The worst thing about this movie...
was the dumb stock monster/t-rex sound effect. The first time i heard that i was like.. SERIOUSLY?! haha
shareWhy would sound FX provoke you when the Babadook's image is just as conspicuously an amalgam of classic horror figures? Perhaps you aren't familiar with them, but many were glimpsed on the TV.
The creature wasn't original in its particulars, but in its hotchpotch of borrowed qualities. That's faithful to the idea of the disturbed mother's psyche projecting influences she'd absorbed like a sponge, and also to the truth that the mind always wants to project itself into the world. A sick mind will make the world in its image. The horror of madness in that it can take familiar entertainments and make them real.
This is the process by which killers have acted out pathological fantasies that simulated elements of movies and video games they'd obsessively watched and played. Warcraft among them. For example, the Norwegian man who murdered 77 people on July 22, 2011:
"Five years before the massacre, Breivik isolated himself in a room at his mother’s flat; he saw practically no one, refused visits, hardly ever went out, and just sat inside playing computer games, World of Warcraft mostly, hour after hour, day after day, week after week, month after month."- The Inexplicable: Inside the mind of a mass killer, by Karl Ove Knausgaard, The New Yorker, May 25, 2015.
You find the same thing with Columbine. The writer/director is a lifelong horror fan and has spoken about her intentionally using classic tropes to construct the monster. The sound designer is a highly experienced veteran. I think it extremely unlikely that they didn't know the sound was based on a familiar source, any more than they didn't know the visuals were.
When the familiarity of the sound FX and images are considered in this light, as I believe they were intended, they don't represent unoriginality. They represent an original and accurate way of expressing how a disturbed mind collects powerful influences from its environment and repurposes them in projected form. That's solid psych-horror.
"You must not judge what I know by what I find words for." - Marilynne Robinson share
sure it was done with intention if you want to interpret it that way but it was definitely jarring and takes you out of the movie the moment it pops up. lurk around (and not just imdb either) and you'd be surprised how many people felt the same way i felt. It's a huge in-the-moment turn off whether intentional or not.
in the end though, i thought the movie sucked so regardless if they used a better sound or not, i don't think it mattered much.
"Takes you" means you and some others. But many have not minded at all. I've looked around and know this is the case. Of course people who don't like it are going to be relatively more vocal about it than those who don't mind. It doesn't mean most people share the reaction.
"Sucked" is an empty, cliched response. It's okay if someone has a different response, but to give their judgement any weight it really should have more substance than nothing.
Don't misunderstand, when i said that line i meant generally speaking, not 100% of every single person out there. Ofc there's people who didn't mind. But my point was more that it is indeed a concrete issue because there's more (outside of just me) that has voiced the same complaint.
What's wrong with "sucked"? I'm not trying to type a list or write a paragraph why it was bad for me (i'm already burnt out from doing so in the YT comment sections). I surely could but i felt like making my feelings known in the "Short" version. Is that really that bad? Whether i went the long route or the short route, at the end of the day, i didn't like the movie. That's all you really need to know. Just like i can tell you really like the movie. And guess what? You don't have to write an essay out for me to explain it if i didn't. All you have to say is "the movie was great for me". See, short version. Simple right?
I get you. It's an interesting situation. Every artistic choice involves risk. You're bound to turn off people no matter what. A filmmaker can never please everyone. So the question is how much of a problem a choice is when it bothers a segment of the audience and not another. Sometimes it's possible to say that, even though people are OK with a choice, there are good reasons why it maybe wasn't as effective as another. Or vice versa.
I watched a TV documentary series recently about the brain. The neuroscientist pointed out that the brain processes sound a lot faster than vision, because the sound process is much simpler. Sound is more "primal" if you will. So with this in mind, perhaps using a familiar sound is going to register more quickly and deeply than using familiar images. It might "stand out" more. I.e., sound and image are not equal. And one of the things about the horror genre is that you could argue it relies on sound more than other genres.
Anyway, that's just a thought as to why the choice to go with a familiar sound gets criticism, whereas using familiar images gets none at all. That's always been curious to me about this case, regardless of what one thinks of the movie as a whole.
As for "sucks," I do understand just wanting to register disappointment (or pleasure). The way people and a story "interact" fascinates me, so "sucks" or "masterpiece" equally foil that nerdy curiosity.
I often wonder what made people feel the way they do after a story. What did they hope for, and what was their experience instead? I'm as interested in the person who took in a story (any kind) as the story itself.
I don't know about you, but I've found that with some people, even though our final judgments may differ, they actually say more of interest to me than someone who might share my judgement but only says "sucks" or "masterpiece" as the case may be.
But again, I do understand the desire to just register disappointment and move on.
Cheers.
"You must not judge what I know by what I find words for." - Marilynne Robinson