The Babadook, and sleep, and the home (oh my)

There's been a trend in horror movies, I honestly can't say it's a recent trend but I've only just now decided to actually look at it. In horror movies that have to do with any sort of possession more often than not the person who has been taken possession of is asleep or otherwise unconscious.
The same holds true for this week's film The Babadook.

In fact, one of the biggest issues in the film, aside from the tall pale-faced weirdo who wants to murder everyone in Amelia's life, comes with issues regarding sleep. Her son Samuel is constantly waking up, convinced there is some sort of monster in his room. He often ends up sleeping in his mother's bed and this keeps Amelia awake for most of the nights. It gets to the point she begs a doctor for some sort of sedative to calm him down enough to sleep. It is after he begins to sleep better that the Babadook is able to take possession of Amelia. Sleep and dreams have always been a big part of film so this meshing of these two ideas is again nothing new. This is why Sigmund Freud, often thought of as a joke today, is still so important to film theory. He saw the unconsciousness as the ultimate gateway to a person's true self. So this incursion of possession is one that goes to the very deepest part of a person. People in these films are attacked at the source of who they are and are often lost because of it. Which is where the real horror of possession lays.

The most likely victims? Women. This all plays directly into Barbara Creed's theory about abjection and the Monstrous-Feminine. Woman as the source of fear? check. Women being given over the top powers that threaten castration to any and all men? check. Boundaries of the self-being infringed upon? check. In the case of The Babadook, I can add an extra checkmark for Amelia being a mother and for her main target being her son.

To delve deeper into The Babadook specifically each part of his creepiness comes from a relation to sleep. He first made himself known in a children's book that Amelia was using to get her son into bed. He comes out almost solely at night. He begins to take over Amelia's mind with dreams and the only way she can think to stave him off is by forgoing sleep entirely.
He almost becomes a rebranded version of Freddy Kreuger, what with his top hat and long-fingered gloves that scratch at things like a knife. A twisted face that smiles at its victims.

The second part I've been thinking about with all three films up to this point is how the apex of the horror in each film takes place in a home. The Sawyers kill in their home and Sally has to fight through most of the house to get away, Nosferatu threatens Europe simply by buying a house and Mina Harker gives up her life in her home (also in her bedroom as well which almost plays into my earlier point), after being possessed Amelia doesn't really leave her house as she threatens and attacks Samuel. The Babadook is even trapped in the very depth of Amelia's house. The depth of the womb as some theories put it (and I cannot remember who said this).

Following both paths of thinking the woman as a person becomes a source of fear but her womb becomes a source of safety. This puts women in horror films in their own liminal space. And I can't decide if this is another way to make women more terrifying or less human. Maybe both.