The Boogeyman

Of all the Stephen King adaptations…The Boogeyman is…certainly one of them.

All kidding aside, this 2023 effort is decidedly in the middle of the pack – that pack being, the capable, if unspectacular, It, and the workmanlike re-imagining of Pet Sematary (the polar extremes are, the exemplary Gerald’s Game, The Shining, and The Mist, counterbalanced by the execrable The Children of the Corn (2022), Carrie (2013), and In the Tall Grass).

Will Harper (Mindy Project’s Chris Messina) is a psychotherapist who runs an office out of his home. He gets a visit from a disturbed interloper, Lester Billings, who doesn’t have an appointment. As an aside, who in horror named Lester is socially well-adjusted? There’s awkward Lester from Scarecrow, crazy Lester from Slaughterhouse, chainsaw specialist/cannibal Lester from Lucio Fulci’s Touch of Death, psycho Lester from The Girl with No Name…And of course, outside the genre there’s Lester from American Beauty…

Anyway, Lester has a creepy wild-eyed disclosure for the doc: he feels that his kids have been killed by some strange entity. Dr. Harper goes to call the police (so much for doctor/almost-patient confidentiality), but it’s too late: attending officers, and the Doc’s daughter, Sadie, find Lester swinging to and fro.

Sadie takes things hard, understandably, and it is cold comfort to have a grief counsellor who’s also your pops.

And it’s inside the high school, rather than the Billings family home – a derelict crack den – that The Boogeyman comes alive: the cast of spirited young characters, Sadie’s pals, and their high school hall interactions especially post-trauma are on-point, a difficult thing to do.

It’s funny, it’s the day-to-day relationships that are actually just as, or perhaps more compelling, than the supernatural horror elements of The Boogeyman. Perhaps this would’ve made for a better family drama about a girl experiencing grief and how the dynamics of friendship are altered.

The Boogeyman looks great: director Rob Savage also did the polarizing Dashcam and the Zoom meeting horror, Host. And now he’s directed the two second-best horrors with “Host” and “Boogeyman” in their names (of course, there’s the K-horror, plus the definite article, and the other, by Ulli Lommel).

*** (out of 5)