Not a horror film?

It doesn't stop people from wondering if it was real or not.

I see it as all really happening. I don't think Rosemary's Baby is ambiguous when it comes to that either. The Innocents fits the bill too.

When I said that there are a lot of movies like The Babadook I meant a movie which follows the perspective of one character as we watch his/her declining mental state.

Nothing is etched in stone.

I would not call it a 'sci-fi horror', nor 'horror' genre.

So, Amelia is making the story up as she goes along. She is creating the visual nightmares for him to experience every night.

I think that it is Amelia's psychotic POV, which she passes along to Samuel to dispel her anger.

I think that is a legitimate interpretation, as far as it goes. It's just that I think it doesn't go very far because it presumes too much authority in psychological rationales, as if they actually speak to the heart of the story and the experience it delivers a viewer.

If we accept that a movie is primarily an emotional and sometimes a spiritual experience, a conceptualization like "psychotic POV, which she passes along... to dispel her anger" is correct in one sense, but reductive. It frames the story in a category, abstracted from experience. It is fundamentally distancing from gut experience, and is therefore comforting.

A diagnosis of some particular malady may be a plausible categorization, but rather than adding meaning to the complexity of viewer experience, it actually limits it, cuts it off. Hitchcock satirized and undercut this effect in the coda to Psycho, by dropping in a shrink's 10 minute lecture pigeonholing Norman. Everything he says makes sense, but... so what?

What I'm trying to say is that the full experience, and therefore meaning, of the story is not limited to the psychological, but is much more than that. If we reject out of hand the supernatural, then we are only allowing for a cerebral response and denying primal experience of the uncanny, according to the usual false assumption that the primal is necessarily crude and ignorant. That it is "not true."

To be fair, it is equally reductive and distancing if one also settles for the tag "horror." To talk of genre alone is as much an abstraction as applying a psych-label, although it does at least have the value of alluding to the nature of the viewer's experience, whereas psych-rationales do not. A renowned film scholar once wrote an influential essay complaining about genre fixation among colleagues, making the distinction that talk of genre addresses the prose of a work of art, but not its poetry.

That said, I think it's unreasonable to deny that the film is solidly in the horror genre, since it contains an overwhelming number of elements that are typical to that sensibility and form of expression. Just as I think it's unreasonable to deny that the story does not also imply a psychotic breakdown. To my mind, both "explain" the story, yet both are distancing and reductive, neither one offering much insight.

I think a more profitable approach would accomodate both categorizations, avoiding the binary conflict, and be something more than either of them, a kind of synthesis.


"You must not judge what I know by what I find words for." - Marilynne Robinson

I think what many of you are forgetting is the dog's peculiar behavior. It senses something is down in the basement. It senses that Amelia is not herself, even when she is stroking the dog affectionately, and jumps down from her lap and growls. This is not a reaction to dementia, it is a reaction to the supernatural. The babadook is real.

Okay, cool, I can accept the idea that the supernatural doesn't have to be associated with the horror genre. As I say, another level of reality beyond ordinary perception, provoking dread, is a key factor, but of course it's arguably even more frightening when our perception no longer sees the ordinary as, well, ordinary. So we get Norman Bates presented as ordinary as can be, and yet revealed to be so alien. Freud's "uncanny." I suppose my idea of the supernatural is really about changes in perspective so radical, so out of our experience (at least consciously acknowledged), that we may as well be confronting the magical.

As for "The Fly," surely you'd agree it's an example of mixing genres, in this case sci-fi & horror. It's that perception thing again: we are first encouraged to identify with the hero, but then ordinary boundaries between him and monster/insect dissolve, leaving us vicariously trapped in this new perspective, this morphing identity. We revolt, but have nowhere else to "put" ourselves. The slipperiness of what we assume is the solid ordinary, one's solid identity, is really horrifying. I guess it's the closest one might come to the experience of madness. There's something compelling about visiting; dreadful, yet pleasurable.

The only thing I'd quibble with are those sources you mentioned. Consider the declaration in Wikipedia, where the first thing we read is this:

"This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources."