“The Boogeyman” (2023) is an adaptation of a 1973 Stephen King short story, but not a faithful one. After all the children in one family dies, the father goes to a therapist, Will (Chris Messina), for help only to lead the titular monster to Will’s door thus endangering Will’s daughters, Sadie (Sophie Hatcher) and Sawyer (Vivien Lyra Blair). Will Sadie be able to figure out how to save her family?
King’s short story was published before “Smile” (2022), but “The Boogeyman” will feel like a pulled punches rip-off from last year’s bleak horror success. Both films revolve around families vulnerable to attack from supernatural forces because the families experienced past trauma. This film wants to accomplish a lot, but never nails the landing. The production values and cast are superb, but wasted.
“The Boogeyman” uses the monster as a metaphor for unresolved grief which threatens to divide and destroy the family. While the daughters are strong characters who hold their end of the story, Will is underdeveloped and underutilized, which does play into the story about how he is too enveloped with grief over the loss of his wife to console and commune with his daughters, but there are huge swaths of the film when he is not present. The momentum of the film is to unite the family so the film should have devoted more time to showing how he spends his time and getting the audience more invested in him. He echoes the barely there father in “Hereditary” (2018) who only exists to be oblivious to his family’s needs and his own vulnerability.
Sadie is the true protagonist of “The Boogeyman,” and if the film does well, it will be because Hatcher dragged the movie kicking and screaming into seeming like a cohesive story with her acting. Sadie is the real adult in the household-a bridge between her sister’s unadulterated fear and their father’s disassociation. Sadie is open to the paranormal because it is her only link to her mom, which makes her a natural ally to Sawyer, whom the film forgets should also be bothered by their mother’s death, but has other priorities: surviving the dark. While it would be cheesy for the father to fight for his daughters, I find it disturbing that the film cosigns parentifying a child who must rescue the whole family. Why do these little girls have to rescue the adult? After the denouement, they are still emotionally and literally physically holding up Will. His needs are centered, not theirs. Ew!
Hatcher’s acting anchors another underdeveloped storyline-the supernatural counterbalance to the monster. Remember that scene in “The Sixth Sense” (1999) when Haley Joel Osment reassures his mom played by Toni Collette that her mom is there. “The Boogeyman” tries to evoke that cathartic vibe of love and safety, but instead it feels as if Sadie is begging to be monster kibble by wandering into dark spaces alone. It is another underdeveloped theme, which only pays off during the denouement.
Writers Scott Beck, Bryan Woods and Mark Heyman fold bullies into Sadie’s friendship group, and the bullies are openly hostile. One of Sadie’s friends is steadfast, but still hangs out with the mean girls, who accept her. These writers do not understand how friendships among girls work and how frenemies function in girl world. Either you are a true friend, and the group would kick you out, or you are not a true friend because you would not be able to tolerate anyone being mean to your best friend. Also there is a line when one of the best friends casually says, “It is not like I haven’t seen you pee a million times.” Um, what? Ladies, please feel free to correct me if I’m wrong, but no, we go to the bathroom together for safety, but we don’t see each other urinate, right? Or it is just Lena Dunham and her crew, correct? That must be a guy thing, and there were no women in the room to say, “No, we don’t.”
“The Boogeyman” may still work for people satisfied by only atmosphere and did not come for the story. Blair’s performance makes the fear palpable, and director Rob Savage evokes the fear of creatures lurking in the dark and images visible in the shadow; however, it gets a little redundant. There are only so many times that Blair rolling a light ball into the darkness can terrify. Blair and Savage mix it up with a living room scene that is more effective though utterly nonsensical in its resolution.
If viewers devote any thought to the monster, it will become obvious that it does not follow any logic. A creature that lurks around in shadows thus making closets into a naturally attractive place makes sense. If they are biological creatures, it also makes sense that they may ooze liquid that ruins walls and causes mold with a black webbing appearance. Its talent at mimicry is most chilling as the voice shimmers and vacillates between human and croaking shrieks. Its appearance does evoke American (indigenous?) folklore, specifically the one that you are not supposed to name (think windy boy). “The Boogeyman” shows blood spatter and children being thrown around like ragdolls, but the dialogue reveals that coroners find that the children die of natural causes. Is there one or more than one creature? If they do not like light, then how did they follow the father to the therapist’s house? They appear in one corner then the next with no transition as if they can teleport, which is fine, but I think that it was just everywhere to scare us, not to build up some kind of logic. Also there is a huge swath of the film where Sadie should just scream, “I’m alone in the dark. Kill me,” but the cryptids are missing in action and doing errands. They do not pounce. Was the monster scary? No. Does it evoke the collective nightmare imagination of the boogeyman? No.
The scariest part of this monster was how it sowed discord among the people that it terrorized. It could mimic voices, but the actual words did not align with what the person would actually say, which reveals an intelligence unexplored in the story. Sadie never doubted Sawyer so when the voices started saying something contrary and made Sawyer believe that Sadie was no longer validating her, it was terrifying. Did the monster appear to be intelligent enough to be manipulative and psychologically devastate a child using language to convey meaning? Not really, so “The Boogeyman” missed a golden opportunity to make this monster more terrifying than it was. This aspect of the film would have been a great way to bring the father into the story more. Instead the film over relies on jump scares.
Sadie also has a dream which reveals how the monster attacks its victims, and it is a great scene because it does not feel like a dream immediately though in retrospect, it does because one character seems more unbothered and casual than usual. This character is eating incessantly, which signals that the creature is disguised and hungry. I wish there were more misleading scenes which zagged when it seemed to zig.
“The Boogeyman” has a real MVP: the person who arranged every room. Every angle of the therapist’s office represented the emotion of the patient. There is a vast wall where Sawyer appears smaller than ever with a painting of the ocean above it. Later everyone is squeezed in on the tiny couch with a window or door letting the light in and a blue film partially covering it making the ocean more manageable. There is a seemingly abandoned house that gets stranger as Sadie explores it. Will’s office also has abstract art, warm tones, etc.