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Amelia
Amelia
Played By: Essie Davis
A widowed mother struggling to keep her and her troubled son's life together.
- Abusive Parents: Amelia temporarily becomes one under the influence of the Babadook.
- Broken Bird: Is one right from the start due to her not having coped with her husband's death. Sam's behavior and everyone shunning her because of it make things no better. And then the Babadook shows up.
- Character Development: Starts the film completely in denial about her own grief over her husband's death, and freaks out at any mention of him, especially in connection to Samuel. It is through this denial that the Babadook gets stronger and ultimately possesses Amelia, representing how her grief and depression have totally consumed her. At the end of the film though, Amelia has come to accept her husband's death and has dealt with her grief, best shown by how she unashamedly and openly talks about Oskar's death with the childcare workers at the end of the film.
- Evil Sounds Deep: Her voice shifts to a lower pitch under the Babadook's influence.
- The Friend Nobody Likes: She is this to her friends, mostly because of Sam.
- Haunted Heroine: By the memories of her husband and by the Babadook.
- Jerk with a Heart of Gold: It's clear that she is a nice woman, however the stress of her day to day life and inability to accept the death of her husband make her unpleasant to be around. She seems to have gotten better by the end.
- Mama Bear: Try as it may, the Babadook is unable to subvert this, and Amelia defeats it with pure maternal rage.Amelia: If you touch my son again, I'LL FUCKING KILL YOU!
- Moving Beyond Bereavement: Amelia suffers from extreme depression over a number of issues in her life, most prominently the death of her husband (who passed seven years ago) and the difficulties of raising her son alone. However, once she and her son confront the Babadook and imprison it in the basement, Amelia appears to overcome her depression and finally come to terms with her husband's death.
- Resentful Guardian: The intensive care Samuel requires takes its toll on her.
- Sanity Slippage: At one point she envisions a hole in the wall with cockroaches crawling out of it. When Social Services come by to see her cleaning away, it's not there anymore.
- Would Hurt a Child: By extension of the Babadook.
Samuel
Samuel
Played By: Noah Wiseman
Amelia's troubled 7-year-old son.
- Bratty Half-Pint: He is loud, obnoxious, and violent.
- Brutal Honesty: Always speaks his heart, which leads to some embarrassment for Amelia.
- Child Prodigy: To his credit, he's incredibly smart and inventive for a first-grader. Unfortunately, he solely uses his talents to further his strange and often destructive whims, which has strained his relationship with Amelia.
- No Social Skills: Is prone to brutal honesty and aggressive outbursts, though according to Amelia the latter behavior is more recent.
- Properly Paranoid: He is constantly talking about fighting off monsters, and may even be preparing to fight his mother. Both become real threats.
- Troubling Unchildlike Behavior: He's aggressive, shows up with a crossbow at school and talks about the death of monsters and people in frank, graphic detail. Fortunately, Amelia schedules professional psychological help for him in the course of the film, and he seems to calm down significantly after the Babadook appears, possibly because all his anti-monster preparation has been validated. His intense violence against monsters is the only thing that keeps Amelia down long enough to banish the Babadook from her body.
- Unlikely Hero: Troubled 7-year-old Sam ends up saving his mother from instigating a murder-suicide.
The Babadook
The Babadook
Played By: Tim Purcell
A sinister figure threatening the protagonists' lives.
- Anthropomorphic Personification: Of Amelia's grief and possibly depression. Denying it makes it stronger, and it torments Amelia constantly, making her life miserable and her relationships dysfunctional even though it never explicitly manifests outside her home. It even appears as the source of Amelia's grief, her husband Oskar, and only by acknowledging that it exists can she begin to cast it out, and even then she can never be rid of it, only placated and locked up deep within her/her house.
- Big Bad: It is a Humanoid Abomination who terrorizes Amelia and her son that may or may not actually exist.
- Body Snatcher: First it enters your house, then it enters you. And then it makes you do things you never want to do.
- Child Eater: This appears to be what the Babadook wants, given his "You can bring me the boy" line.
- Clipped-Wing Angel: Its form at the end of the movie: simply an invisible force, without all the massive shadow stuff.
- Creepily Long Arms: It usually keeps them rigidly at his sides like Orlok or extended outward like wings.
- Creepy Long Fingers: Its long, fanned-out fingers are frequently emphasized.
- Dark Is Evil: Is very heavily associated with shadows.
- Dirty Coward: Despite clearly enjoying torturing its victims, and able to succeed when its victims are terrified, it is unable to handle resistance. It is unable to counter Samuel's weapons, and Amelia's anger frightens it to the point of powerlessness.
- Eldritch Abomination: Its true form. It's just a giant, shadowy mass, with a pair of taloned arms extending from the shadows.
- Evil Plan: The Babadook seeks to corrupt Amelia into murdering her son and killing herself.
- Fluffy the Terrible: You probably wouldn't expect something as terrifying as the monster in this movie to be called something as silly as "Mr. Babadook".
- Humanoid Abomination: It looks human until it "takes off [its] funny disguise."
- Invincible Boogeymen: It may eventually be repelled with screaming, but it is also the Anthropomorphic Personification of grief, and the associated depression and mental illnesses, and thus it's utterly inescapable as a result — the best Amelia can do is accept that the damned thing is going to haunt her basement from now on and if she ever slips up, all of the horror she had to endure is going to start all over again.
- Kick the Dog: The Babadook spends its days stalking women and slowly driving them to abuse and then murder their own children.
- Living Shadow: This is probably the closest approximation to what the Babadook's true form is, as the illustrations in the pop-up book and its shadowed form at the end show little more than a looming dark mass.
- Logical Weakness: "You can't get rid of the Babadook" works both ways: if it is a real entity, it's now trapped in Amelia's basement, unable to find another victim.
- Looks Like Cesare: A glimpse at the Babadook's face reveals it to have white skin with sunken eyes and black lips.
- Looks Like Orlok: Its body is obviously based on Orlok, best seen in the way it keeps its Creepy Long Fingers fanned out at the sides of its long coat.
- Meaningful Name:
- Its name is at least an allusion. "Baba" sounds a lot like "Papa", who was taken from them long ago, and the Babadook takes his form to taunt Amelia, and then on top of that, tries to take Sam while in the form of papa.
- In Hebrew, ba-badook means "he is coming for sure."
- Not to mention it's also an anagram of "a bad book".
- Mental Monster: It symbolizes Amelia's grief over her husband's death. For most of the film it's a pervasive, Nothing Is Scarier presence that terrifies her young son while she tries ineffectively to drive it away; later, it fully possesses her and tries to make her destroy her family. It's defeated by defying and containing it, since it can be controlled but never fully destroyed.
- Named by the Adaptation: It isn't named in the original short film.
- Nothing Is Scarier: We never fully see its true form, but this could also be a subversion, as at this point, it's totally lost the power it once had.
- One-Winged Angel: Its true form.
- Sealed Evil in a Can: Its ultimate fate, trapped in the basement with Oskar's things.
- Things That Go "Bump" in the Night: Is basically a particularly terrifying type of boogeyman with a mix of both classic and unusual abilities.
- Verbal Tic Name: Is named for the rumble and knocking noise in the book, apparently. Although it does seem to like phoning Amelia and just saying its name in a creepy voice.
- Voice of the Legion: When it takes Oskar's form."Oskar": You can bring me the boy.
- Wall Crawl: Crawls on the ceiling of Amelia's bedroom.
- A Wolf in Sheep's Clothing: Tries to gain Samuel's trust by snatching his mother's body. Samuel looks through the sham disguise and stabs her with a knife.
- Would Hurt a Child: It wants Amelia to hand over Samuel. An evil intent is implied.
