THE BOOGEYMAN Review

“The Boogeyman isn’t particularly scary, nor is it particularly original”

I have to be honest that I wasn’t familiar with the Stephen King story on which this new horror movie from Rob Savage (Host) was based, although I’m pretty sure I read “Night Shift” (in which that story appeared) when it was first released in 1983. Surely, you can’t expect me to remember a book I read forty years ago, can you? (That’s rhetorical. You can’t.)

In it, therapist Will Harper, played by Chris Messina, is struggling to be a single father with two daughters, the older teen Sadie (Sophie Thatcher), and the younger and quite impressionable Sawyer (Vivien Lyra Blair), after their mother was killed in a car accident. One day, a strange and troubled man named Lester Billings (David Dastmalchian from Ant-Man) shows up, having been accused of murdering his own kids. Soon, he, too, is dead in the Harper home, and the odd occurrences he warned Will about start to occur as some being starts haunting Will’s daughters.

I feel there are different levels of horror currently. There are things that really stand out and distinguish themselves to be true originals, things like last year’s Barbarian and Alex Garland’s Men or James Wan’s Malignant that try to challenge horror norms. But then, you have the movies for the horror tourists, the M3gans and the Smiles, which rely so heavily on the most obvious scares and kills that it’s hard to take them seriously once you’ve watched as much horror over the decades as I have.  

For instance, in these movies, there’s always some sort of light source that flickers in and out to give the audience mere glimpses of the main horror element. In the case of The Boogeyman, there are so many of them, whether it’s Sawyer’s weird glowy ball that she rolls around or the lighter Sadie finds (which she uses to light up a joint) or the odd light device a therapist uses to help Sawyer get over her fear of creepy things under her bed and in her closet. There’s also a video camera which has footage of their mother for no apparent reason. Just the fact that the movie has the most generic title like “The Boogeyman” (and thankfully, the creature in the movie is never referred to that) and that this malevolent creature is afraid of light – we’ve seen it in so many other movies that I almost yelled by the third or fourth time someone looked under a bed.

I recently had a similar epiphany while watching Evil Dead Rise, which at least offers some groovy gore to keep things interesting, whereas The Boogeyman gets so bogged down in its own PG-13 rating that it’s just constantly playing things too safe. None of the actors really do much to elevate the scares, and even Marin Ireland, who plays Lester Billings’ wife, holed up in their ramshackle nearly abandoned house, just doesn’t do very much to make the movie exciting. (And if you went to Sundance, you saw Ireland give one fantastic performance after the next.)

The problem may not be that the movie itself is so derivative of so many other movies, but that so many other movies have liberally borrowed (stolen) from King in the forty years since the book’s initial widespread release, but kids being scared of things in the dark wasn’t even original compared to other King works. 

The movie finally does pick up in the last act, when the creature is far more prevalent than earlier. It’s quite an impressive display of creature design, since the main creature clearly needs VFX, but it also still feels quite solid. Even once we get to see this unnamed terror, there are still many scenes where it’s hard to tell what’s going on, either due to poor lighting or over-editing. The film’s other standout craft is its sound design and ambient score, both which try their best to enhance the scare factor, though instead, the movie frequently goes for slamming doors and things like that to try to scare the viewers.

Savage seems like a perfectly capable filmmaker, but he’s working from material that just doesn’t pop or distinguish itself from many similarly flaccid horror movies. In fact, there have been so many far better versions of this very movie, from the Insidious and Conjuring films, to David F. Sandberg’s Lights Out, that it’s hard to watch the movie without being reminded of that fact. The Boogeyman isn’t particularly scary, nor is it particularly original, and the fact it spends more time playing like a family drama when it should be freaking audiences out just shows you that studio-made horror movies still have a long way to go.

Rating: 6/10

The Boogeyman hits theaters nationwide on June 2.