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7 June 2017

The Babadook is now an LGBT icon and nobody knows why

By Ross Semple

The Babadook is the world’s newest LGBT+ icon, but not everyone seems to be clued up on the specifics of it all.

For those who may not know, The Babadook is a 2014 horror film about a mother raising her son in the aftermath of her husband’s death. After reading a pop-up story about Mister Babadook, a top hat clad monster who torments people after they find out about his existence, the Babadook comes after the pair in a variety of creepy ways.

The Babadook is a film about grief, motherhood, and loneliness – with no queer representation on the surface. Or is there?

What if The Babadook is really gay and just torments people to stir up drama? That’s what the internet seems to think, thanks in part to a queer reading of the film.

The ‘queering’ of films occurs when academics or audiences take film characters with no explicit sexuality, and they ‘read’ them as LGBT+, taking evidence from the text. Alexander Doty famously envisioned The Wizard of Oz as a lesbian fantasy. In his book Flaming Classics: Queering the Film Canon, Doty envisions Dorothy as a young lesbian, with the Wicked Witch and Glinda representing the “wicked butch and good femme” respectively.

This is exactly the kind of reading audiences have given The Babadook. The titular monster has no obvious sexuality, so there’s nothing that stops him from being a queer stunt queen who lives in the basement of an old house.

One Tumblr user notes that The Bababook’s creation of “a pop-up book of himself for the drama of it all” is evidence of his queerness.

He has even been imagined as a Drag Race queen:

Now queer people across the internet have expressed their admiration of The Babadook for living his best life:

What do you think? Should The Babadook sit alongside Judy and Barbra in the annals of queer history, with his top hat cocked to the side and claws manicured to perfection?

Watch the trailer for The Babadook below:

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