October 'Nick's Pix:' THE BABADOOK & Book Signing
Well, it's that time of the month again, and this particular month is very special to me.
The second Wednesday of every month means another 'Nick's Pix' screening at the beautiful Lake Theater in downtown Oak Park, where Classic Cinemas basically lets me take over the giant Theater 2, get up onstage, and show whatever movie I want.
I've been doing these screenings for more than two years now, and they have become one of my favorite things I get to do. I love introducing the movies, watching them with a big audience, talking about them afterward, giving away some prizes, meeting everybody who comes out, and signing books in the lobby.
But October is different.
October is my month.
Halloween is my favorite holiday, horror is my favorite movie genre, and spooky season is the time of year when the rest of the world finally catches up with those of us who spend the other eleven months thinking about monsters, ghosts, serial killers, zombies, vampires, demons, werewolves, and all the other horrible things that make life worth living.
So on Wednesday, October 14th at 7:00 p.m., I'm bringing one of the scariest movies of the past 30 years to the Lake Theater: Jennifer Kent's extraordinary 2014 Australian horror film The Babadook. And we're showing it in a beautiful 4K restoration on the big screen. If you've never seen The Babadook, prepare yourself, because this movie is scary as hell.
Jennifer Kent wrote and directed the film, her feature directorial debut, and it stars the remarkable Essie Davis as Amelia, a widowed mother raising her troubled six-year-old son Samuel, played by Noah Wiseman.
Amelia's husband was killed in a car accident while driving her to the hospital to give birth to Samuel, so every birthday her son celebrates is also an anniversary of the worst thing that has ever happened to her.
That's a hell of a psychological place to begin a horror movie.
Amelia is exhausted, grieving, isolated, and barely holding everything together. Samuel is a difficult child who has become obsessed with monsters and builds homemade weapons to protect himself and his mother from them. Then one night, a mysterious children's pop-up book called Mister Babadook appears in their house.
And this is not Goodnight Moon.
The book tells them about a strange, shadowy creature in a top hat called the Babadook. The farther Amelia reads, the more disturbing the book becomes, and Samuel is immediately convinced that this thing is real. Amelia initially believes this is simply another manifestation of her son's increasingly difficult behavior.
Then things start happening.
The book comes back after she destroys it. Its images become more violent. Amelia begins seeing things. Samuel becomes increasingly terrified. The house itself seems to change. And gradually the question stops being whether the Babadook exists and becomes something much more frightening: What exactly is the Babadook?
That is where Jennifer Kent does something really special.
The Babadook is absolutely a monster movie. There is a creature. There are shadows. There are noises in the house. There are images in this film that are genuinely terrifying. But the monster is also something much deeper and much more painful.
The Babadook is grief.
It's loss.
It's rage.
It's depression.
It's everything Amelia has spent years trying not to confront.
Essie Davis gives an absolutely phenomenal performance because Amelia can't simply be a terrified horror-movie mother. She has to move through grief, exhaustion, rage, terror, guilt, resentment, tenderness, and eventually something approaching madness, sometimes within the same scene.
Davis makes every part of that believable, and as Amelia begins to unravel, the movie becomes increasingly frightening because we're not simply afraid of what the Babadook might do to this family. We're afraid of what Amelia might do.
Kent creates an incredibly claustrophobic world inside Amelia and Samuel's house. The colors are drained and cold. The rooms feel increasingly narrow. Shadows seem to be everywhere. The production design has this strange storybook quality that makes the house itself feel like something out of a nightmare.
And then there's the Babadook.
One of the things I especially love about the creature is that Kent didn't turn it into some gigantic, slick CGI monster. She wanted a handmade, deliberately low-fi quality. She drew inspiration from early cinema, silent horror, old B-movies, Georges Méliès, and the visual language of films like Nosferatu. Even the creature's appearance was partly inspired by the Man in the Beaver Hat from the lost Lon Chaney film London After Midnight.
The Babadook looks like something you might have seen in an illustration when you were five years old and then spent the next three weeks convinced was standing in the corner of your bedroom.
And, The Babadook has endured. When the movie first appeared in 2014, it premiered at Sundance and eventually became an international success despite initially struggling commercially in Australia. It was acclaimed for Kent's direction, Essie Davis' performance, the creature design, and especially the way it uses horror to deal with grief and loss. More than a decade later, it has become a modern horror classic.
I thought it was the best horror movie of 2014 when I originally saw it, and I haven't changed my mind.
In fact, that brings me to the other reason this particular 'Nick's Pix' screening means so much to me.
My brand-new book, 40 Years, 40 Horror Films, is now available from Eckhartz Press, and for the first time at one of my Lake Theater screenings, I will have copies with me to sell and sign before and after the movie.
And guess what movie represents 2014 in the book?
The Babadook.
So this couldn't be more perfect.
40 Years, 40 Horror Films is the follow-up to my first book, 40 Years, 40 Films, which was my autobiographical journey through forty years as a professional film critic. I became a critic in 1985, so in that book I selected my favorite movie from every year beginning with 1985, wrote about those films, included my annual Top 10 lists, and told stories about my life and career along the way.
The new book takes that same idea and dives directly into the genre that means the most to me....Horror.
For every year from 1985 through 2025, I chose my favorite horror film and wrote about why it matters. But the book also became a much larger examination of the genre itself, why horror works, why people love being scared, why horror has historically been dismissed by people who don't understand it, and why I believe it is one of the richest and most important genres in all of cinema.
My horror Top 10 lists are included as well, and more than 400 horror movies are discussed throughout the book. It's also a celebration of horror fans, the tribe I've been lucky enough to be part of throughout my life and during more than two decades of hosting and moderating panels at Flashback Weekend.
And I'm especially proud that my friend Rich Koz (the legendary Svengoolie himself) wrote the Foreword.
So showing The Babadook, one of the films featured prominently in the book, during October, at the Lake Theater, while debuting the new book at 'Nick's Pix' feels exactly right.
Join me:
THE BABADOOK
Wednesday, October 14th at 7:00 p.m.
At the Lake Theater in Oak Park
Tickets available HERE: classiccinemas.com/nick
I'll be in the lobby beforehand with copies of 40 Years, 40 Horror Films.
Come by, say hello, pick up a book, and I'll sign and personalize it for you. We'll take some pictures and talk movies.
Then I'll get up onstage and introduce The Babadook, tell you a little about the movie and why I chose it, and then we'll watch this incredibly scary film together in 4K on that giant Lake Theater screen.
And horror movies are always better with an audience. We'll sit in the dark and get the hell scared out of us together.
After the movie, I'll come back onstage and we'll have an interactive discussion about what we just watched. I'll share some behind-the-scenes stories, we'll talk about Jennifer Kent and the making of the film, we'll do some movie trivia, and I'll give away prizes including T-shirts, movie passes, and more.
Then I'll be back afterward signing books, taking pictures, and hanging out.
I love doing 'Nick's Pix' every month. I love being able to share movies I care about with an audience at a beautiful theater like the Lake, and I love that Classic Cinemas continues to let me get away with this.
Come on. This is my idea of a perfect October night.
Join me for The Babadook on Wednesday, October 14th at 7:00 p.m. at the Lake Theater in Oak Park.
Come get scared.
Come talk horror.
Come pick up a copy of 40 Years, 40 Horror Films, and I'll sign it for you.
And whatever you do...don't let it in.
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