The Boogeyman (2023)

JUNE 6, 2023

GENRE: SUPERNATURAL
SOURCE: THEATRICAL (REGULAR SCREENING)

Knock on wood, but after three years, I still haven't gotten covid (at least, not to my knowledge; it's hard to tell when I battle allergies 365 days a year and have no sense of smell anyway), and I chalk at least part of it up to the fact that I have always tried to sit in isolated sections of the movie theater (i.e. the front section, so all the idiots with their cell phones will be behind me). I still wear my mask pretty much anywhere I'm going to be indoors with strangers, but that's not possible when you're a popcorn addict like me, so while I'm not worried about Target or whatever, the movies are the closest I get to living recklessly. To keep things safer, I no longer go to most movies on opening night, figuring a few days later will be less busy and I'll decrease my chances of sitting next to someone spreading their germs. But my usual move didn't work for The Boogeyman; the front section was empty when I bought my ticket earlier in the day, but those three rows were all nearly full by the time the movie began (and, with people being the morons they are, filled in even more throughout the first 15 minutes of the film).

And naturally, as you can probably guess, they weren’t the most considerate moviegoers in the world: talking, laughing when nothing was funny (including at a character’s grief), coughing... it all served as a stark reminder of why so many people have opted to skip theaters altogether. Which is kind of ironic, because Boogeyman was supposed to be a streaming movie anyway, only for strong test screening scores – and a rave from Stephen King, who wrote the short story it’s sort of based on – to have Disney/Fox change their mind and release it theatrically. So I got to watch it on the big screen, like I prefer, among a bunch of dumbasses who should have stayed home and watched literally anything else since they obviously weren’t engaged by the film. If I get covid on top of it, I’d almost have to laugh.

Luckily the movie was pretty good! As I’ve said a million times, I don’t particularly find this sort of movie scary in the slightest, but there are some well executed jumps scares (one, involving a smashed door, even got a jolt out of me) and the sections of the crowd that weren’t mutants were eating it up, gasping and muttering “oh no” whenever the telltale signs of a looming fright moment were offered. So even if I myself wasn’t exactly going to have trouble sleeping that night, I’ve been to enough of these things in theaters to develop a pretty good gauge for the ones that work and the ones that don’t. It’s part of why I keep going even when I know I’ll be rolling my eyes at certain crowd members (I mean seriously; it’s been a long time since a crowd was that annoying, and I see a lot of kids’ movies, too), to use the crowd’s reactions to sort of make up for my own inability to really tell the difference between a good scare and a weak one.

That said, I can’t help but feel some of its power was diluted by Lights Out, which covered the same ground, of a supernatural entity that thrives in the dark/can’t get you in the light (not to mention Darkness Falls, but that was 20 years ago now and hopefully forgotten by most anyway). King’s short story (which is in Night Shift, for the curious) is basically just one scene, of a troubled man named Lester who tells a psychiatrist about how he came to lose all three of his children, chalking it up to the titular boogeyman. King’s story ends on a little twist (the shrink is the boogeyman), but the filmmakers (Rob Savage of Host fame, with a script by Quiet Place/65 creators Beck and Woods) omit that and use the scene as a launching point, focusing on the doctor (Chris Messina with a fantastic beard) and his two children, a teen played by Sophie Thatcher from Yellowjackets and a younger girl played by Vivien Lyra Blair (young Leia from Obi-Wan). After Lester (David Dastmalchian, killing it in his one scene) tells his story and makes his exit from the film, the boogeyman attaches itself to Messina and his family, providing the film with all the child endangerment terror that sells tickets.

The boogeyman chooses them because, as Lester’s wife (Marin Ireland) tells us later, it’s attracted to the broken and wounded, and they’re all dealing with the recent death of the mom of the family unit, who died in a car accident. Messina’s character buries himself in his work, helping his clients deal with their problems while talking around it with his own children. It’s this stuff that I found most interesting about the movie; there’s a number of heartbreaking little moments about how Thatcher’s character is dealing with the loss of her mom that made this a cut above the usual “let’s make sure there’s a jump scare every five minutes” PG-13 horror. At one point she repeatedly refreshes her text chain with her mom as if a new message might appear, and when she finally returns to school after a month’s absence to deal with the loss, she opens her locker and finds the (now very spoiled) last lunch her mom packed, complete with a “have a good day!” kind of message; an everyday, forgettable kind of thing that nearly reduces her to tears as she realizes it’s the last sort of communication she ever had with her, while also reminding us how quickly someone can be taken from us - she went to school like every other day and got that awful call before lunch. Messina’s dilemma is also well handled; he sends the girls to another therapist because he is unable to talk to them about it, which comes to a head when Thatcher starts opening up about how she’s feeling and he cuts her off with “You should tell Dr (whoever) about this at your session this week,” prompting a teary-eyed Thatcher to reply “I’m trying to talk to YOU.” Teen girls in horror dealing with loss are usually presented as rebellious and withdrawn; it’s kind of refreshing to see one who is trying very hard to communicate with her remaining parent.

As for the other, younger daughter, she is mostly tasked with giving the movie its trailer moments, which is fine but – again, as someone who doesn’t find this stuff all that scary – left me feeling less invested whenever it focused on a young child being menaced by the monster in this PG-13 studio horror movie. Dastmalchian’s kid is offed in the opening scene and Thatcher has an F-bomb, so we can be assured that anything more intense would have netted it an R rating, and thus it’s hard to get too caught up in her plight during these scenes. But again, they’re at least well done, and with a minimum of *fake* scares to boot, so it’s all good. I know it’s this stuff that gets butts in seats, not someone freaking out that her dad is trying to get rid of her dead mom’s painting supplies - having those character elements in between the scenes instead of something more generic is what made the movie engaging to me, is the point.

And the boogeyman itself? It’s a pretty good creature! The concept means we rarely get a good look at it, but I liked that it was an actual creature (sort of like a humanoid spider?) as opposed to a human kind of thing, as the concept of “The Boogeyman” is a bit synonymous with Michael Myers so moving away from that idea helped me from thinking about my favorite movie during this one. On that note, the few references to other things are pretty subtle; their house number is 19, which should make any astute King fan smile, and Savage drops a little bit of Host footage into a key moment, which won’t register unless you’ve seen the film anyway. I mean, we’re at the point where horror movies are the only things that are successful in theaters outside of the predetermined blockbusters from Disney and Universal, so even if the crowd isn’t well behaved there’s something almost soothing about seeing a packed crowd for a movie that isn’t just an advertisement for the next movie in its franchise. The last two movies I saw in theaters before this (Fast X and Spider-Verse) both ended on cliffhangers, so I have to fork over more money next year to see how those events pan out – that’s kind of annoying! But The Boogeyman told a complete story (even the obligatory “it isn’t over yet!” tease at the end actually ultimately plays as more of a definite THE END) and almost never reminded me of other movies - that’d be worth my 15 bucks even if it was just 90 minutes of cats jumping out of cupboards.

What say you?

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