Any Stephen King fan knows that big-screen adaptations are hit or miss. But hopes were high with British filmmaker Rob Savage (‘Host’, ‘Dashcam’) behind this adaptation of a 1973 tale of things that do more than go bump in the night.
However, ‘The Boogeyman’ is nothing like his previous horror vision-forward works hinted it might be, yet it isn’t without some payoff – as long as you’re prepared to suspend a few hours of reality and can indulge some very well-worn horror movie tropes.
It won’t take long to grasp the premise, as there’s not a lot of depth to it: dad and two kids reeling from the sudden car accident loss of wife/mother spiral in their grief, so much so that spooky things emanating from darkened closets in the middle of the night could just be a manifestation of their anxieties. Adding to the creepiness (though perhaps not deliberately) is that the dad, therapist Will, is played by Chris Messina, who was quite terrifying in season three of thriller TV series ‘The Sinner’.
After a potential patient turns up to Will’s home office to ask for help, things get a whole lot worse for the family. The flimsy but oddly enjoyable haunted-house setup is ultimate carried by the real stars of this film: Vivien Lyra Blair, who turns 12 in June, and who has come a long way since being cast as ‘Girl’ in ‘Bird Box’ in 2018; and Sophie Thatcher, most recently known as young Natalie in TV series 'Yellowjackets'. Her character Sadie, here, is not unlike Natalie, and ‘The Boogeyman’ is all the better for her casting.
Cue, 90 minutes of something lurking in the dark. What also haunts the family is a sudden inability to operate light switches on the walls of their suitably creaky cavernous house. Naturally, the house also has a basement. As comedian Michelle Wolf memorably joked at her Melbourne International Comedy Festival set in 2019, nothing good happens in a basement. A slightly foreign space for Australians, they’re much-loved areas of entrapment in American storytelling (and, let’s face it, in some real-life horror stories too).
There’s something nonetheless endearing about a horror movie that leans into well-worn cliches (there’s even a not-at-all-ironic ‘I’ll be right back’ spoken), and the excellent sound design sustains the tension throughout. It’s almost, but not quite, enough to ignore the silly things, such as a 1980s-era camcorder found in a box with battery fully charged, which got a solid laugh from the audience.
While this is a King short story, it isn’t much of a gauge of how it’ll adapt to feature-length film; ‘Stand By Me’ (aka ‘The Body’) is a much better movie than text. But part of what makes King so hard to translate to film is how much of the real scary stuff is how his words conjure those monsters in our heads. Similarly, the scares in this movie are ultimately much more effective as the unseen monster under the bed or in the closet that wakes you at night.
Still, fans of 2016’s ‘Don’t Breathe’, 2018’s ‘A Quiet Place’ and last year’s ‘Barbarian’ should find enough in this to enjoy, with Sophie Thatcher’s performance going some way to make up for what the film lacks in plot and character development.
