PARK CITY — One of the better-received offerings in Sundance’ midnight movie series of genre films, Australia’s “The Babadook” is a reasonably well-done hunk of horror that seems bound to be remade in Hollywood with name actors.
Horror audiences tend to be unsophisticated and don’t much mind seeing musty plotlines recycled, so they’ll be fine with this single-mom version of “The Shining” in which a clairvoyant kid with seizure-like symptoms repeatedly warns his mother that the two of them must prepare to battle monsters like the ones in a mysterious children’s book called “The Babadook.”
Since there are effectively only two characters in the piece, and the visionary kid is one, it seems pretty clear where the scares are going to come from, with the increasingly unhinged mom (Essie Davis) serving as both Jack and Wendy from “The Shining.”
Director Jennifer Kent seemed to please most members of the audience (though she bored me) with all the horror cliches they love: repeated use of false alarms (a dark figure suddenly flying into bed with the mom when she’s trying to gratify herself with an electrical sexual aid turns out to be….the kid), sudden bursts of eerie music, dream sequences, the mom’s fruitless appeal to authority figures who think she’s crazy.
When the mom rips up the Babadook book, you know it’s going to be reassembled and reappear, and a climactic scene in which the mother protects the kid while hurricane-force winds roar through the house is a virtual theft from “Poltergeist.”
As I say: routine stuff, but horror audiences eat this kind of thing up like comfort food, and Kent dishes out the cinematic meat loaf with flair.