The Boogeyman

Darkness is your greatest enemy in Rob Savage's new film adaptation of The Boogeyman. In true Stephen King fashion, trauma manifests into monsters, making the film half-psychological thriller and half-haunted house horror. It ends up being a relatively competent horror film that doesn't really offer any surprises and doesn't bring anything new to the genre.

The Boogeyman follows a family of three where the mother has recently died. This leaves father Will Harper (played by Chris Messina) and his two daughters Sadie (Sophie Thatcher) and Sawyer (Vivien Lyra Blair) traumatised and emotionally dysfunctional. Their grief is expressed in different ways, with the father's being the most damaging to the family. He is unable to talk about the girls' mother in any way, which makes him emotionally numb to his daughters and creating conflict, especially with the eldest daughter, Sadie, who, unlike her father, is too stuck in the past. The Harper family is haunted by their trauma, both figuratively and literally, as The Boogeyman - a long-legged and disgusting monster that thrives in the dark - terrorises the family in their home. The key to defeating the monster is tied to how they deal with their grief and whether they are able to move forward as a family.

There are actually a lot of things that work pretty well in The Boogeyman. The central drama is believable enough, the film is beautifully photographed and the three leads deliver tremendously strong acting performances. The acting is particularly impressive because the script is often not so well-written. But Messina, Thatcher and Lyra Blair manage to make the dialogue vivid and believable throughout the film. But good actors can't save everything. The film resorts to cheap gimmicks that reduce the characters' actions to stupid horror clichés. It is especially in the film's second and third acts where this becomes too much, and where annoying decisions break the immersion and horror.

I couldn't help but think of Jordan Peele's modern horror classic Get Out, which comments on the stupid decisions horror film characters make when, for example, they are alone in an abandoned house and hear a noise in the basement. Unfortunately, The Boogeyman also falls victim to these clichés. There is also a relatively unbelievable plot thread where we get to know Sadie's so-called friends, who are simply so evil that you should almost fear them more than the film's actual villain.

But The Boogeyman should also be seen as a genre film. And genre films, by their very nature, follow the conventions that precede the genre of the film in question, and this film knows its genre well. It ticks off all the familiar horror tropes and delivers most of them with confidence and energy. So in that way, The Boogeyman succeeds in being a competent horror film that just doesn't manage to stand out in the saturated genre.

The Boogeyman does not join the ranks of King's best film adaptations, such as
The Shining, The Mist, or Gerald's Game, but still works as a reasonably effective horror film that knows its time. The film is an entertaining and well-oiled horror film that leans too heavily on genre conventions, making it too spineless at times.