simon Njoo’s handheld shots induce unease, low angles dwarfing Amelia against looming doorways. Practical effects—a silhouette puppet for the Babadook—lend tactile menace, outperforming CGI peers.
These techniques converge in pivotal scenes: Carol’s hallway rape vision parallels Amelia’s basement expulsion, both using distorted perspectives to plunge viewers into delusion. Such precision cements their status as sensory benchmarks.
Effects Without Excess: The Art of Implied Atrocity
Special effects in psychological horror prioritise suggestion over splatter, a principle both films exemplify. Repulsion shuns gore for implication—blood seeps under doors, bodies slump off-screen—relying on matte paintings for expanding walls and forced perspective for groping hands. Makeup artist Wally Schneiderman aged Deneuve’s pallor convincingly, while practical props like the skinned rabbit evoked visceral disgust without excess.
Kent’s low-budget ingenuity shines: the Babadook suit, crafted from cardboard and wire by Anthea Nakosis, distorts human form eerily. Stop-motion pop-up animations and forced-perspective shadows create its omnipresence, with Davis’s contortions selling possession. No digital trickery dilutes the handmade authenticity, echoing Repulsion‘s analogue purity.
This restraint amplifies impact, proving psychological terror thrives on the viewer’s imagination, influencing successors like Hereditary and Relic.
Gendered Gazes and Performative Madness
Performances anchor the comparison. Deneuve, at 22, inhabits Carol’s mute horror with balletic precision, her wide eyes conveying oceanic despair. Davis, 42, unleashes a tour de force, transitioning from frayed patience to feral savagery, earning festival acclaim. Supporting casts enhance: Ian Hendry’s sleazy suitor in Repulsion, Wiseman’s hyperactive Samuel providing counterpoint pathos.
Directorial gazes differ: Polanski’s male lens voyeuristically dissects Carol, yet empathises through her victimhood. Kent, a female filmmaker, grants Amelia agency in acceptance, subverting maternal stereotypes. Both challenge patriarchal norms, with Carol’s killings prefiguring slasher avengers and Amelia’s arc validating mental health struggles.
Echoes Through the Decades: Influence and Resonance
Repulsion birthed apartment horror, paving for Rosemary’s Baby and Suspiria, its influence rippling into The Tenant. The Babadook ignited "elevated horror," spawning memes and analyses tying it to depression discourse. Remakes elude both, their specificity defying commodification.
Cultural footprints persist: Repulsion in queer readings of repression, The Babadook as motherhood anthem. Together, they affirm psychological horror’s evolution, from 1960s surrealism to 2010s realism.
Their power lies in universality—anyone harbouring unspoken pain recognises the encroaching shadows.
Director in the Spotlight
Roman Polanski, born Rajmund Roman Thierry Polanski on 18 August 1933 in Paris to Polish-Jewish parents, endured profound early trauma. His family relocated to Kraków in 1936, where the Nazi occupation claimed his mother in Auschwitz; young Roman survived by Catholic foster care and street scavenging. Post-war, he navigated Poland’s communist regime, discovering cinema at 14 through stolen projector viewings of Hollywood classics.
Entering Łódź Film School in 1954, Polanski honed craft with shorts like Two Men and a Wardrobe (1958), blending absurdism and menace. His feature debut Knife in the Water (1962) garnered international notice for tense triangular dynamics. Repulsion (1965) marked his British breakthrough, followed by Cul-de-sac (1966), a Palme d’Or contender.
Hollywood beckoned with Rosemary’s Baby (1968), a satanic pregnancy chiller blending paranoia and occultism. Macbeth (1971) reflected personal grief after wife Sharon Tate’s Manson murder. Chinatown (1974) earned Oscar nods for neo-noir detective yarn. Fleeing US sodomy charges in 1978, he resettled in France, directing Tess (1979), a César-winning Hardy adaptation.
Later works include Pirates (1986), swashbuckling farce; Frantic (1988), Hitchcockian thriller with Harrison Ford; Bitter Moon (1992), erotic mind games; Death and the Maiden (1994), political drama; The Ninth Gate (1999), occult mystery; The Pianist (2002), Holocaust survival epic netting him a Best Director Oscar; Oliver Twist (2005), Dickensian fidelity; The Ghost Writer (2010), political intrigue; Venus in Fur (2013), one-room power play; Based on a True Story (2017), meta-thriller; and An Officer and a Spy (2019), Dreyfus Affair drama. Influences span Hitchcock, Buñuel, and Welles; his oeuvre fuses suspense, psychology, and autobiography.
Actor in the Spotlight
Essie Davis, born Esther Davis on 23 December 1970 in Hobart, Tasmania, grew up in a creative family, her mother a novelist. Training at National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA) from 1988-1992, she debuted onstage in A Little Night Music. Early TV included Police Rescue (1994-1996) as a paramedic.
Breakthrough came with The Matrix Reloaded and Revolutions (2003) as Lady Galadriel-voiced character, but theatre shone in Sydney Theatre Company productions like Richard III. Film roles proliferated: Absolute Truth (1999); Holly Cole (2003); Girl with a Pearl Earring (2003), as Tanneke opposite Scarlett Johansson; The Invisible (2005), maternal lead.
The Babadook (2014) catapulted her, earning AACTA and Fangoria awards for Amelia’s anguish. Subsequent highlights: Assassin’s Creed (2016), historical action; The Death and Life of Otto Bloom (2016), romantic sci-fi; Lion (2016), supporting in Oscar-nominated adoption tale; Storm Boy (2019), family drama remake. TV triumphs include Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries (2012-2015), glamorous 1920s sleuth netting Logies; Game of Thrones (2019), as Brienne’s mentor; Euphoria (2022), guest arc.
Recent films: Babyteeth (2019), Sundance hit as dying mother; True History of the Kelly Gang (2019), outlaw epic; The Justice of Bunny King (2021), vengeful aunt. Stage returns feature The Staircase (2022). With Helpmann and AFI honours, Davis embodies versatile intensity, influences from Meryl Streep evident in dramatic range.
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Bibliography
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