As if I hadn’t already placed Australian actress Essie Davis on a pedestal awhile back after our brief Q&A preceding the premiere of Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries, along comes what could perhaps be the best horror flick to come out since William Friedkin’s The Exorcist back in 1973. If it’s in a word, or it’s in a look, you can’t get rid of the Babadook! For Essie Davis fans, The Babadook is definitely not your father’s Miss Fisher.
 

Essie Davis (a.k.a. Miss Phryne Fisher) plays single mother Amelia, a caretaker to the elderly, who lives in an Australian town in a ramshackle, spooky house with her six year-old son Samuel (Noah Wiseman). Her husband Oskar died six years earlier, in a car accident, on the day his son was born. When a children’s book turns up, introducing the monster The Babadook, Samuel is scared- the monster is said to enter a house when invited, knocking on the door three timesand calling “dook-dook-dook!”, and never leaves.
 

 
The film, which plays to everyone’s childhood fear of the boogeyman and are scarily documented in a children’s book Mister Babadook which mysteriously appears in Amelia and Samuel’s lives, has received stellar reviews ever since its January 2014 premiere at Sundance including Variety, The Hollywood Reporter and Indiewire. It has won eight international film awards out to ten nominations and has been released in both Australia and France so far. The film is set for a 24 October premiere in the UK and a November 28 premiere in the U.S.

Looks like it’s time to sleep with the light on beginning November 29.