A Constant Visual Feast

Another year, another conversation with Jennifer Kent. This is exaggerated and yet literally true: I spoke with her in 2014 ahead of November, when her now-classic feature debut, The Babadook, opened in U.S. theaters. (I have exchanged a couple of pleasant emails with her between then and now, but they don’t count.)

Speaking to her in 2024 was a different experience. She’s the same Jennifer Kent; if you are a peer of mine and chance affords you time to chat with her, take it, even if it has nothing to do with a work assignment. She’s wonderful! What has changed is horror cinema, and The Babadook‘s status within horror culture, not to mention its adoption as a pop culture touchstone slash icon over the course of the last decade; I’ve talked about this before (though the piece I published for Fangoria got disappeared at some point or another that I’m not aware of), but the Babadook itself increasingly became a reference for gags in shows ranging from You’re the Worst to The Magicians (and, Jennifer tells me, RuPaul’s Drag Race, which came as a surprise to me). 

This time around, I picked Jennifer’s brain about her relationship to The Babadook 10 years on, and its relationship to contemporary horror, and that culture of referentialism slash homage to the character, for The Daily Beast.