The Boogeyman (2023) – In The Dark

IMPORTANT NOTE: This piece was written during the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike. Without the labor of the actors currently on strike, the movies being covered here wouldn’t exist.

Released: 2nd June
Seen: 18th October

In 1973, Stephen King wrote a short story called The Boogeyman. The short story was published in a magazine called Cavalier and eventually was part of the first collection of King’s short stories known as Night Shift, which is also how we got such stories/films as The Mangler, The Lawnmower Man and Children of the Corn. The great thing about this process is that King tends to have some great terrifying ideas that work well in film and a lot of these short stories have fascinating ideas that would work great in a horror film… the downside is that they’re short for a reason and in order to make something feature length any filmmaker has to take what King did and build upon it and that’s usually where things start to falter. 

The Boogeyman uses the events of the short story as the opening act. We get introduced to the central family of Dr Will Harper (Chris Messina) and his two daughters, Sadie (Sophie Thatcher) and Sawyer (Vivien Lyra Blair), and one day while the kids are at school Will gets a new client known as Lester Billings (David Dastmalchian). Lester comes to get therapy regarding the death of his own family, he’s been accused of murdering them but he knows he didn’t do it and a creature that lives in the closet is actually responsible. Now, in the book Lester is the main focus and the entire thing is just about this meeting but the movie instead has Lester dying mysteriously in the Harper household and now it’s the Harper family who are dealing with the terrifying Boogeyman… which looks kind of like a weird giant spider for some reason.

What The Boogeyman does absolutely fantastically is play with the idea of “What you don’t see is scarier than what you do”, largely through implication or just hiding the big scary creature in the dark shadows for most of the film. It barely even gives you glimpses of what the creature is, you might see an eye or what looks like a hand but for the most part it keeps it secret which makes everything a lot scarier. Now sure towards the end it does show off the creature a lot more and it does look somewhat derivative of the creatures from A Quiet Place but even then it’s still got a little bit of creepiness to it, it’d just be a whole lot better if they could’ve somehow kept up the “You can’t see it” thing.

When The Boogeyman is just following along the basic plot of the short story it actually does a really good job, the big scene where Lester tells his story is both heartbreaking and unnerving because it plays like he could’ve just done the murders so there’s some serious intrigue going on. Even for a little while after his character is removed from the film there’s a real sense that you don’t quite know what’s going on… but soon enough that goes away and you’re left with “oh it’s just a monster and it’s going to make loud noises every 12 minutes” and slowly the actual potential of this adaptation slips away.

Like a lot of average horror films, while there are moments you can feel some real tension building, The Boogeyman is largely just a long series of quiet moments punctuated by someone screaming or a loud chord playing on the soundtrack in order to give the audience a sense of shock. All the actual tense moments are front-loaded in the film, the longer it goes on the less it seems to care about actual tension building and just wants to have the audience jumping in their seats because a loud thing happened. That’s certainly a choice, it can make for a fun watch with a few friends but it’s also something that can get on your nerves when you realise that you aren’t being scared, you’re being surprised. 

The sad thing is that underneath the half-hearted jumpscares, The Boogeyman is actually trying to tell an interesting story about how kids deal with the grief that comes with losing a parent. There’s actually something interesting there, the Boogeyman as a manifestation of the childhood fears of loss… but that’s not what this is, it’s just a creature that lives in the darkness and occasionally it makes a loud noise in the direction of the main character. If the film leaned more into the idea of this creature representing the feeling of the families loss, then it might be more interesting but as it is it’s just kind of a basic monster movie, which is certainly fine enough and does the job but the idea was clearly there at some point to make this something more and they just don’t do it. They rely on jumpscares so much that it can’t help but get repetitive and dull after a while.

The Boogeyman is probably fine for people who are trying to get into horror, it delivers some effective jumpscares and admittedly has a very good atmosphere but if you’re even a little bit familiar with the genre it’s going to be a bit boring. Its repeated jumpscares are only effective at first and even that atmosphere can’t help it because anyone who has seen even one of these films before will know what’s coming because it’s just been done before so often and so much better. It’s not a bad film, it’s not great, it’s just OK enough to get the job done.