Rob Savage was the writer/director of Host, my favorite movie of 2020. That horror film breathed fresh air into the genre of found footage, which was growing staid. Most pleasantly surprising to me was it was only as long as it needed to be, clocking in at 57 minutes.
So when I heard Savage was directing The Boogeyman for Universal, I knew there would be compromises, if only for running time. You know a major studio like that would mandate the picture be around 90 minutes.
It also wasn’t surprising it would be rated PG-13, so as to reach the broadest audience possible. In keeping with some weird, unwritten mandate associated with the rating, there will also be the single, obligatory F-bomb. That convention of PG-13 movies always leaves me bemused: I can understand not allowing the word even once, but is hearing it twice that much worse than hearing it once?
What did surprise me is Savage brings nothing new or distinctive to this adaptation of one of Stephen King’s less-remarkable short stories. Why hire the director of one of the most innovative horror films of this decade so far and then have him churn out a completely pedestrian effort?
Let’s start with the titular boogeyman. It is the same kind of CGI creature we have seen in dozens of other movies. It is sinewy and long-limbed, usually walking around on all fours. It can also climb up walls and crawl around on ceilings. It is exactly the kind of monster which isn’t scary anymore (if it ever was).
In the opening scene, the creature kills an infant. This way this was conveyed is disturbing: a sudden spray of blood across a picture and the baby’s crying is silenced. Alas, the moment is undermined slightly by the appearance of a CGI monster hand grabbing a crib railing.
What we do not know at this point is the creature actually kills all three of the parents’ children that night. We learn this when David Dastmalchain, as the family patriarch, seeks help from psychiatrist Chris Messina. Messina conducts his practice from his home and that seems to me to be a seriously bad idea. I doubt any shrink I have seen would want me knowing where they live.
An unforeseen consequence of this is the psychiatrist inherits Dastmalchain’s baggage after the boogeyman kills that mourning father and makes his death look like a suicide. Not that Messina was lacking issues of his own at that time. The shrink lost his wife, and his two daughters their mother, a year before. Ready to feed off fresh grief and fear, the creature takes up residence in this new house.
In addition to how the monster looks, I had huge problems with the rules of the world in which this movie takes place. Any house the boogeyman haunts becomes progressively overtaken by what looks like a combination of black mold, dry rot, water damage and vine growth. This felt like little more than window dressing to me—yet another of the tired trappings of horror films so far in this century.
Then there’s a scene where the older daughter (Sophie Thatcher) uses the ol’ string-and-doorknob method to extract a troublesome baby tooth from the mouth of the younger sister (Vivien Lyra Blair). After they go to sleep, we see the creature steal the tooth and string. What doesn’t make sense to me is how Thatcher later vomits the string and tooth. How did this get in her stomach? There’s nothing else in the film to suggest the boogeyman has such powers, never mind why he does this. Not to mention the weirdness of stealing the tooth, unless the monster is secretly the Tooth Fairy.
And speaking of its powers, it can instantaneously cross great distances to go from one house to another, yet can also be physically wounded. I know I’m nit-picking, but how can it be a physical manifestation that can be impacted by some rules of the natural universe but not others? For that matter, I was only thinking such questions while watching the picture because it wasn’t entertaining enough to prevent me from doing so.
If there is one element which works best in his movie, it is the sisters. Their rapport doesn’t always feel completely organic, but enough of it rings true enough for me to care about these characters. There’s also a nice moment between Blair and Messina where he agrees to let her sleep in his bed, but only if she’ll stop eating cheese, as it makes her fart. She throws shredded cheese at him and then resumes eating it.
As far as the horror elements go, the most effective here is how the boogeyman is afraid of light. This leads to all kinds of interesting, if not exactly novel, setups. My favorite involves a moon globe Blair has that is lit from within. Since we have a ball that is also a light, it is good for scenes like rolling it down a dark hallway or under a bed. I wouldn’t say the feature maximizes the potential use for device, but it makes for many of the better scenes.
It may sound like I’m relentlessly bashing The Boogeyman, but it was a breezy and enjoyable 90 minutes. It was effortless to watch, but it was also immediately forgettable. I was expecting more from the creator of Host. Strangely, given this monster’s aversion to light, I think the curious might be better served by 2016’s Lights Out, which does far more with the same concept.
Dir: Rob Savage
Starring Sophie Thatcher, Chris Messina, Vivien Lyra Blair
Watched in a theater