The Boogeyman: Monsters in bedroom, classic Stephen King
The Boogeyman is based on the horror master’s 1973 short story and the opening scene is terrifying.
The Boogeyman (MA15+)
In cinemas
★★★
When it comes to writers whose books are made into films, it’s hard to beat Stephen King in terms of volume and variety. There’s the supernatural horror, of course, starting with Carrie, Brian De Palma’s 1976 film of King’s 1974 debut novel.
There are the prison dramas The Shawshank Redemption (1994) and The Green Mile, each directed by Frank Darabont, and the 1986 coming-of-age classic Stand By Me, directed by Rob Reiner.
One of King’s strengths is the use of psychological horror. Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980) and Reiner’s Misery (1990) are outstanding adaptations of King in this milieu.
Sometimes the dual horrors – supernatural and psychological – blend, as in It, King’s much-adapted 1986 novel, so the reader/viewer dangles between two possibilities. Is there a monster in the house or is it human evil? Or maybe both?
That unsettling blend is at the centre of The Boogeyman, based on King’s 1973 short story. The tense, terrifying opening scene – a baby girl crying in her crib, in fear of something she cannot understand – sets the scene.
We learn she is one of three infant siblings to die unexpectedly in their bedrooms. Their father, Lester Billings (David Dastmalchian), turns up unannounced at the office of therapist Will Harper (Chris Messina).
He tells him, “They all think I did it. Killed my kids one at a time.” When the therapist asks if they died of natural causes, Lester answers, “There was nothing natural about it. It sucked the life right out of them.”
And so we have another It, out to kill children. Or do we?
Will suspects the man is deranged and dangerous so he calls the cops. He has two daughters of his own, teenage Sadie (Sophie Thatcher) and pre-teen Sawyer (Vivien Lyra Blair). They are all grieving the recent death, in a car accident, of his wife/their mother.
When Sawyer starts seeing a “shadow monster” in her bedroom, her father says, with a near eye-roll, “A monster in the closet?”
Does he dismiss her fear because he knows there’s a monster but it’s not in the closet? He’s a strangely absent father. Sadie tells her younger sister, “It’s all just in your head. It’s not real.” Time will tell.
This 99-minute movie is a sort of mix of the old and the new. The youngish director, Rob Savage, has made two horror films pegged to the digital age: Host (scares via Zoom meetings) in 2020 and Dashcam (scares via as the title suggests) in 2021.
Here he takes on a story King wrote half a century ago. He does quite a good job, though perhaps relies more on the supernatural rather than the psychological.
It’s a fairly loose adaptation. The reason for the title, Boogeyman, is stronger, and scarier, in the story. And the story has a more disturbing end, which the film only gestures to.
While all horror movies require a suspension of disbelief, this one stretches it a bit to keep the plot moving forward. A few tips for the characters. If you think there’s a monster in the closet, don’t go into the closet. If you think the monster is scared of light, don’t stumble around in the dark basement.
King was shown the film ahead of its release. The director told Total Film magazine the horror master emailed him afterwards to insist it be shown in cinemas rather than the original plan to stream it.
He is right about that. I saw the film in Xtreme Screen and the jump scares did make me jump. I doubt that would have happened had I been watching in my living room, or on my smartphone.
There have been at least 80 film and television adaptations of 75-year-old King’s work and there are lots more to come. Next up is a second life for Salem’s Lot, which was a two-part mini-series in 1979. A film version, with Australia’s James Wan as a producer, is due later this year.
Being Mary Tyler Moore (M)
Foxtel
★★★½
As the title suggests, Being Mary Tyler Moore is about the woman behind the much-loved American sitcom characters Laura Petrie (The Dick Van Dyke Show, 1961-1966) and Mary Richards (The Mary Tyler Moore Show, 1970-77).
There were bits of her in each upbeat character but the real Mary Tyler Moore, who died in 2017 at the age of 80, had a darker and sadder side.
She talks about her alcoholism but does so without losing her sense of humour. In 1984 she booked into the Betty Ford Center. “Liza Minnelli had just been there, Elizabeth Taylor had just been there,” she says.
She talks about the 1980 death, from an self-inflicted but accidental gunshot wound, of her 24-year-old son Richie, and here there can be no jokes.
In a painful example of life following art, her son died three weeks after the premiere of Robert Redford’s film Ordinary People, in which Moore is a mother who withdraws from her son (Timothy Hutton) following the death of his older brother.
Moore remembers that Redford thought of her for the role when he first read the 1976 Judith Guest novel on which the film is based.
“He was fascinated by what might be the dark side of Mary Tyler Moore,’’ she says. “He knew, that little devil, that there was a lot of other stuff happening.”
This two-hour movie is directed by American documentary maker James Adolphus. It is a fascinating account of how one actor came, via two rule-breaking sitcoms, to be one of the faces of American feminism.
Two television interviews with Moore act as a framework for this story. The first, with David Susskind in 1966, is sexist and patronising.
The look on Moore’s face when he suggests Laura Petrie, stay-at-home wife and mother, is the ideal American woman says it all.
She responds by referring to Betty Friedan’s 1963 book The Feminine Mystique. “Women are – or should be – human beings first, women second, wives and mothers third.’’
Moore followed through on this in The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Co-creator James L. Brooks recalls pitching the show, in which the lead character would be divorced, to senior executives at the CBS network.
He was asked to leave the room. He soon learned there were “three rules” on what was banned from CBS shows at the time: “Jews, somebody with a moustache and divorced women.”
A quick rewrite made Mary Richards a single career woman. The star, sick of seeing women in TV shows “running the vacuum in flowered frocks and high heels” insisted Mary wear pants and this, radical as it was at the time, was agreed to.
The second TV interview, with Rona Barrett in 1981, is where Moore opens up about her less than perfect self. The interviews with Moore are from archival footage.
Most of her co-stars, directors and writers, though, are still with us, including on-screen husband Dick Van Dyke at age 97. He is interviewed as is her on-screen boss Ed Asner, who died last August at age 91.
The director makes good use of clips from the sitcoms, particularly to highlight Moore’s comic gifts. There’s one in which Van Dyke can been seen trying, not completely successfully, to stop himself from laughing.
Moore’s third husband, cardiologist Robert Levine, a producer on the film, opened access to her personal archive, so we see and hear her and her family in home videos.
One of the highlights – though it was not for Moore – is when she so wanted to star in a Broadway production of Breakfast at Tiffany’s that she undid her right-to-reject agreement with the Universal film studio.
The play, in which she starred alongside Richard Chamberlain, was a flop so she was soon back doing whatever movie Universal wanted her to do.
This included Change of Habit (1969) in which she is a nun, Elvis Presley is a doctor and love is in the air. A clip from it sums up the situation she found herself in. Elvis looks at Mary in her habit and drawls, “You’ve gotta be kidding”.
She wasn’t but fortunately she was only a year away from becoming the woman, as the theme song puts it, “who could turn the world on with her smile”.