‘The Boogeyman’ hits big screen

Horror enthusiasts are heading to the cinema as ‘The Boogeyman’ (2023) hits the big screen.

Based on a 1973 short story by Stephen King in which a thing of nightmare terrorises a young American family, the film adaptation picks up where the short story left off, after a man named Lester Billings suggests the boogeyman has killed his three children.

While variations of the boogeyman are found in the folklore of cultures all across the globe, in King’s imagination, the thing that goes bump in the night is particularly fond of petrifying children before murdering them in the seeming safety of their own homes.

Grim? Yes. But classic King.

At this point, if you’re interested in the process of film adaptation, I suggest you read King’s 18-page short story, titled ‘The Boogeyman’, which is freely available online.

While all of the original takes place in Billings’ therapist, Dr Harper’s consulting rooms as the racist, sexist, whisky-drinking man recounts his gruesome tale, screenwriters Scott Beck, Bryan Woods and Mark Heyman use this encounter as a preface to an entirely new story that sanitises the reprehensible Billings while drawing on details from the 1973 short.

In the film, Dr Will Harper (Chris Messina) and his two daughters, who don’t exist in the source material, become the boogeyman’s prey.

Still reeling from the sudden death of their wife and mother, the Harpers try to navigate their grief with therapy for daughters Sadie (Sophie Thatcher) and Sawyer (Vivien Lyra Blair) and through a return to normality, even as Sawyer begins to see and hear things in the dark.

Directed by Rob Savage of ‘Host’ (2020) and ‘Dashcam’ (202) fame, ‘The Boogeyman’ takes a simple and universal premise – what devil awaits in the pitch dark – and elevates it around a story of family dealing with the isolation of anguish.

Young Sawyer, surrounded by night lights, says little about her mother, but dreads the dark.

Teenage Sadie watches clairvoyants on YouTube trying to connect with her dead parent, and Will won’t utter a word about his wife, despite Sadie’s desperate need to talk about it all.

If the whole thing sounds pretty bleak, that’s because it is. Dimly lit and focused on the darkness of hallways, bedrooms, basements and closets open ‘just a crack’, ‘The Boogeyman’ is a familiar, often predictable and sometimes infuriating horror story.

Really, cellphone torch lights and actual torches don’t exist? We’re seriously investigating that creepy sound down a dark hallway like we’ve never seen even one horror film?

Your sister says she saw a monster like the one that killed three kids before killing their father in this house, and we’re gonna let her sleep alone in the dark that terrifies her?

If you can get past that type of stuff and roll with the frights and delights of the genre, then you’ll enjoy the jump scares as well as the solid performances from Thatcher from ‘Yellowjackets’, and the ensemble on the whole.

Please also note that, while I left the movie theatre feeling the film was a B- for effort, I did end the evening with the careful closing of all my closet doors.

– martha@namibian.com.na; Martha Mukaiwa on Twitter and Instagram; marthamukaiwa.com