The Boogeyman

Stephen King’s 1973 short story “The Boogeyman” gave me a few sleepless nights when I was a kid. For King, the tale arose from his fears of his children dying. For kids, it was even scarier: a monster could come for you in the night, and your parents couldn’t stop it. The story is told by Lester Billings, who has lost three of his young children to what they described as “the boogeyman,” a thing that hunkers down in dark closets, waiting to strike. Lester isn’t very relatable — he doesn’t seem to like his wife or kids, and he’s actually kind of a huge prick — so we suspect, like others in his life, that he himself killed the kids and made up the boogeyman as a sort of coping mechanism. But no, the boogeyman is very real … although we may wonder to what extent the monster has acted on a resentful father’s suppressed desire to be rid of the shackles of family.

The new movie version (there was a cheesy short version forty years ago, usually packaged with a much better Frank Darabont short also based on King) takes an entirely different psychological tack. For one thing, Lester — in the person of the likable, sometimes painfully vulnerable David Dastmalchian — is presented in his limited screen time as a genuinely bereaved father who needs to make sense of what happened. A better movie might have wanted to follow Lester on his journey, but he — and, sadly, Dastmalchian — exit the picture early, leaving us with the therapist Lester visits, Dr. Will Harper (Chris Messina), and his two daughters.

I won’t abandon him as quickly as the film does; I find David Dastmalchian a fascinating, hooded presence. He can be creepy or friendly (or both), and he just pulls us naturally into whatever his character is feeling. His haunted, agonized features promise a much more impactful horror movie than The Boogeyman turns out to be. When he goes, the movie I wanted goes with him, and I was stuck with Dr. Harper, sullen teen Sadie (Sophie Hatcher) and cute-as-a-button Sawyer (Vivien Lyra Blair) as they grappled with the death of Dr. Harper’s wife. Thematically, this family’s pain isn’t very satisfying because the boogeyman isn’t drawn to grief. It just wants to drink the life out of children, and the only reason it imprints on Dr. Harper and his daughters is that Lester (unknowingly) brought it there. It’s said their weakness in time of grief makes them easier targets for it, but I was still left wondering why this story wasn’t about Lester and his growing terror and madness when his children kept being killed.

It took three guys to work up the script pitting two brave girls against a monster who doesn’t like the light. A couple of clever moments come out of this, such as when the younger girl, playing a videogame, makes the TV screen flash just long enough to reveal the boogeyman creeping in the shadows of the room. Whoever designed, rendered and animated the monster has earned a salute, and director Rob Savage is shrewd about how much of the boogeyman he shows us, and when. The atmosphere is heavy, with just about the only levity coming from Sadie’s high-school friends, one of whom is annoying enough that we want the boogeyman to visit her.

Nine out of ten horror directors think a dynamic soundtrack will scare us, and Savage certainly isn’t the exception. The movie gets plotty and goal-oriented when it should be parking itself quietly in front of a closet door creaking open by itself and letting us fill the darkness with our own fearful demons. If you’ve seen enough horror movies, you know all the tropes and all the techniques. So sometimes a frightening sequence in an otherwise non-horror film — I always cite the room full of mummies in Raiders of the Lost Ark or the terrifying figure behind the dumpster in Mulholland Drive — hits us squarely in the fear center, because we don’t see it coming. We horror-movie buffs may still have fun at a horror movie — even The Boogeyman has its enjoyable bits — but as far as genuine scares, well, that ship sailed for most of us somewhere in our teens. The Boogeyman isn’t scary, but it could have been. The source material was right there. David Dastmalchian was right there. 

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