That the foundation of The Boogeyman doesn’t waver speaks to its strength as a rumination on a family’s immense loss. The central performances give the film its emotional resonance, the play on shadows makes you want to sleep with the lights on, and the notes on grief can cut deep. The less you see the threat, the more The Boogeyman works. 

In a scene from Rob Savage’s The Boogeyman, adapted from a Stephen King short story of the same name, Sadie Harper (Sophie Thatcher) stares intently at a flickering candle. She pleads with her late mother for a sign of ethereal presence. If the flame sways to the left, Sadie will know that she is not alone.

Grief can be terribly lonely – whether it’s the leftover space in a room somebody once inhabited or not having a safe space to talk about your rollercoaster of emotions. Isolating as this experience can be, there is something communal about it. Many will have gone through loss at one point or another to various degrees. And when you can’t make sense of a world forever changed by loss, you question: who else feels this way? Films can be an incredible comfort, and a mirror held up to experience, too. The horror genre in particular often sees characters navigating the root of their pain and trying to make sense of something that feels otherworldly. Horror preys on the vulnerable, as The Boogeyman does to give the familiar ‘monster in the closet’ trope a chilling psychological layer. 

The mythic lore of the Boogeyman is a strong metaphor for how grief shrouds your imagination and stimulates projections. Since the Boogeyman is essentially a blank slate — an entity with no particular appearance that is the same for everyone — it shape shifts according to your fears and vulnerabilities. In Savage’s film, it occupies safe spaces such as bedrooms, which for children especially are a sanctuary. It also feeds in the absence of light — partial to darkened door frames and closets, and of course, under the bed. The Boogeyman perils over characters who are emotionally in the dark, as the Harper family are after the sudden loss of their matriarch, so it’s no surprise that the Harpers become its new family to feed on. With a compelling performance by Sophie Thatcher to light the way forward, The Boogeyman elaborates on the bare bones of its source material with creepy tension and well-earned jump scares. 

Stephen King’s short story is chilling on its own accord. It’s about a man named Lester Billings who walks into a therapist’s office and explains that the Boogeyman killed all three of his children in their bedrooms. The 2023 adaptation keeps this narrative, but smartly fleshes out its premise to build on King’s foundation. From the screenwriters of A Quiet Place and A Quiet Place Part II (Bryan Woods, Scott Beck) and Black Swan (Mark Heyman), The Boogeyman introduces new characters and centers on the collective grief of a family. The titular creature parallels one of the scariest things about grief: how it can lurk in the background of everyday life and creep up on you without warning, while the rest of the world keeps spinning.

The film’s protagonist Sadie (Thatcher) doesn’t want to move on; she holds onto her mother’s memory as much as possible. It’s all in the details: smelling her clothing, wearing her dress to school, keeping an old bag of lunch she had packed. These small moments, which one can easily take for granted, convey Sadie’s need to feel connected to her mother. While in a state of deep grief, she’s also navigating high school and mean girls, plus an important responsibility back at home: being there for her younger sister Sawyer (Vivien Lyra Blair). Sadie starts to take on a maternal role towards Sawyer, who herself is learning how to grieve by observing her surroundings. Sawyer becomes the film’s source of showing how the Boogeyman shrouds imagination and preys on those most vulnerable. As the most innocent in her family, Sawyer becomes most susceptible to noticing scary shadows in the dark. Both sisters are dealing with the threat in different ways, while also sharing in the experience of emotional abandonment. 

The film explores a different side of grief through the girls’ father Will Harper (Chris Messina), a therapist navigating his patients’ emotions while struggling to share his own. Along with his wife’s belongings, he boxes up conversations and memories about her. He shuts out his personal reality and focuses on work, which takes a twisted turn when a disturbed Lester Billings (David Dastmalchian) drifts into Will’s home office one day. Having heard about Will’s wife, Lester crosses the bridge of grief for an impromptu appointment and simultaneously describes a parent’s worst nightmare along with a universal childhood fear. What makes their exchange especially unpleasant is that by this point in the film, the titular role’s threat had been well-discerned. The film has an uncompromising opening scene that places you in the fear of pure innocence. It’s a haunting watch that sets the tone for the rest of the film. Through use of effective camera angles and bone chilling voice work, the Boogeyman’s introduction adheres to the tried-and-true direction that less is more. 

If you ever lay in bed at night and stare at the darkened space of a door ajar, you might be able to relate to the feeling that imagination can be scarier than reality sometimes. Glimpses of the Boogeyman are far more unsettling than the full picture could ever be, which speaks to the power of projection. The majority of the film smartly relies on shadows, lights, and sounds to evoke fear. The use of lighting in particular has neat effects, one being a sphere-shaped nightlight that rolls towards strange noises and creates anticipation for what might be revealed. As well, the lingering shots of dark corners and closets establish a threatening presence in an understated way. But of all the creature’s features, the voice work by Daniel Hagen is most impressive. The muffled, strained pleas and incorporation of human sounds are genuinely nightmarish. In addition to the Boogeyman itself, the lead-ups to moments of discovery are strongly plotted, whether it’s hesitating to open a door handle, or following noises down to a basement. Adding to the suspenseful atmosphere are Eli Born’s cinematography and Patrick Jonsson’s score, which help to tease out the Boogeyman’s features at a decent pace.  

A significant part of The Boogeyman’s draw are the performances. While the characters can feel quite derivative at times, the actors tap into various stages of grief that resonate beyond. Sophie Thatcher plays Sadie with incredible conviction. Much like her work as teenaged Natalie on Showtime’s Yellowjackets, Thatcher is a force of nature on screen. Sadie’s overall encounters with the Boogeyman exist on a much more psychological level than what her sister and their father experience. The more she tries to connect with her mother’s spirit, the deeper her mind sinks into an otherworldly place where apparitions manifest. Thatcher brings layered humanity to the role and makes the character feel like a real person you could connect with. Vivien Lyra Blair also impresses as Sawyer; her character has some of the most intense scenes in the film, and Blair’s way of portraying pure terror adds to the film’s visceral quality. And while Chris Messina is mostly just on the sidelines of this story, his standout moments shed reverberating light on the character’s grieving process. 

The wrapping up of a story can often be where horror films spiral to the point of no return. The Boogeyman follows a familiar structure of the genre itself. Once a threat is established, the characters embark on the path of figuring out what it means and how to stop it. While the film does stumble in its third act, it’s more to do with the supporting elements than the story’s core foundation. The act could have benefited from Savage’s ‘less is more’ approach, which lets fear of the unknown dominate how scenes unfold visually. As well, the use of a mysterious supporting character (played by Marin Ireland) falls into the trappings of plot convenience more than anything else. That the foundation of The Boogeyman doesn’t waver speaks to its strength as a rumination on a family’s immense loss. The central performances give the film its emotional resonance, the play on shadows makes you want to sleep with the lights on, and the notes on grief can cut deep. The less you see the threat, the more The Boogeyman works. 

Grade: B+

Oscar Prospects: 
Likely: None
Should Be Considered: None

Release Date: June 2, 2023
Where to Watch: In Theaters