The Babadook: narrative — Eduqas GCSE Film Studies C670
Eduqas GCSE Film Studies · C670
The Babadook: narrative
The Babadook
What you need to know
Plot and story: the car crash as backstory and repeated memory, and how the screenplay links past and present.
Structure: cause and effect, the book as the inciting incident, escalating disruptions, the climax in the house and the unusual resolution.
Techniques: withholding whether the monster is real, releasing Amelia's grief, and ambiguity.
Characters and their functions (Amelia, Samuel, the Babadook), Samuel's change, themes of grief and motherhood, and how the narrative builds fear and sympathy.
A worked answer to a practice Section A question on narrative, part by part: the short parts that ask you to identify and explain, and the 15-mark final part on a key sequence.
How to answer each part: the marks, and what the short identify and explain parts need as well as the extended answer, since naming a technique instead of a specific example from the film loses marks there. Practice questions to try, each headed 'Practice question' with its marks.
Quote only short lines of dialogue you're sure of, a few words at a time, and base every point on what happens in the finished film.
