USA. 2023.
Crew
Director – Rob Savage, Screenplay – Scott Beck, Mark Heyman & Bryan Woods, Screen Story – Scott Beck & Bryan Woods, Based on the Short Story by Stephen King, Producers – Dan Cohen, Dan Levine & Shawn Levy, Photography – Eli Born, Music – Patrick Jonsson, Visual Effects Supervisor – Paul Graff, Visual Effects – Bot FX (Supervisor – Sean Pollack) & Folks VFX (Supervisors – Jonathan Piche-Delorme & Nicholas Seal), Special Effects Supervisor – Matt Kutcher, Production Design – Jeremy Woodward. Production Company – 21 Laps.
Cast
Sophie Thatcher (Sadie Harper), Chris Messina (Will Harper), Vivien Lyra Blair (Sawyer Harper), David Dastmalchian (Lester Billings), LisaGay Hamilton (Dr Weller), Marin Ireland (Rita Billings), Madison Hu (Bethany), Maddie Nichols (Natalie), Cristala Carter (Detective Garland)
Plot
Psychologist Will Harper and his two daughters Sadie and Sawyer are coping in the aftermath of the death of Will’s wife/their mother. A disturbed man Lester Billings slips into Will’s office. Will offers therapy and Lester begins to talk about how an entity has killed his family. Will goes to call the police only for Lester to sneak away. Sadie then walks in to discovers that Lester has hung himself. In the aftermath, The Boogeyman that Lester spoke of then begins to target the Harper children.
The Boogeyman – not to be confused with the supernatural slasher The Boogey Man (1980) and its sequel, or the Sam Raimi produced Boogeyman (2005) and sequels – was a 1973 Stephen King short story. The story was first published in the men’s magazine Cavalier and can be found in King’s anthology Night Shift (1978). The story had been twice filmed before as The Boogeyman (1982), a 28-minute short from Jeff Schiro, and The Boogeyman (2010), a 27-minte short from Irish director Gerald Lough.
British director Rob Savage first gained attention with his Zoom-shot horror film Host (2020), one of the first films to be shot and released during the Covid pandemic. This gained a great word-of-mouth reputation and Savage was signed to a three-picture deal. Savage then went on to the wonderfully deranged Blumhouse-produced Dashcam (2021). The Boogeyman was Savage’s third film, his first regularly shot production.
Here Savage comes with the backing of Shawn Levy, director of Night and the Museum (2006) and sequels, Real Steel (2011) and Free Guy (2021), and his 21 Laps production company. The script comes from the directing/writing team of Scott Beck and Bryan Woods known for the Found Footage horror Nightlight (2015), Haunt (2019) and 65 (2023), as well as the script for the big hit of A Quiet Place (2018).
Rob Savage is a director with a good grasp of what makes horror film work. The first half of The Boogeyman comes with a slow and undeniably effective build-up. Almost the entirety of the film is shot in darkened rooms with the characters surrounded by shadow. Savage is adept at giving half-glimpses of things scuttling away under Vivien Lyra Blair’s bed or closet doors that ominously open of their own accord, creating an eerie sense of something about to happen.
On the other hand, when you look at it in terms of a screenplay, The Boogeyman is completely generic. For a time, it has nominal things in common with the Stephen King story – Lester Billings come to talk to a psychologist about his fears of the boogeyman that killed his family. Whereas the story delves more into what happened to Lester’s family, the film focuses on Sophie Thatcher as the psychologist’s daughter as things happen to them, an aspect that does not appear in the story. Disappointingly, the film also drops King’s great twist ending, which essentially made the story.
The disappointment is that after a great build-up, the second half of the film becomes generic. It is nothing more than Sophie Thatcher running around fighting off the monsters, assorted boo moments and trying to find ways to combat it. It all runs into one. We have seen exactly the same in a great many near identical films such as Darkness Falls (2003), The Grudge (2004), Countdown (2019), Polaroid (2019), Smile (2022), Talk to Me (2022) and this just disappears into more of the same.
Other Stephen King genre adaptations include:- Carrie (1976), Salem’s Lot (1979), The Shining (1980), Christine (1983), Cujo (1983), The Dead Zone (1983), Children of the Corn (1984), Firestarter (1984), Cat’s Eye (1985), Silver Bullet (1985), The Running Man (1987), Pet Sematary (1989), Graveyard Shift (1990), It (tv mini-series, 1990), Misery (1990), a segment of Tales from the Darkside: The Movie (1990), Sometimes They Come Back (1991), The Lawnmower Man (1992), The Dark Half (1993), Needful Things (1993), The Tommyknockers (tv mini-series, 1993), The Stand (tv mini-series, 1994), The Langoliers (tv mini-series, 1995), The Mangler (1995), Thinner (1996), The Night Flier (1997), Quicksilver Highway (1997), The Shining (tv mini-series, 1997), Trucks (1997), Apt Pupil (1998), The Green Mile (1999), The Dead Zone (tv series, 2001-2), Hearts in Atlantis (2001), Carrie (tv mini-series, 2002), Dreamcatcher (2003), Riding the Bullet (2004), ‘Salem’s Lot (tv mini-series, 2004), Secret Window (2004), Desperation (tv mini-series, 2006), Nightmares & Dreamscapes: From the Stories of Stephen King (tv mini-series, 2006), 1408 (2007), The Mist (2007), Children of the Corn (2009), Everything’s Eventual (2009), the tv series Haven (2010-5), Bag of Bones (tv mini-series, 2011), Carrie (2013), Under the Dome (tv series, 2013-5), Big Driver (2014), A Good Marriage (2014), Mercy (2014), Cell (2016), 11.22.63 (tv mini-series, 2016), The Dark Tower (2017), Gerald’s Game (2017), It (2017), The Mist (tv series, 2017), Mr. Mercedes (tv series, 2017-9), 1922 (2017), Castle Rock (tv series, 2018-9), Doctor Sleep (2019), In the Tall Grass (2019), Pet Sematary (2019), The Outsider (tv series, 2020), The Stand (tv mini-series, 2020-1), Chapelwaite (tv series, 2021- ), Lisey’s Story (tv mini-series, 2021), Firestarter (2022) and Mr Harrigan’s Phone (2022). Stephen King had also written a number of original screen works with Creepshow (1982), Golden Years (tv mini-series, 1991), Sleepwalkers (1992), Storm of the Century (tv mini-series, 1999), Rose Red (tv mini-series, 2002) and the tv series Kingdom Hospital (2004), as well as adapted his own works with the screenplays for Cat’s Eye, Silver Bullet, The Stand, The Shining, Desperation, Children of the Corn 2009, A Good Marriage, Cell and Lisey’s Story. King also directed one film with Maximum Overdrive (1986).
Trailer here