a shapeshifting demon takes on the guise of a kindly father in this jump-y take on a lesser-known King short.
“I’m not going to make a horror movie about trauma” is the new cool kid rallying cry of the horror community. It’s not only contrarian and smug – it also misunderstands horror. Most horror, directly or not, works as an analog for trauma. From fringe exploitation to the middling massacres of ‘80s slashers to the highest of heights of “elevated horror,” all stratas of the medium trade in trauma whether they want to admit it or not. To deliberately – willfully – divorce trauma from horror is to take the gears from your bike and proudly insist it’s “not another stupid bike with gears.”
Cool! Why?
The Boogeyman – like many King creations – trades in monstrous analogues for everyday terror. On the surface this is about a primordial evil that stalks, terrorizes, and kills its prey with a cat-and-mouse game of supernatural gaslighting. The beast takes on the form of shadows and trusted authority figures, kills a mother, then sets its sights on her surviving children. Teenager Sadie tries to ignore it, but the specter intrudes on her daily life and begins to terrorize both her and her younger sister, Sawyer. Sadie has to call on candle magic, moon invocation, and other pagan rituals if she wants to save her family.
(And a shotgun, if the situation calls for it.)
What impresses most about The Boogeyman is how uncomfortable and uncertain it is. On the surface, it’s a very A to B story held together by familiar tropes and motifs. If you’re the sort who considers every trope a “sin,” check yourself out now. But those able to look beyond such things will find a careful arrangement of those elements that assemble something more upsetting than the sum of its parts. A lot of “to do” is made of movies like Fast X, Spider-Verse, Dead Reckoning that don’t have a “real ending” in favor of multi-act storytelling. But The Boogeyman doesn’t have a “real ending” because we never actually learn the “real threat.” As the credits, we’re left to wonder – did evil really get vanquished or were we, too, gaslit by the true antagonist of the film?
While it’s comforting to take the film at its word – that Sadie and her family are being pursued by an ancient evil – the script and original short both invite us to think twice. Throughout the film, Sadie’s father Will is the first one to tell his daughters that they’re hallucinating. He regularly belittles their experiences and what they see. His lines are often sinister and laced with double meaning, as he leads his children into further danger and exposes them to more stressful situations. And we know – from exposition – that the monster is a shape-shifter who plays the long game with his victims and scares them to death. He can make his targets see, here, and think things that aren’t there.
There’s more, too. Sadie and Sawyer both have nightmares of repressed trauma – a thing lurking in their closet and terrorizing them. But specifically, Sadie has a dream of the monster forcing itself down her throat in the dark, on the floor of her room. It’s upsetting imagery, but beyond that, it’s imagery that invites us to think about what it might actually be an analogue for. Perhaps I’m projecting my own trauma – my grandfather and Catholic school teachers orally raped me between the ages of 3 and 6 – but it’s hard to not see this as a stand-in for sex abuse. For years, my brain tried to make my trauma into a number of “boogeymen” before I realized the simplest answer was the truth. All those nightmares and hallucinations had context, and I was able to recall them with greater precision.
My read on The Boogeyman is that Will groomed and impregnated Sadie’s mom, then proceeded to gaslight her through her life until finally killing her. This is the monster’s long game – to capture, terrorize, and ultimately enslave multiple generations of women under one family. A familiar, intimate evil that goes unnoticed by most. The monster recognizes this and uses every trick at his disposal to mislead Sadie into thinking she’s bested evil. Its manipulations and diversions make up the tapestry of the film – trickery and spectacle meant to comfort us. Monsters aren’t real, we know, and as soon as we see the lanky CG specter burn alive, we feel a certain “evil is punished” catharsis. But what if this, too, is an illusion? We know – thanks to the ending – that the monster is still kicking around and following Sadie. Who’s to say this was not an illusion the monster conjured? One last practical joke before it follows Sadie for knowing too much? The mind wanders – and King’s original story practically invites this read.
Whatever social politics or commentary may lurk in The Boogeyman’s shadows are only aided by Savage’s expert direction. He wields jump scares, long hallways, and dark shadows like a true professional; his movie is a top-notch Halloween Horror Nights experience manifested into a 99 minute film. You don’t mind the cliches because – as I mentioned – they’re assembled into such a compelling diorama, you just want to comb over every detail and let it scare you. Fear is consensual for me and films. Something has to earn my suspension of disbelief, my desire to be scared in a controlled environment. It’s like role play. The Boogeyman not only earned my suspension but wrested it from me and made me shriek at even the most obvious pops.
20th Century Studios seems to be Disney’s new “for adults” imprint, which lets them put out riskier stuff like Crawdads, Barbarian, and a Fede Alvarez Alien. While it’s a depressing end for one of the most venerated and risky studios in Hollywood history, films like The Boogeyman are a nice consolation prize. Horror that leaves you with something to chew on, something to take with you into your daily life, isn’t usually the domain of these big-budget deals. It’s usually easier to make something totally stupid up (A Quiet Place), play on conventional suburban fears (The Black Phone,) or turn into an action movie (The Purge.) The Boogeyman, thankfully, avoids all of these inclinations and plays its hand close. The true nature of the evil in this film, what it wants, and how it persists are murky mires for us to slog through in the weeks, months, years that follow. In that sense, Savage understands how to adapt King: let the ideas do the heavy lifting and leave the rest to the imagination – and throw in some jump scares along the way.
Because horror, too, is a trauma. Images, sounds, ideas that make us look under the bed or check over our shoulders. It’s meant to upset and unsettle us – to play on our fears. Fears that are informed by things that have happened to us or to people we care about. The things that make us feel vulnerable, like children cowering in our cribs, like cavemen around the fire at night. To fear is to have trauma; to have trauma is to fear. To divorce this experience from the genre is to deny reality, reject humanity, and admit – quite tacitly – that you don’t understand it.
The Boogeyman, thankfully, does. One of the year’s best.
stray thoughts
I really loved Marin Ireland’s turn as an unhinged survivor. She brings a dirty, sad energy to the movie that shows Sadie — perhaps — how her future might turn out. It plays on the fear every traumatized person has that they’ll succumb under the weight of their mental illness.
To harp on the dad thing more, the beastie in the original short is also a therapist named Dr. Harper. Now, you could argue this is a red herring, but I’d counter that the in-text diversion (Sadie’s own therapist) is the actual herring. In my read, the monster successfully traps Sadie in a fucked-up monster room to be killed while he walks out — scot-free — with Sawyer.
The monster looks cool. Not really much I could do with that in the review, but I love the use of CG here. It’s minimal, it’s dark, and it’s creative. The blood-sucking and hand-mouth effects, specifically, were very memorable.
Sophie Thatcher is wonderful.
There’s a very clever sequence with a video game’s default animations and lighting that will be relatable to anyone who’s ever stayed up all night playing a video game in the dark.
man this really was one of the better things last year. I think it deserved a higher place on my top ten. come to think of it, I’m not sure it even turned up! oop.