One of the more cleverly conceived horror films to harness the constraints of Covid lockdown, Rob Savage’s Host located its horror entirely within the domestic space. The director’s newest film, The Boogeyman, a loose adaptation of Steven King’s 1978 short story, takes a similar approach, having its titular villain function as an extension of the darkest corners in an ordinary suburban home. Except that the film, without the hook of pandemic-induced isolation, feels decidedly more generic and its jump scares more traditional, as they’re not filtered through the grainy, fragmented lens of various Zoom chat boxes.
Like the traditional form of the mythical being, the Boogeyman here often hides in closets and underneath beds. But in a twist that’s in line with so much contemporary horror, it also specifically targets “the hurt and vulnerable.” In this case, it’s 10-year-old Sawyer (Vivien Lyra Blair) and her 16-year-old sister, Sadie (Sophie Thatcher), whose psychiatrist father, Will (Chris Messina), is emotionally unavailable in the wake of his wife’s recent death in a car accident.
The Boogeyman, then, is yet another horror film about trauma, but Savage at least imbues the proceedings with a good deal of visual ingenuity, particularly through the use of light sources that provide brief glimpses of the beast before abruptly returning him into the dark crevices of the frame. Sawyer’s light ball, which she sleeps with because she’s afraid of the dark, is nimbly employed in a few scenes, while flickering Christmas lights make for a particularly eerie encounter in the basement. Even the firing of a weapon in a video game to create additional light in a darkened room is used to great effect later on, allowing the Boogeyman to become terrifying more through the subconscious influence of one’s imagination than CGI effects.
These stylistic flourishes help to make some of the film’s scarier moments feel more singular. But on a narrative level, The Boogeyman suffers from a threadbare story that often feels like it’s spinning its wheels to delay the final showdown by having both Sadie and Will, at different points, denying the existence of a creature who’s obviously causing real, observable destruction. And while the film is surprisingly effective at conveying the cruelty of teenage girls, whose pettiness serves to further isolate the struggling Sadie, the family dynamic between her, Sawyer, and their father, which makes up the bulk of the film, barely evolves until the final sequence.
Ultimately, The Boogeyman is like so many other modern horror films that prioritize mood above all else. To its credit, it does have a few evocative sequences that serve up genuine chills, but looking for any thematic weight or narrative depth in it is like kids searching their closets for the actual Boogeyman. They may catch evidence that something’s there, but upon closer examination, it’s just their mind playing tricks on them in the dark.
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Takes place in a modern, well-equipped office/home which seems to possess no overhead lighting at all. Like most horror films, The Boogeyman provides nothing like the real terrors of human life: poverty, war, serious illness… just obviously set up and unconvincing ‘scares’.