The Boogeyman (15)

Dir: Rob Savage

The latest Stephen King adaptation is a relatively spooky horror film but ultimately a forgettable one.

British writer-director Rob Savage broke to prominence during the pandemic with the release of the 2020 Horror film Host. The reason Host was so effective is that it took a scenario that the whole world was worryingly all too familiar with and added a supernatural element to it. Savage’s feature debut had a shoestring budget of about £100K and utilised a found footage set-up following a group of friends conducting a séance over Zoom during lockdown. Savage then followed this up with his sophomore film Dashcam, which was also a low-budget found footage horror flick. The successes of these independent features got the attention of larger studios and saw Savage snapped up to Direct “The Boogeyman“, the latest of what seems to be a plethora of Stephen King adaptations.

The Boogeyman follows the recently bereaved Harper family, where widowed father, Will (Chris Messina), and his two daughters Sadie and Sawyer (Sophie Thatcher and Vivien Lyra Blair) struggle to come to terms with the sudden death of the family matriarch. Will, now a single-parent, works from home as a therapist and one day gets an unexpected visit from a mentally unstable client named Lester Billings (David Dastmalchian). Lester informs Will that his three children have all died in the past year and that they were killed by an unseen entity that lives in the shadows which his children called ‘The Boogeyman’.

Will, sensing Lester could be a threat to him and his family excuses himself to call the police. Unbeknown to Will, Sadie had come home from school early after being bullied about her mum’s death. Sadie hears a commotion coming from her mum’s now abandoned art room and finds the body of Lester hanging from the closet door. The combination of the grief the daughters are facing as a result of their mother’s death, and the trauma of Lester’s apparent suicide in their home, leaves the sisters vulnerable to a voracious evil entity that hides in the shadows.

The Boogeyman has its moments with a couple of tense set-pieces but, as a whole, the film relies too much on cheap jump scares and loud bangs and crashes within the score. This results in a film that we have seen hundreds of times before and will ultimately go down as yet another forgettable Stephen King adaptation; like the recent remakes of Firestarter and Pet Sematary.

Rob Savage definitely knows the genre well and I feel if the studio allowed him to take full creative control with ‘The Boogeyman’, we would have got a more effective portrayal of grief and neglect. It would then perhaps be something more akin to Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook or Ari Aster’s Hereditary.

I hope whatever project Savage has lined up next, the studio let him run wild with it. It is only with the full backing from a studio that Savage will be able to become the distinguished name in the horror-genre that he has the potential to be.