It’s not impossible to make a good feature adaptation of a Stephen King short story, but history has demonstrated that it is damn difficult. For obvious reasons, the process requires a lot of creativity beyond what’s on the page, and that part of the equation has been the downfall of a number of projects as they fail to expand on what’s interesting and effective about the source material. The many, many awful swings taken at “Children Of The Corn” are a perfectly adequate case in point, but this legacy also includes terrible movies like Ralph Singleton’s Graveyard Shift and Tobe Hooper’s The Mangler. (Not to be excluded from this record is King’s own notorious directorial debut, Maximum Overdrive, based on the short story “Trucks.”)
Release Date: June 2, 2023
Directed By: Rob Savage
Written By: Scott Beck & Bryan Woods and Mark Heyman
Starring: Sophie Thatcher, Vivien Lyra Blair, Chris Messina, Marin Ireland, David Dastmalchian, and LisaGay Hamilton.
Rating: PG-13 for terror, violent content, teen drug use and some strong language
Runtime: 98 minutes
In this context, director Rob Savage’s The Boogeyman is exceptional, and I’d put it alongside Mark Pavia’s The Night Flier in a conversation about the best film based on a single Stephen King short story (which excludes anthologies like George A. Romero’s Creepshow). That being said, it’s not a game-changer; it’s an effective, well-made, and entertaining horror movie that forges a metaphor about grief with a staple of childhood terror. While treading some familiar ground, it delivers a haunting atmosphere that seeps from the screen into the theater and is anchored by tremendous turns from its two young leads Sophie Thatcher and Vivien Lyra Blair.
Thatcher and Blair play Sadie and Sawyer Harper: sisters who, along with their psychiatrist father Will (Chris Messina) have been emotionally stunned by the recent and sudden death of their mother in a car accident. After weeks of mourning, they begin to try and get back into their old routines, but this effort is interrupted with the arrival of Lester Billings (David Dastmalchian) – a disturbed man who arrives at the Harper home looking for therapy without having made an appointment. Lester explains that his life has been torn apart following the death of his three children, who he claims have been killed by a monster that hides in the darkness and “comes for your kids when you’re not paying attention.”
Lester’s time in the Harper house leaves a stain, and it’s immediately after that Sadie and Sawyer discover he isn’t delusional. The Boogeyman that destroyed Lester’s life is now living in their home, lurking in shadows and closets and under the bed, and while its dark presence spreads like an infection and threatens the girls’ lives, Sadie works to learn what it is so that she can try and stop it before it’s too late.
The Boogeyman works like a sequel to Stephen King short story, and has a creepy tale to unfurl.
One might say that The Boogeyman is an adaptation of the Stephen King short story of the same name in the way that Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead II is a remake of The Evil Dead. King’s version features Lester Billings as its protagonist, and the film, while not strictly maintaining continuity, uses Lester’s haunting tale as a jumping off point to focus on original characters and plot details. Again, this strategy doesn’t have the best track record (this time I’ll point to the two dreadful TV movies Sometimes They Come Back and Trucks), but this effort works with compelling leads, escalating tension, and thrilling set pieces that give Rob Savage spectacular opportunity to demonstrate the special genre skills he first showed off a few years ago with the séance-centric screenlife horror feature Host.
There isn’t much scope to the story – with Sadie’s search for answers going little beyond meeting Lester’s wife (Marin Ireland) and discovering that she is as unhinged as her spouse – but the quick pacing keeps you engaged and curious where the Boogeyman is going to strike next. These moments fortunately all come about organically and build on the personalities and behaviors of the characters. In Sawyer’s case, her extreme fear of the dark is utilized exceptionally well in multiple ways, from a blinking light box during a therapy session letting the child-eater get dangerously close, to her rolling an illuminated ball down a dark hallway at night looking for monsters. Sadie, meanwhile, discovers some terrifying things in the Billings household and has a sleepover from hell when she’s trying to reconnect with her friends from school.
Rob Savage further demonstrates himself as an exciting up-and-coming horror director with The Boogeyman.
The Boogeyman marks a stylistic deviation for Rob Savage, who followed up 2020’s Host with the appropriately named Dashcam in 2021, but that just means it’s the filmmaking showing that he knows how to freak out an audience with more traditional cinematography and non-real time storytelling. There is a handful of jump scares that will get your heart beating out of your chest (skillful work from editor Peter Gvozdas), but more impressive is the development of dread. Savage’s collaboration with director of photography Eli Born and production designer Jeremy Woodward yield multiple sequences where you’re pulled to the edge of your seat peering into dark, moldy corners while always bracing yourself for the titular monster’s attack.
Without giving too much away, it can also be said that the team behind the creature design did great work, as did the VFX team bringing it to life with the motion capture performance by Michael Bekemeier. The fact that the Boogeyman lives in the shadows makes the desire to see its full form a compelling aspect of the film, and without saying too much, curiosity is rewarded in the third act.
Sophie Thatcher and Vivien Lyra Blair are the heart of The Boogeyman, and they're both wonderful.
Given the fabled nature of the Boogeyman, it’s natural that the film puts the terror of a teen and a child front and center, and while that comes with the risk of putting the whole enterprise on the shoulders of two young performers, that ends up in no way being a problem. Sophie Thatcher and Vivien Lyra Blair have a terrific chemistry that depicts the bond of sisters through a period of grief (a time of big emotional ups and downs), and they are effortlessly empathetic expressing overwhelming fear while paralyzed in the pin light stare of the creature haunting their house. Their work makes a scary movie scarier, both in the realism their performances bring to the fantastical and how they encourage emotional investment in what Sadie and Sawyer are going through.
When gears first started really turning behind the scenes with The Boogeyman, the feature was going to be released as a streaming movie, but test screenings and the influence of Stephen King changed that – and it’s unquestionably for the film’s benefit. It will eventually live as a freaky cinematic ride to have at home with all of the lights turned out, but this is a feature perfect for the communal experience that is watching a horror movie with a large crowd. You should take advantage while you can.
