Name : Scott Foundas / Alias : Variety
Manages to deliver real, seat-grabbing jolts while also touching on more serious themes of loss, grief and other demons that can not be so easily vanquished.

Name : Anthony Lane / Alias : New Yorker
Let a law be passed, requiring all horror films to be made by female directors.

Name : William Goss / Alias : Film.com
An impressively chilling exercise in old-school restraint.

Name : Colin Covert / Alias : Minneapolis Star Tribune
"The Babadook" is urgent, uncanny and entirely disturbing, a dream within a dream within a nightmare. It is the best English language supernatural film of this new century.

Name : David Rooney / Alias : Hollywood Reporter
This is a different kind of nail-biter that has less to do with demonic possession than with the renegade power of an untamed imagination.

Name : Bill Goodykoontz / Alias : Arizona Republic
This is a really scary movie.

Name : Joshua Rothkopf / Alias : Time Out New York
Who thinks up a film like The Babadook? Actress-turned-debuting-feature-director Jennifer Kent has the narrative chutzpah to show her entire hand in the pop-up story and then make us squirm as foretold events come true.

Name : Alan Scherstuhl / Alias : Village Voice
It's the most horror I've felt at a horror film since Neil Marshall's The Descent, one where the scares don't release the tension - they harrow.

Name : Wesley Morris / Alias : Grantland
Sometimes you go to a movie and know from the first image that whoever made it knows what she's doing. You don't need convincing. You're there with her. Jennifer Kent's The Babadook is like that.

Name : Dana Stevens / Alias : Slate
The Babadook makes everyday domestic life seem like the most natural possible place to encounter monsters of every description, including the monsters that we ourselves have the capacity to become.

Name : A.A. Dowd / Alias : AV Club
What really distinguishes The Babadook, however, is the metaphorical potency of its narrative.

Name : Adam Graham / Alias : Detroit News
Credit writer-director Jennifer Kent for lending her Australian indie a healthy dose of brains and subtlety, giving it a distinct advantage over most modern horror films.

Name : Richard Roeper / Alias : Chicago Sun-Times
As someone who has developed a pretty thick Critic's Shield from years of watching standard haunted house/possessed human/mythological-creature fare, I have to say I was genuinely freaked out by some of the passages in The Badabook.

Name : Joe Morgenstern / Alias : Wall Street Journal
A small film that packs a horribly big punch.

Name : Michael O'Sullivan / Alias : Washington Post
With its mixture of frights both literal and literary, "The Babadook" will, I suspect, satisfy horror's devotees as much as the genre's doubters.

Name : Ty Burr / Alias : Boston Globe
A potent journey through the fears, anxieties, and repressed rages of motherhood.

Name : Moira MacDonald / Alias : Seattle Times
Shot in chilly shades of blue, "The Babadook" will haunt anyone who's ever heard a cry in the night - or wondered what was under the bed, in the dark.

Name : Michael Phillips / Alias : Chicago Tribune
Kent has taste, an eye and a knack for brisk, accelerated pacing. In the case of "The Babadook," familiarity breeds an eerily gratifying contentment.

Name : Steven Rea / Alias : Philadelphia Inquirer
No matter how successful The Babadook turns out to be - and Jennifer Kent's horror story deserves all the success it gets - the prospects of a best-selling kid-lit tie-in don't look good.

Name : Inkoo Kang / Alias : TheWrap
"An exceptionally rich psychological portrait of a woman, it's an enormously compassionate and sadly relevant film about misplaced blame and the often impossible demands of motherhood."

Name : Rene Rodriguez / Alias : Miami Herald
This is a dark and shivery story about motherhood, a common subject for horror movies, but one that's rarely treated with such intelligence or seriousness of intent.

Name : Ella Taylor / Alias : NPR
The Babadook makes the most of its special effects as needed, but this smart little frightener keeps its head close to the rising anxiety of a young widow whose husband died a violent death.

Name : Peter Travers / Alias : Rolling Stone
This psychological thriller from gifted first-time filmmaker Jennifer Kent will have you climbing the walls simply by plumbing the violence of the mind. Brace yourself.

Name : Stephen Whitty / Alias : Newark Star-Ledger
Although the supernatural seems the likeliest answer, it's not the only one, and audiences can read the film either way.

Name : Jordan Hoffman / Alias : New York Daily News
One of the smartest and most effective horror films in years.

Name : A.O. Scott / Alias : New York Times
You will be scared. And also, perhaps even more scarily, moved.

Name : Rafer Guzman / Alias : Newsday
Jennifer Kent's startling debut is an artful horror-chiller that gets under your skin and into your psyche.

Name : Betsy Sharkey / Alias : Los Angeles Times
"The Babadook" is a smart, darkly drawn modern-day horror movie of monsters, memories and mothers.

Name : Chris Nashawaty / Alias : Entertainment Weekly
In an age when horror movies have mostly become lazy and toothless, here's one with ambition and bite.

Name : Sara Stewart / Alias : New York Post
I like to imagine watching this chilling Australian horror film with late, great authors Shel Silverstein, Roald Dahl and Edward Gorey - all of whom would have relished its twisted children's storybook at the center of things.

Name : Cary Darling / Alias : Fort Worth Star-Telegram/DFW.com
Director Kent has made the kind of striking film that is going to have mainstream Hollywood haunting her like a Babadook in a bad mood. For the sake of her idiosyncratic vision, let's hope she doesn't frighten easily.

Name : Drew Hunt / Alias : Chicago Reader
The Babadook makes a convincing argument for classy, psychological horror cinema even as it fails to meet its own lofty standard.

Name : David Edelstein / Alias : New York Magazine/Vulture
In the running with Boyhood as my favorite movie of 2014 is another work that turns on the challenges of parenting. This one is a tad more insane.

Name : Christian Holub / Alias : Entertainment Weekly
Like all the best horror, The Other Side of the Door is concerned not just with what freaks us out on a gut level, but the deeply-repressed anxieties that truly terrify us.

Name : Tom Huddleston / Alias : Time Out
So tasteless in its depiction of India that it makes 'Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom' look like a triumph of racial awareness.

Name : Dave White / Alias : TheWrap
There is Conjuring-style haunting. There's a creepy piano that plays itself. And there is an annoyingly liberal use of horror's cheapest gimmick, the jump-scare.

Name : Geoff Berkshire / Alias : Variety
The type of sporadically silly and patently predictable horror pic that would look like filler on Syfy's weekend lineup, "The Other Side of the Door" brings virtually nothing new to the supernatural genre.

Name : Christy Lemire / Alias : RogerEbert.com
It might be trying to make a point. If so, it sure is hard to hear it over the noisy screeches and cheap jump scares.

Name : Justin Lowe / Alias : Hollywood Reporter
Along with writing partner Ernest Riera, Roberts pilfers odds and ends of Hindu religious practices and folklore to construct a middling ghost story that traces a vaguely Gothic outline, only to follow a wearyingly derivative trajectory.