Why Amelia may be hard to identify with: She’s a very selfless character, and there’s always a big risk onscreen that this will be the s...

A modern masterpiece. The Ultimate Story Checklist: The Babadook Rulebook Casefile: Jennifer Kent vs. the Naysayers Straying from the ...

Are all monsters metaphors? Well, I’ve said before that every fictional story an author tells, even work for hire, is automatically a meta...

The Babadook also exemplifies three more rules: A story follows the progress of the problem , not the progress of the character Cut ...

There is no genre that has a more tortured relationship to its own conventions than horror. The burdensome pile up of rules and tropes ha...

Is there ever a good reason for a character to have generic dialogue? Yes, The Babadook is one movie that gets away with it. In my defi...

For the upcoming pieces on The Babadook , I’ll be relying heavily on the great interviews that Jennifer Kent has done to promote this movie,...

Updated to the sixth and final checklist! Seven years ago, Amelia’s husband died in an accident while racing her to the hospital to have...