{"id":1112,"date":"2020-10-30T22:21:32","date_gmt":"2020-10-31T02:21:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/?p=1112"},"modified":"2021-03-10T22:26:50","modified_gmt":"2021-03-11T03:26:50","slug":"the-babadooks-curse-a-real-life-horror-story","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/the-babadooks-curse-a-real-life-horror-story\/","title":{"rendered":"The Babadook\u2019s Curse: A Real-Life Horror Story"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Just so you know where I stand, I loved The Babadook<\/i>. This movie that masqueraded\u00a0as a horror film\u00a0but was really a meditation\u00a0on depression and profound grief hit me hard.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

But these days, I\u2019m freaking terrified of The Babadook<\/i>.\u00a0I will never, ever voluntarily watch it again.<\/span><\/p>\n

Bill and I first saw the movie\u00a0in December 2014 at a tiny indie theater in DC. It reminded me of\u00a0the kind of things we often did\u00a0when we first started dating, before almost all the cool indie theaters disappeared from the city. That was a nice evening. I’d been reading all kinds of great, intriguing things about the movie, and I loved it. I was feeling a little \u201coff\u201d that night, tired and somewhat breathless, but I\u2019d been hospitalized with a ruptured appendix that\u00a0summer and had an appendectomy that November, so \u201ca little off\u201d was the norm for me.<\/p>\n

Two days later, I ended up in intensive care with a pulmonary embolism. A doctor woke me up in the middle of the night to show me my lung scans and inform me that if the enormous clot I’d thrown had landed in the center of my lungs instead of to the left, I\u2019d have died. Another doctor said oh-so-cheerfully, \u201cMost people who get this just drop dead at home.\u201d\u00a0Ho, ho, ho. Merry Christmas!<\/span><\/p>\n

OK, so one could perhaps\u00a0argue that The Babadook <\/i>had nothing to do with that. I learned later on that I have a genetic mutation that causes my blood to clot more easily, and I\u2019d been pretty inactive for the latter half of 2014 between the appendix and the surgery. This had all been the perfect setup for something really bad to happen. Fair enough.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

But.<\/p>\n

A few months later in early spring, The Babadook<\/i> hit pay cable, and we watched and enjoyed it again.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The next weekend, I was in the hospital\u00a0again<\/b>, this time with an issue I won\u2019t go into detail about because it\u2019s pretty unpleasant and you might be eating.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

So by now I was starting to form some pretty unpleasant associations with The Babadook<\/i>, great film though it is. I\u2019d switch channels when it came on cable.\u00a0I’ve had enough of being in the hospital,<\/em> ha ha<\/em>, I’d say.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

But.<\/p>\n

Around the time\u00a0we first saw\u00a0the film, the production company put together a Kickstarter to produce copies of the terrifying children’s book seen in the movie<\/a>. They wanted it to look just like it does in the film, with loads of popups and elaborate illustrations.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I asked\u00a0for a copy of that for Christmas, and I got one.<\/p>\n

As sometimes happens on Kickstarter, the BabaBook team underestimated how long it would take to design and produce a high-quality version of the\u00a0book. But they sent regular updates, and I\u00a0figured I’d get it eventually.<\/p>\n

Nearly two years later, I finally got my BabaBook. Hooray! And oh, it was indeed a gorgeous piece, with popups and illustrations just like the ones seen in the film. The book was\u00a0beautifully done and well worth the wait.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I received my BabaBook on Monday, November 7, 2016.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Guess what happened on Tuesday, November 8, 2016?<\/p>\n

People will be arguing\u00a0about why the hell the\u00a0pre-election polling seemed to get things so wrong until the end of recorded history. Maybe everyone misread the swing state polls or didn’t pay attention when they started narrowing. Maybe the pollsters didn’t talk to enough people. Maybe people lied about who they were really voting for. That all sounds reasonable. But I know\u00a0the truth.<\/em>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

You can’t get rid of the Babadook.<\/p>\n

So yeah. I don\u2019t mess with The Babadook<\/i> anymore. That shit is like the video from The Ring<\/i> as far as I\u2019m concerned. Even writing this is making me nervous, because I worry that thinking about it so\u00a0much is going to attract\u00a0its attention, and dear god, election day is right around the corner and here I am invoking all this\u00a0and the goddamn election’s gonna get Babadooked again if I don’t stop.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The Babadook<\/i> is the finest horror movie I will never, ever watch again. Tell the truth\u2026can you blame me?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Just so you know where I stand, I loved The Babadook. This movie that masqueraded\u00a0as a horror film\u00a0but was really…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[44,33],"tags":[47,16,10],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1112"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1112"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1112\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1290,"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1112\/revisions\/1290"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1112"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1112"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1112"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}