Director Jennifer Kent holds the rights to the film. When asked if there would be a sequel, she said, "I will never allow any sequel to be made, because it's not that kind of film. I don't care how much I'm offered, it's just not going to happen."
The movie had a campaign where you could buy a copy of the hand-created "The Babadook Pop-Up Book" for 80 dollars. The first 2,000 copies are numbered and signed by the director, Jennifer Kent. The book contains pop-up pictures, as well as additional pages not seen in the movie. The campaign was only open for a limited amount in which roughly 9,500 books were sold.
When asked where the idea for The Babadook (2014) came from, director Jennifer Kent said, "I have a friend who's a single mother, whose son was traumatized by this monster figure that he thought he saw everywhere in the house. So I thought, 'What if this thing was real, on some level?' So I made Monster (2005) [a short film] about that idea. But I couldn't leave it alone. I kept coming back to it. And that led to The Babadook." She has also stated that Amelia suffers from the unprocessed trauma of witnessing a horrible death, and that it is up to the audience to interpret whether the Babadook is supernatural or psychological in nature.
In Hebrew, ba-badook means "he is coming for sure."
Several female critics were offended by the portrayal of Amelia, stating that no mother would ever mistreat her son like that. However, director Jennifer Kent said that she was approached by several women afterwards who admitted that being a mother is hard, and it would sometimes give them negative thoughts of mistreating their children, even if they would never act on such ideas. Most women thanked Kent for finally addressing that taboo.