Title Fright: The Babadook v Under the Shadow

The Babadook and Under the Shadow are uncannily similar films. 

The Babadook (top) and Under the Shadow - strangely similar

Both are about single mothers – Amelie and Shideh - haunted by a vengeful spirit.  But which is better?

I very occasionally do vlogs and blogs comparing two similar horror films. 

So let’s find out.

Uncanny similarities

Motherhood

Both Amelia in The Babadook and Shideh in Under the Shadow, have given up everything that they used to be at the moment they became mothers. Both are struggling to adapt.

Claustrophobia

Both films take place within the home – a strange grey and white house in the Babadook and a 1980s Tehran apartment in Under the Shadow.

Judgement

Amelia is judged by her sister, her son Samuel’s school, and social services. Basically that she’s getting things wrong as a mother because her child is so awful.

Shideh is judged by the Islamic regime – for having been politically active in her youth, and for going out of the house in her pyjamas.

Benign older women

Both Amelia and Shideh gain succour from an older female neighbour. Mrs Roach is a consistent kindly presence in Amelia’s life and Mrs Fakur babysits Shideh’s daughter Dorsa.

Parent-child conflict

Both Amelia and Shideh get increasingly angry with their children as the film goes on, culminating in epic grapples on the floor.

Black goo

The monsters in both films manifests, amongst other things, through black goo.

Differences

Community

Amelia (Essie Davies) - floating around with only the thinnest of ties to other people

In The Babadook Amelia is a typical figure from advanced capitalist society – she’s floating around with only the thinnest ties to other people.

 Just one person, Mrs Roach, offers a real connection and she’s quite as disempowered as Amelia as she’s elderly and suffering from Parkinson’s disease.

Whereas in Under the Shadow, the community is really strong. 

It has its oddballs and irritants – a strange orphan who moves into the apartment block, like a premonition of the djinn who rides in on magic winds. A gossipy landlady. And a man who complains constantly about the garage door not being closed. 

But there is a much greater sense of support – Mrs Fakur looks after Dorsa, and Shideh, as a former medical student, is asked to treat a man suffering a heart attack. 

Shideh isolates herself because she refuses to flee the bombing along with the other residents. But the presence of this community is quite distinct from Amelia’s non-community.

I call this round a draw. Community is an axis that reveals interesting differences in the two films, but clearly one is not better than the other, and both films portray these worlds equally well. 

Parent-child relationship

Dorsa is a lovely little girl and the fear we have in relation to her is that she will be hurt or killed. What complicates Shideh’s relationship with Dorsa is the state repression ruining Shideh’s career, and the bombs destroying their home. 

Samuel evokes a different fear – that he’s one of those ‘difficult children’ with whom nothing can be done. 

But there’s so much packed into The Babadook. It certainly peers into the abyss of Samuel being irredeemable. But by the end we realise his personality is much more dynamic – a co-created outcome of his relationship with his mother, and their shared trauma. 

The dark heart of The Babadook is that Amelia doesn’t love Samuel – all she can say when he says ‘I love you mum’ is ‘me too’. When you think about the film in this light, Samuel’s behaviour is much more understandable.

Some critics see Samuel as an envoy of patriarchal oppression. But I don’t buy this. Motherly love isn’t just a submission to the patriarchy – that’s part of it… but reducing it to only that is facile. 

When you’re faced with your own child, an actual small human being, their need for love is not something you can shrug off with identity politics. 

Still, it’s not easy. 

The Babadook gets  all of this across.

I suspect that for people who have experienced war Shideh and Dorsa may be more compelling – the way they are haunted by the violence around them is unforgettable. And I’ll talk more about this distinction in the next round. 

But if we are looking purely at the parent-child relationship, I think The Babadook has to win because of its sheer complexity. There are so many twists and turns to Samuel and Amelia’s relationship, all of them gripping, illuminating and essential. 

The Babadook portrays a parent-child dyad struggling to be born and it is unbelievably moving.

Subjective vs systemic violence

Yes, it’s time for the Z word! No, not zombies, Zizek!

In his book Violence, philosopher Slavoj Zizek drew a distinction between subjective and systemic violence. 

Subjective violence singles particular people out for violence because of who or what they are, while treating others well. It chooses you specifically.

Systemic violence occurs in a violent system. Victims are simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, and it could have been anyone.

I thought of this when I compared The Babadook and Under the Shadow. 

In war, your problems are not of your own making – there’s an external enemy. Shideh’s torment is because Iraq is bombing her and Iranian Mullahs are repressing her. She’s in the wrong place at the wrong time.

She does some very odd things - refusing to leave Tehran during a period of intensive bombing, and dancing in silence to an imaginary Jane Fonda tape. But under the circumstances this is totally relatable.

Amelia’s problems all stem from her. The death of her husband may have been bad luck, but how she’s dealt with it is not. Samuel’s dysfunction is her subjective failure, it’s happened because of who and what she is, a bad mom and possibly a bad person. Like Samuel, perhaps she’s irredeemable.

To me this is much more chilling, but that reflects the fact that I experience life more like Amelia than Shideh, because I live in a safe Western country. If I fuck my life up, I know it’s my fault.

However, I know without asking that anyone who lives in a war zone would consider it the ultimate luxury to be able to say, ‘I fucked my own life up’.

Another way of looking at this is from a psychoanalytic perspective. Therapists often say that what messes up the lives of their patients is that they can’t see the truth. This could certainly be applied to Amelia, as she faces up to the fact that she’s still broken by her husband’s death, and that it’s destroying the future for her and Samuel.

But for Shideh, the truth is abundantly clear, and that still doesn’t mean freedom. 

Watching Under the Shadow for the second time, I was struck by how many scenes there are of female oppression at the hands of the Islamic republic. Shideh is basically a prisoner in her own country. She can do nothing to give her daughter the life she deserves, and she knows it. 

On earlier viewings it had been the war that impressed me most as the metaphorical shadow over Shideh and Dorsa. It took an even deeper immersion to confront the fact that the shadow is also the systemic bullying of women.

Notably, Under the Shadow ends with Shideh and Dorsa fleeing their home which remains occupied by the untamed djinn. There’s no resolution for them.

Amelia and Samuel, on the other hand, achieve a precarious but profound co-existence with the Babadook.

I call this round a draw. The Babadook confronts us with the internal, subjective agonies of mothering. But Under the Shadow opens our minds to the terrible hopelessness of mothering within a violent system.

Conclusion

The Babadook wins two of the three categories and Under the Shadow wins one. So it’s a win on points for The Babadook.

But that’s just my opinion and I know I’ve arrived at it because I recognize myself more in Amelia than in Shideh. 

Under the Shadow remains incredibly powerful and one of my all-time favourite horror films.

I’d really love to hear what anyone else thinks, so if you’ve read this far please do comment below.