Gian Karlo

Spoilers for the horror film The Babadook and the musical Next to Normal.

---

The Babadook and Next to Normal

I recently watched the pro-shot recording of the musical Next to Normal (2025) that premiered on PBS. I went into it blind, having not seen the musical before and having no prior knowledge of its themes or what the story was about. I was in awe of the work of art I experienced. Everything from the songs and music to the performances and production flowed beautifully and powerfully. The musical deals with themes of mental illness, loss, and grief, and how these can affect a family if not addressed.

After watching the musical, I couldn’t help but be reminded of the film The Babadook and think about all the similarities between the two. Both stories are very different from each other, and are also told in different ways (one being a musical and the other a monster/psychological horror movie), but they both deal with grief and mental illness in a family that is being destroyed by the loss of a family member and both deal with the ramifications of not addressing this loss and how it can build to be an oppressive presence that gets in the way of their lives, sometimes violently.

The Babadook has been one of my favorite movies since the moment it came out in 2014, and my love for it has only increased through the years. It has helped me deal with my own experiences of loss and has given me an avenue to experience and make some sense of it all. I don’t have much knowledge about the musical Next to Normal, but seeing the similarities, I can see how it can also help someone navigate the aftershocks of loss.

My Personal Journey

I made a friend after high school that quickly became my best friend. We had both just graduated and were far away from our families for the first time and during this time we dealt with similar experiences: isolation, feelings of imprisonment, feelings of failure, loss of identity (religious/political deconstruction), which, at least to me, all lead to a a lot of confusion and a deep depression. During this time, the only one that knew that all these things were happening to me, was my new friend. With him also going through similar circumstances, we bonded deeply through our mutual support of each other. I genuinely don’t know how well I would’ve come out of all of it without him.

Two years after my friend and I had met, I moved across the country back with my family, and a month after that, my friend died in a vehicular accident coming home from work. The pain today feels just as strong as it did then, and the hole and loneliness it left are still there. I lost my best friend, and the only person I could talk to about those specific experiences we went through. Now those memories are only mine and the feeling that no one else will truly be able to see or know is haunting.

Fast forward four years. My dad and I went on a trip for a month, just the two of us. We had a month of bonding, of getting to know each other better, of working together and more. I remember visiting restaurants, going to the movies, and learning about this new place we were visiting. I didn’t grow up with my father, only visiting him every other weekend growing up or during the summers once he moved away, and this trip made me feel more connected to him.

One night, as we were nearing the end of this trip, we were heading back to the place we were staying and a drunk driver ran the light and collided with out car. It was a very traumatic event for me. We were now trapped inside a card in the dark and my dad had lost consciousness. He didn’t gain back consciousness for almost a week, but I was conscious the entire time and I remember everything about it. The smells, the blood, the pain. I though I was going to lose my father, but I didn’t, and I’m happy to say he is alive and well, but the trip we went on together slipped from his mind. He experienced some memory loss from the accident and that month prior to the accident was lost and has never come back.

This to me feels like another form of loss. I didn’t lose my father, but I lost the connection we built and the memories we made. I feel alone all over again, with no one to share the trauma of the car accident, pulling him out of the car, the fear in the moment that he might die, and the month that came before it. Now those memories are only mine, again.

These personal losses have linked themselves to these works of art, and now I find myself searching for new ways to understand my own grief.

Making Sense of Loss

Both in The Babadook and Next to Normal, things aren’t just magically fixed at the end. They don’t have happy endings, and that makes sense. Both deal with heavy themes and families in extreme circumstances and it’s hard to find anything happy about losing someone close to you, someone you love. What they both offer is a bittersweet ending and the promise that there’s still hope on the other side.

The ending of The Babadook has always been intriguing to me because the family is not rid of the monster. In fact, they have the monster living in the basement of their home, because the monster was never a monster. Throughout the movie, The Babadook was and has always been an embodiment of that loss in the family. In Next to Normal, it is Gabe. The depression, the anger, and the grief, that is all the monster and Gabe truly are, so the families cannot get rid of them the same way I can’t get rid of my own memories. They live with us.

And this is where I find the light at the end of the tunnel. It may seem terrifying, the thought that the loss will never go away, but in order to fix a problem, we must know what the problem is in the first place. I have gone to counseling, talked with friends and family, and will probably continue to do so because that is how I battle and cope with it.

In The Babadook, the family feeds the monster in their basement, not to make it stronger, but to appease it and find some peace within themselves too. In Next to Normal, the family decides to make hard decisions: the parents split and the father decides to go to therapy. That is how they battle and find peace. In my own life, I have found peace and light in knowing that these monsters will stay with me, and that all I need to do is figure out how to properly feed them and find peace for myself.

Processing Grief Through Creativity

It’s difficult dealing with heavy emotions head-on, to stare at the monster in the face. Sometimes it’s easier to approach grief indirectly, and art offers a powerful avenue for that journey. Art creates a safe distance, a buffer that allows us to examine our pain through metaphor, narrative, and emotional resonance without being consumed by it. Both The Babadook and Next to Normal provide this buffer, allowing audiences to witness the twisted and terrifying forms of grief while maintaining enough separation to process it safely.

What makes these works so effective is how they refuse to offer easy solutions. Instead, they acknowledge that grief becomes part of us, something we learn to live with rather than overcome. In the end of The Babadook, with the mother feeding the monster in the basement, I felt a profound sense of recognition. That’s exactly what writing, talking, and creating about my grief has been. Bringing food to the grief, acknowledging it, giving it space to exist without letting it take over my life.

In writing this post, I’m engaging in the same ritual yet again, feeding my own monsters through creativity. Putting these experiences into words allows me to examine them from different angles and to make sense of them. By connecting my personal story to these artistic works, I’m not just processing my grief, I’m transforming it into something that might help others name their own monsters.

Perhaps that’s the most powerful aspect of pressing grief through creativity: it transforms isolation into connection. My memories of my friend and the lost time with my father may be mine alone, but in sharing them through writing, they become part of a larger conversation about loss. Like these works of art that touched me, maybe my words can offer someone else that moment of recognition, and the comforting realization that we’re not alone in learning to live with our monsters.