THE BOOGEYMAN – Directed by Rob Savage and based on a short story by Stephen King, ‘The Boogeyman’ is a slick rendition of currently hip supernatural horror tropes that feels a million miles away from its shonky, but in my opinion amazing, early eighties Ulli Lommel namesake (with which it shares no other connection whatsoever). Not that it has much to do with the SK source material either, used here as little more than a narrative springboard. Here goes; life in the Harper household has hit something of a low ever since Sadie (Sophie Thatcher) and Sawyer lost their mum, and dad Will his wife. To make matters worse, therapist Will takes in a client one day who relates a disturbing tale of how his kids were killed one by one by an entity he calls The Boogeyman – before storming off into the recesses of the house to hang himself. The film goes on to concentrate on the Harper children, particularly Sadie, and how they deal with the newfound monster in their closet. ‘The Boogeyman’ doesn’t break any new ground and shares a very tried and tested approach to supernatural horror with many other recent US genre films. They all seem to be coming from the same place – take a dash of the ‘classics’ like ‘Poltergeist’, feed in a bit of the American mainstream’s absorption of the J-horror influence, take what you can from the ‘Insidious’ era boom, then wrap it up with nice photography and some spiel about trauma. ‘The Babadook’, ‘Hereditary’ and ‘The Boogeyman’ are very different films, but they all seem part of the same landscape. It’s not necessarily stale, but when anything becomes a template you either have to perfect it or mess with it. ‘The Boogeyman’ is going for ‘dressage’. It’s obvious that Savage is working a terrain he has a real feel for. He plays the film’s murky vibes for all they’re worth, and if the lighting, the photography and the palette each ring a little familiar, together they carry an accent and tone as relentlessly morbid as the weird mould that smothers the Harpers’ walls. It’s not simply technical orchestration though, Savage definitely knows how to spin a scene – there’s a masterful bit early on when, with a tiny narrative switch, a child’s therapy session transforms into a nightmare of pulsating red neon, and almost throwaway little moments that spice it up and are just so well done, like when an arm dangles over a toilet cubicle wall and we instantly feel a pending jump scare coming on – it never arrives, but then we realise how expertly we’ve been played. What drags it back a little are the typically hackneyed moves that are almost built into the format, and I wasn’t convinced by this idea of the boogeyman as a symbol of unprocessed grief, if that’s what the film was going for at all (if you’re going to deal with those kinds of themes then it helps to be less vague if there’s a monster included). Also, I have to admit that in idle moments I caught myself reminiscing about the 1980 ‘The Boogeyman’, and what a silly, brilliant f*cked up film THAT one is, one of my all-time faves and, come to think of it, proof you can do a cliché ridden exercise in the supernatural and STILL have it derail into something weird enough to endlessly fascinate. But none of that gets in the way of the fact that ‘The Boogeyman’ (2023) is a more than solid addition to the genre tendency that marries heavy feeling with jump scares, slick visuals and spooks.
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