By Jake Wilson
THE BOOGEYMAN ★★
(MA) 98 minutes
Perhaps for the moment we don’t need any more horror movies about grief. At least, I can’t say I learnt anything new about the subject from Rob Savage’s forgettable The Boogeyman. Which, to avoid confusion, bears no relation to the similarly titled series of slasher movies that began in 1980, nor the stand-alone Boogeyman from 2005.
David Dastmalchian plays the mysterious Lester in The Boogeyman, which is based on a Stephen King short story.
This Boogeyman is based on a 1973 Stephen King short story, which originally ran around 15 pages and consisted of a single scene: a dialogue between a therapist and his possibly monstrous new patient.
In the movie, the focus shifts onto the therapist, Will Harper (Chris Messina), a sensitive guy shell-shocked by his wife’s recent death in a car accident and struggling to be emotionally present for his daughters, teenage Mindy (Sophie Thatcher) and her younger sister Sawyer (Vivien Lyra Blair).
In the meantime, he continues to treat patients from the family home, a rambling old place equipped with all the standard horror-movie features: creaky doors, long corridors, frosted glass, narrow stairs leading down to the basement and omnipresent shadows where monsters could be lurking.
Sophie Thatcher (left) as Sadie Harper, Chris Messina as Will Harper, and Vivien Lyra Blair as Sawyer Harper in The Boogeyman.
The pervasive gloom lends an eerie quality to the sour, moonlike face of David Dastmalchian as Lester Billings, the patient from the original King story, who staggers in off the street in what proves to be the film’s most effective scene.
Lester, it seems, was a father, too, until his children started dying one by one. But did the mysterious “boogeyman” take them, as he claims, or is he the killer? Either way, are Will and his family now under threat, too?
It’s a familiar horror set-up, and no less familiar are the bloodless set pieces that follow, which rely on weird noises and flashing lights to distract us from the fact not much is going on.
Outwardly, it’s all a far cry from Savage’s last horror movie, the obnoxious but promising Dashcam, a frenetic take on the found-footage format centred on a motor-mouthed anti-vaxxer who stumbles on horrors worse than anything her paranoid imagination could have conjured up.
In the source material of Boogeyman, the Lester character is similarly presented as a creepy bigot who can’t easily be classed as hero or villain, which might be part of what originally persuaded Savage to get on board.
But in the final product, the character’s more provocative statements have been almost entirely eliminated – and nor are we ever seriously asked to wonder if Will is anything but the caring father he appears.
We’re at a strange moment in horror cinema, when a film that presents as earnestly as this one can’t match the complexity and ambiguity of early Stephen King.
Boogeyman is released in cinemas on June 1.
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