A seven-year-old boy snuggles up to his mother as she finishes his bedtime story. Closing the book, she looks him in the eye. “I’ll kill the monster when it comes,” he says to her, “I’ll smash its head in.” The mother’s eyes widen just for a moment. Then she nods her head and reads the story again.

These are the opening moments of The Babadook, a new film by first-time Australian director Jennifer Kent, taking a familiar domestic scene and nudging it, quietly, into something dark and unsettling. In doing so they set the tone for what’s to come. Amelia (played by Essie Davis) struggles to raise her son Samuel alone after the death of his father. Samuel (a hollow-cheeked Noah Wiseman) is plagued by fears of a monster, and exhibits his anxiety in the most antisocial ways imaginable (one of the more palatable being the home-made trebuchet he takes to school). His fears seem prompted by his favourite story: a ghoulish, gothic pop-up book that tells of a malevolent spirit, the Babadook. As the boy’s behaviour gets worse and the mother endures ever more sleepless nights, the question rears its head: could the child’s fears be real?

The Babadook (the film not the spirit) has been welcomed enthusiastically by horror fans. It got a rapturous response at the Sundance festival when it was first screened earlier this year and has received uniformly positive reviews. Kim Newman, the doyen of horror film criticism, described it this month as “one of the strongest, most effective horror films of recent years” which “imparts a lingering sense of dread that will stay with you for days”. It might also put you off pop-up books for life.

I speak to Kent over Skype at her home in Australia and she’s keen to stress her passion for the genre. “I love horror and I don’t look down on it, even the bad stuff,” she says. She cites David Lynch as her favourite director, the films of John Carpenter and Carl Dreyer as influences, and insists she’d rather watch Saw if it popped up on the TV than an Oscar-winning drama. But she didn’t conceive of The Babadook as a horror film. “I think where horror excels is when it becomes emotional and visceral. It was never about, ‘Oh I wanna scare people.’ Not at all. I wanted to talk about the need to face the darkness in ourselves and in our lives. That was the core idea for me, to take a woman who’d really run away from a terrible situation for many years and have to face it. The horror is really just a byproduct.”

While there are plenty of jumps and scares in The Babadook, where the film really excels is in its detailing of the slow psychological shattering of its central character. The demons are not in the child, it turns out, but in the parent. And as we watch Amelia’s inexorable decline, it brings to mind another psychological horror: The Shining. Kent’s film doesn’t share all the qualities of Stanley Kubrick’s classic. There are no frame-gobbling images, no torrents of blood flowing down the streets of suburban Australia. But, as with Jack Nicholson’s stymied writer, you both want to sympathise with and cower from the increasingly crazed Amelia.

“I feel very honoured,” says Kent when I bring up the comparison (it’s clear I’m not the first). “But it’s funny because after Sundance I read The Shining and I feel that The Babadook is actually closer to the book than the Kubrick film. I guess that with the book Stephen King goes into the psychology of the character and you feel for him even when he’s going right on a downward spiral.”

That the downward spiral is undertaken by a woman is another thing that marks The Babadook as being different. In most mainstream horror, women are either blonde fodder for rampant serial killers or the petrified victims of supernatural creatures. They might also get to swing an axe or two (in a halter-neck top), but rarely are viewers invited inside their minds. Amelia is a woman unable to move beyond the grief of losing her husband. She is also struggling with her relationship with her only child. She tries to be tender towards him but ends up shocked, even intimidated. In picking at the maternal bond, Kent is dealing with one of society’s last taboos.

Jennifer Kent. Photograph: Scott McDermott/Corbis

“Yeah, look,” says Kent assertively when I raise the subject. “Apart from We Need To Talk About Kevin, I can’t easily think of other examples [that address the subject] and it’s the great unspoken thing. We’re all, as women, educated and conditioned to think that motherhood is an easy thing that just happens. But it’s not always the case. I wanted to show a real woman who was drowning in that environment. I thought that maybe I would be criticised by women, by mothers, because I’m not a mother. The opposite has happened; I’ve experienced a collective sigh of relief that women are seeing a mother up there that’s human. Sure, it’s an extreme situation but what I realise is that a lot of women have felt those feelings that Amelia goes through at some point along the way.”

This may be Kent’s first full-length film but her apprenticeship in the movie business has been a long one. She was first an actor – early roles included a part in Babe: A Pig In The City – until she became too frustrated with the characters on offer to continue and in the early 00s began to pursue a career as a director. “What I’m doing now is a lot harder,” she says. “There’s a lot more work involved, but I can shape what I’m doing and work on things I really believe in.” If that remark suggests a determination to do her own thing, it’s underlined by her story about applying for work experience with Lars von Trier.

“At the time I was looking to make my own films I saw Dancer In The Dark and I remember leaping up at the end and saying, ‘I want to work with this guy.’ My friends thought I was mental but if I feel instinctively that I have to do something then I’m like a dog with a bone. So I got his address and wrote him a really heartfelt email about why I wanted to come and learn from him. I said I’d rather stick pins in my eyes than go to film school. So maybe it was the suggestion of a woman sticking pins in her eyes that really interested Lars, who knows? But the approach got through. I was lucky enough to spend the whole duration [of Dogville] on set at work and it was my film school. What I think I learned from him was that it’s OK to be stubborn. Women are not socialised to be stubborn and to hold on to a vision, yet here I saw someone who had to do that. Someone who had a very singular vision and followed it from start to finish. Not without difficulty – there was a lot of difficulty – but he was courageous so that was a very valuable experience.”

Horror film 101: never look under the bed. Photograph: REX

That acquired stubbornness is apparent throughout The Babadook. The colour scheme – everything is a shade of burgundy, blue or black through to white – was achieved in the flesh, with no gels on the camera lens or alterations post-filming. “Watch the film and you’ll see there’s absolutely no deviation on that. I was even pissed off that the grass was so green. We had furniture that was just too brown, so bless our production designer, he would go and grey-wash it.”

Kent describes directing as being ultimately a leadership role and – alongside other film-makers such as her friend Justin Kurzel, who made the lauded, highly traumatic crime horror Snowtown – she is part of a new generation of Aussie directors telling simpler stories on their own terms. “It was under three years actually from, ‘Oh, I’ve got this idea,’ to, ‘Oh, I’m on set making it.’ Which, I don’t know about the UK, but in Australia is pretty quick,” she says. “I’ve had a number of projects fall over before this and I decided that I was really going to make this one happen and to tell a story that was achievable.

“I’m going in carefully, you know. It’s a long career that I want to have and I want to be able to say something with my films.” After The Babadook you wouldn’t bet against it happening, nor having the bejaysus scared out of you in the process.

The Babadook is in cinemas from Friday