While the Babadook is about a mother being plagued by a supernatural creature representing her grief, loneliness, and despair as a failed mother and lost partner, the men in The Shade are menaced by a hideous harpy being that likewise represents their grief, anxiety, emotions, and fears that they're not good enough and are slipping.
The film's impact comes from it's normalcy. How completely regular and everyday it is, and then suddenly there's this flash of an arm, or your worst fear slinking across the hall. And you can't say anything, because you are so scared it's not real and no one will believe you.
The film is from the masculine perspective and explores, in a subtle, tactful way underneath the horror premise, the damage done to men when women usurp and then block their natural communication amongst themselves and ways of processing.
The men are hobbled in facing their (literal) demon by the women in their lives who cannot even see the creature as real, as many women deny male emotions are real, yet still manage to make the men's experiences about their own feelings and what they need those men to provide for them. Even men speaking just amongst themselves are hindered, since they are hedged into feminine modes of therapy speak and must reframe their experience to be less offensive or obtrusive, apologizing even as they are ignored.
The inability to share in a masculine way and the reluctance to participate in an ineffectual-for-them feminine one leads to anxiety, panic attacks, and suicides as the Harpy creature infiltrates their lives.
It's not until they band together and take up their natural roles that they can face the demon down.
