'The Babadook' Director Finally Weighs in on His Status as Queer Icon

As every queer millennial knows, there’s no gay icon quite as important to our culture as the Babadook.

Monster or not, the memes more than make up for his terrorizing ways. The ‘B’ in ‘LGBT’ stands for Babadook, after all. He is one of us. We are part of him.

It’s widespread fact at this point, despite, I guess, technically not being canon in the film The Babadook, but now the director of the movie has finally commented on the 2017 phenomenon.

Bloody-Disgusting spoke to Jennifer Kent about her upcoming film The Nightingale at Sundance and asked if she’d heard how the queer community had claimed the demonic creature as our own, and how she felt about it.

“That was mad,” she said. “That was crazy.”

“Of course, I love that story. I think it’s crazy and just kept him alive. I thought ah, you bastard. He doesn’t want to die so he’s finding ways to become relevant.”

So the brief acknowledgement of the memes by the director basically makes Gay Babadook canon now, right?

Either way, it’s super cool of a creator to not shrug off the post-creation gay-ification of a character by the masses, as often seems to happen when a subset of a fandom collectively decides a character is probably queer.

Long live the Babadook! Hey, whatever happened with his engagement to Pennywise?