Certificate: 15
Running Time: 98 mins
UK Distributor: 20th Century Studios
WHO’S IN THE BOOGEYMAN?
Sophie Thatcher, Chris Messina, Vivien Lyra Blair, Marin Ireland, Madison Hu, LisaGay Hamilton, David Dastmalchian
WHO’S BEHIND THE CAMERA?
Rob Savage (director), Scott Beck, Bryan Woods and Mark Heyman (writers), Dan Cohen, Dan Levine and Shawn Levy (producers), Patrick Jonsson (composer), Eli Born (cinematographer), Peter Gvozdas (editor)
WHAT’S IT ABOUT?
Two sisters (Thatcher and Blair) encounter a terrifying entity that feeds on suffering…
WHAT ARE MY THOUGHTS ON THE BOOGEYMAN?
After testing the waters of modern horror with Screenlife features Host and Dashcam, director Rob Savage is finally ready for the big leagues, with his first big studio project The Boogeyman. He’s landed quite a significant one, too; the source material is a short story written and published in 1973 by none other than horror legend Stephen King, thereby immediately placing it among the rankings of King adaptations that have either surpassed or failed to live up to the author’s original prose.
Where The Boogeyman ends up landing is nowhere near the all-time classics like The Shining or Carrie, but also far from the absolute bottom of the pile which includes Cell and last year’s Firestarter. It’s a decisively middle-of-the-road picture, one that features far too many familiar traits to be considered fresh and original, but also has enough decent things about it to earn your respect while watching it.
The film introduces us to sisters Sadie (Sophie Thatcher of Yellowjackets fame) and Sawyer (Vivien Lyra Blair, aka young Leia from the recent Obi-Wan Kenobi miniseries), who are grieving the sudden loss of their mother, which their father, therapist Will (Chris Messina), is reluctant to talk with them about due to his own grief. One day, Will is visited by deeply disturbed patient Lester Billings (David Dastmalchian) who claims his children were killed by a mysterious entity that feeds on fear and suffering, one that has now set its sights on Will and his daughters in their own time of sorrow. It’s now up to the sisters to figure out how to rid themselves of the terrifying monster before they meet a similar fate, which of course ties into their own journey past the grieving stage.
You should be familiar with most, if not all, of the stuff mentioned in that description, because this is a film that heavily piles on the genericism. From the moment it begins, you already know what kind of movie it’s going to be, which themes it’s going to be tackling, how each character is going to evolve throughout it, the different types of scares it will try to frighten the viewer with, and so on. This is because you have seen all these familiar tropes done countless times over, including in many other Stephen King adaptations, to where it really isn’t that effective of a concept anymore. It’s entirely familiar territory with this script – based on separate drafts by A Quiet Place writers Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, and Black Swan scribe Mark Heyman – from the tackling of grief to the fake-out dream sequence, to even the classic King trope of the mean high school bully, whose only dimension is to give the main characters a hard time (but unlike in a lot of other King adaptations, it’s a trope that is never really seen all the way through to its inevitable conclusion).
Knowing just about every step it’s going to take, well before it even lifts its foot off the ground, does make The Boogeyman a slightly less compelling watch. However, that also means that more attention can be paid to its execution (since there isn’t a whole lot in this script that truly wins you over), which is thankfully where the film shines the most. Anyone who has seen Host – and, to a lesser extent, Dashcam – will know that Rob Savage is an extremely playful horror filmmaker, using a mixture of practical effects and editing trickery to create a genuinely creepy atmosphere, and make some of the more traditional scares feel a lot more unsettling. Here, Savage is given a much bigger budget to play around with, which he uses to craft a number of striking sequences that rely heavily on chilling night-time cinematography and swift camera movements, and they work because he is a filmmaker who seems to really appreciate the foundations of horror filmmaking, enough to where he knows how to effectively shoot and steadily build up such a sequence, no matter how familiar it may conceptually be.
The acting is also very good, with Chris Messina as well as younger actors Sophie Thatcher and Vivien Lyra Blair really selling their shared grief and actually feeling like a family unit, albeit one that’s already rather fractured from the moment we first meet them. On paper, their characters are no different from any other horror movie protagonists, especially the younger ones, but these actors share believable enough chemistry with each other and have some genuinely emotional moments by themselves that you are still fully on their side throughout the whole thing, since they’ve done more than enough to make you actually care about people that you otherwise wouldn’t have done under much less assured direction.
If you’re looking for a horror movie that’s seeking to change the game, then The Boogeyman isn’t it – but if you’re after something that’s a well-organised display of familiar items, it’s passable enough entertainment that’s hardly revolutionary, but is at least impressively executed.
SO, TO SUM UP…
The Boogeyman is a middle-of-the-road Stephen King adaptation that plays heavily into familiar tropes and conventions which leave it far from fresh or truly engaging, but some impressive filmmaking by director Rob Savage and strong performances from the likes of Chris Messina and Yellowjackets’ Sophie Thatcher make it a respectable enough display of familiar genre accessories.
The Boogeyman is now showing in cinemas nationwide
