The Boogey­man

Stephen King’s 1975 short sto­ry The Boogey­man blurs the psy­cho­log­i­cal and the super­nat­ur­al. Unfold­ing entire­ly with­in the con­fines of a psychiatrist’s office, it pur­ports to be the sto­ry that dis­traught patient Lester Billings tells about his three children’s deaths – and while Lester insists that they were all killed at the hands, or more pre­cise­ly claws, of a crea­ture that would emerge at night from the clos­et, from the con­sult­ing couch this dis­traught nar­ra­tor also reveals his own racism, sex­ism, cru­el atti­tudes towards chil­drea­r­ing and propen­si­ty to vio­lence, enabling his sto­ry to be read in two dif­fer­ent ways – even if, in the end, the mon­ster will come out once more for Lester himself.

Scott Beck, Bryan Woods and Mark Heyman’s very free adap­ta­tion of King’s sto­ry lets us know from the start that there is a super­nat­ur­al mon­ster, revealed through the sound of its strange, human-aping voice (cour­tesy of Daniel Hagen) and occa­sion­al glimpses of its shad­ow and claws, as cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er Eli Born’s cam­era pans in a cir­cle around a bed­room, cap­tur­ing only in impres­sion­is­tic pass­ing the creature’s fatal attack on an audi­bly ter­ri­fied toddler.

From this har­row­ing sequence, there is a cut to the Harp­er fam­i­ly – teenage daugh­ter Sadie (Sophie Thatch­er) and the much younger Sawyer (Vivien Lyra Blair), both reel­ing from the recent death of their moth­er in a car acci­dent, and their father Will (Chris Messi­na), who though a psy­chol­o­gist him­self, has been unable to open up about his own feel­ings of loss.

This domi­cile, already filled with dark, emo­tion­al­ly fraught thoughts, will soon be vis­it­ed by the haunt­ed, sim­i­lar­ly griev­ing Lester (David Dast­malchi­an), whose child was killed in the open­ing scene – and he will bring with him not just his own unnerv­ing nar­ra­tive, but some­thing more tan­gi­ble that takes up res­i­dence in the dam­aged home, look­ing to feed on a new family’s dys­func­tion and pain.

Pho­to­pho­bic like the mon­sters from David Twohy’s Pitch Black, Robert Harmo’s They, Troy Nixey’s Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark and Brad Anderson’s Van­ish­ing on 7^th Street, this crea­ture quick­ly inhab­its the dark clos­ets, the shad­ows under the bed, the ill-lit base­ment – all spaces asso­ci­at­ed equal­ly with a child’s pri­mal fears and with fam­i­ly repres­sions. Which is to say that while The Boogey­man is cer­tain­ly a crea­ture fea­ture (and a ghost sto­ry) with all the tropes and trap­pings of hor­ror, it is also, unques­tion­ably, a psy­chodra­ma, track­ing this belea­guered family’s des­per­ate quest to con­front their demons, both per­son­al and shared, and to reemerge into the light.

Here direc­tor Rob Sav­age aban­dons the trade­mark screen-life exper­i­men­ta­tion and polar­is­ing polit­i­cal ten­sions of his ear­li­er fea­tures Host and Dash­cam, instead mak­ing his first for­ay into the ​‘domes­tic’ mar­ket of main­stream stu­dio hor­ror. Sav­age taps right into all this household’s uncan­ny inte­ri­ors, exploit­ing every gloomy nook and cran­ny to sug­gest, and increas­ing­ly to show, a mon­strous pres­ence that both preys on and incar­nates the destruc­tive neg­a­tiv­i­ty plagu­ing the Harpers. For all its con­ven­tion­al­i­ty, The Boogey­man is deft­ly done, its child-focused stakes are nev­er less than alarm­ing, and its end­ing, ambigu­ous and clos­et­ed, rings true.