This is the intuition of every child.

The idea that the hyper-reality playing this one (as we play theater) is fine. But the idea that this thing has imprinted any of itself with any fidelity onto film, which would require an impossible coordination of whole human lives so that they would come together and do what they did, is ludicrous. With one exception. Which you can read about here.

But this is the feeling I get with certain “really, really old” films—meaning the silent ones. Especially Nosferatu, which Dodger and I realized was not something made by people.

Really, really old films are terrifying, especially the ones that tried to be “funny and whimsical,” like those by Méliès. “Sci-fi” costumes that look like shapes for a 1970s horror-themed breakfast cereal. Prancing and jumping in cone-hats. Smoke explosions and blink-teleport effects. Heavy clown-like makeup. Faces with pointed features. Grotesqueries, in other words, that aim to be kindergarten-didactic. What is ancient and rejected but which can be found in archives. The jumpy bodies and lumpy, overly dramatic faces. Time and movement were different back then. It’s not the film speed that was screwy, but being itself.

Really, really old films are Lovecraftian talismans that carry the malignancy of their time in them. Watching them is dangerous. The temporal jumpiness, the alien movement, those facial gestures expressing god-knows what emotions—our minds cannot digest them. And seeing them threatens to undo the goodness of cultural progress that informs our psyches.

Look at these photos:

And these two videos! Jennifer Kent used these Georges Méliès films in her movie, which is the scariest movie after The Exorcist. (Though it feels weird saying that. The film changed the course of my life. After 40 years of silent reverence, I finally explained this to Billy Friedman on May 12, 2018 at 8:21:03 PM CST:

Lo and behold—he felt the same way. He actually said that The Babadook was the scariest film period and across all categories. He was super adamant. Yes he did!

Yes it’s true. It is … that black liquid she vomits. That black ink-dye-stuff is the stuff of film, and the stuff of this film, making the medium the substance for real. The film is that—what Billy Graham said of The Exorcist is actually TRUE in the case of The Babadook. Graham, hamming up his best redneck marketer interface self, said that the physical celluloid of that movie was materially instilled with evil force. That is, it said that the premise of the movie was, in fact, true—evil can BE. It can be literally emmanu-El, Geist-with-us.

Well, that childish asshattery is, actually, in fact, true of The Babadook.

Here is why. Spoiler alert: This is the climax of the film.