Horror is in a privileged position as a genre in the current theatrical landscape. The niche’s ability to return both box office results and critical acclaim has a consistency that’s been lacking among other non-blockbuster genres since the pandemic. Companies such as Blumhouse, A24, and Hulu have led the charge to prove that original horror can be successful. From Get Out to M3gan, there’s been an explosion in horror’s ability to get financed and distributed properly. This has led to a renaissance for strange and beautiful horror filmmaking. When the genre can sell, studios let directors get a little freaky. This recent trend is why Rob Savage’s new adaptation of Stephen King’s The Boogeyman is such an anomaly. In a golden age for American studio horror, Savage has delivered work that barely registers in the mind minutes after finishing it.
The Boogeyman follows Sadie (Sophie Thatcher), a teenage girl struggling to keep her little sister Sawyer (Vivien Blair) and therapist father Will (Chris Messina) close after the untimely death of her mother. When her father is visited by a client who claims the titular monster is real, Sadie must find a way to protect her family –- and her sanity –- from the supernatural force which seeks to tear her life apart.
The film exists within two truths: it is derivative of films released a decade ago and yet simultaneously somewhat effective. Both as a monster picture and a psychological thriller, the script by Mark Heyman (based on drafts from writer duo Beck & Woods) fails to squeeze anything truly new from this concept. The dynamics between the characters are well done enough, but it all feels so familiar that any emotion mined from the interaction feels stale. Savage moves the story along fast enough that I’m entertained, but never lingers long enough to really make me feel anything. For a story so entrenched in metaphors about living with grief and struggling to move on, it’s jarring that the movie moves so fast. It all feels more focused on scares than drama, but is never quite horrifying enough to make up for the lack of pathos. The drama it does engage with is hardly compelling enough to sustain the feature on its own.
There’s an odd uncertainty with what the film wants to do with its central characters. While there’s a desire to explore their grief, the frame keeps us far from our lead performers. The story wants us to empathize with Sadie, but she never becomes fully realized insofar as she’s never given time to let us. A particular shame in her case. Thatcher gives her all and proves herself as having a powerful screen presence in the little time she gets to flex her acting muscles. Beck & Woods’ playhouse is in broken families (see A Quiet Place and 65), but like the latter, The Boogeyman only lets us in as far as we can physically see them. The growing mold in the house could be a suitably unnerving metaphor for the weight of the grief taking hold if we knew how far their lives have fallen. Instead, the trio of the father and his two daughters go around like business-as-usual. Their implied trepidations are left mostly weightless.
On the opposite end, the main monster’s weightlessness is what gives a gravity and bite to the horror. Wisely, Savage and cinematographer Eli Born keep the figure as visually vague as what pop culture deems a “Boogeyman.” When the threat is hidden in shadows, the scares work. The threat feels like fear itself, and is emblematic of the variety of images that the name “Boogeyman” inspires. The jumpscares are a little overplayed but Savage’s hand guides the sequences to be effective. He knows why the set-ups have been done over and over and is able to highlight why they work. Yet as the plot moves along, the more we know, the less we fear. There’s a disconnect between what the monster represents and what the monster turns out to be. When Thatcher is spraying fire at a digital lanky quadruped in the film’s final moments, it feels disconnected from the ominous hallways we’ve grown accustomed to. The desire to canonize the concept of the Boogeyman is not only a fool’s errand, but one at odds with the personal and cerebral jumpscares the film has been reveling in, and as a result the conclusion feels jarring.
Another decision that rattles the narrative is the pace at which the film moves. It’s quick, able to recover quickly when something isn’t working. A B-story about Sadie being bullied at school is poorly acted and plotted out, but it doesn’t stick as you’ve forgotten about it three minutes later. This pace feels more like a fix than an intentional choice. As fast as we move past the subpar pieces, we move just as fast through more dramatic elements. Solid groundwork for drama, like Sadie’s deeper relationship with her family, is left in the dust as the movie keeps everything as efficient as possible. The frame dwells on nothing for longer than exactly what it needs to. That’s fine, often preferred, but somewhere in here there’s an (albeit messier) slower and thought-provoking film. One that really takes time to deal with the heavy emotions grief can cause. The film that does exist never puts in the work to access those deeper emotions. It seems to prefer keeping the movie distinctly in the horror category.
This is what damns The Boogeyman more than anything else – it plays it safe when it doesn’t have to. As this is Savage’s first feature with a major Hollywood studio, it makes sense that he’d want to air on the side of caution when handling the relatively hefty $35 million budget. It’s not like Savage has no distinct style either. He’s known for his found footage work more than anything. It’s clear he reigned himself in. But when compared to other horror contemporaries like X or Barbarian, this lacks a real personality. While technically the film feels more emotionally cohesive than something like The Black Phone, The Boogeyman lacks a real hook. As it stands, the optimal condition to experience The Boogeyman is to have it in your peripheral vision while doing the laundry. Efficient and competent enough to tell a decent story, but hardly worth paying real attention to.
Special thanks to Anna Anderson for assistance in editing this piece.
