The Boogeyman (2023 | USA | 98 minutes | Rob Savage)

My introduction to Stephen King’s writing happened in junior high, when I bought the 1978 King anthology, Night Shift. Even at the relatively tender age of 12, I’d already seen (and read) heaps of horror, and it took a lot to rattle me. 

But several of the stories in that collection got under my skin in a big way. And one in particular, “The Boogeyman,” truly terrified me. To this day, the story housed in those twelve pages just might comprise the scariest thing I’ve read in my life. 

Some five decades after Night Shift and “The Boogeyman” were loosed upon the world, director Rob Savage and the scriptwriting team of Scott Beck, Bryan Woods, and Mark Heyman have undertaken the challenging task of fleshing out those twelve pages into a 98-minute feature film. How well the filmed adaptation of The Boogeyman works will depend largely on how receptive you are to a solidly made, well-acted movie that dutifully cherry-picks elements from recent genre movies while adding nothing—and I mean nothing—new to the mix.

The devastating loss of their mother throws Sadie Harper (Sophie Thatcher) and her younger sister Sawyer (Vivien Lyra Blair) into a tailspin. Sadie’s resentment and adolescent anger lead to her acting out, while Sawyer withdraws and develops an intense fear of the dark, and of monsters lurking in that darkness. Will (Chris Messina), their father, offers insufficient support, channeling his energy into his therapy practice in lieu of dealing directly with the tragedy that’s reared its head. 

Then one day, Will’s home office is bum-rushed by jittery Lester Billings (David Dastmalchian), a man who insists that his own three children, all dead from ostensibly real diseases and mishaps, actually died due to something much less explainable—and much more overtly sinister. One gruesome death later, Sawyer begins enduring increasingly intense attacks from a supernatural being that does indeed live in the darkness. Said boogeyman becomes increasingly lethal, and Sophie plays detective in an attempt to figure out what’s doing the scaring, and how to stop it. 

Not surprisingly, The Boogeyman condenses King’s original source material into a few minutes of exposition, providing a springboard for the screenwriters to launch their story proper. And it’s hard to argue against the overall proficiency on display here. The relationship beats between all three surviving members of the Harper clan pretty much ring true—Thatcher’s straight-up great here—and Savage displays plenty of aptitude at generating the requisite jump-scares. 

If only the rest of the movie measured up. Horror can often survive, even thrive, in a trope-heavy framework, but a metric crap-ton of overly familiar elements rear their heads throughout The Boogeyman. There’s transferal of a scary supernatural force a la It Follows and Insidious; a dysfunctional but loving family dynamic whose cadences descend from Poltergeist and The Conjuring; a Big Bad who’ll look all too familiar to fans of A Quiet Place; and set pieces pilfered wholesale from several different (and in most cases, more effective) movies. The net result feels like what it is: A film made for a streaming service (Hulu, in this case) that lucked into a theatrical run.

Savage also offsets his obvious craft as a director by making things too menacing, too much of the time. Between the overbearing score, and the fact that pretty much every scene takes place in the shadows, there’s never an attempt to modulate the tension with even the faintest bit of aesthetic contrast. The visual language here becomes so obvious, and so one note, that it flat-out yanks you out of the movie in a not-fun way (it’s been a long time since my brain has screamed, “Just turn on a frickin’ light!” at a movie with such frustration and frequency). It’d be one thing if this were an exercise in pure style, but The Boogeyman’s attempts at Just-Go-With-It dream logic just chafe against the more realistic, grounded parts of the narrative.

If the mood strikes and you’re up for an undemanding, perfectly respectable 98-minute ride through some familiar turf, The Boogeyman should fill the bill capably. But in the end, not even a $35 million budget, a solid cast, and a surplus of talent behind the camera manage what Stephen King accomplished with twelve pages of lean but impactful prose—namely, providing an experience that’s memorable enough to stick with you after you’ve finished it.  

The Boogeyman opens nationwide in theaters everywhere today, May 31. Lead image courtesy 20th Century Studios.