The Boogeyman review: Decent scares and twists save this Stephen King adaptation from convention

In Stephen King’s 1973 short story The Boogeyman, a man named Lester Billings, laid out stiff as a corpse on his therapist’s couch, recounts the death of his three children. All of them, he insists, were slain by a creature living deep inside their bedroom closet. It’s an odd work, and more disturbing even than King’s usual output. Lester behaves appallingly in casual conversation, and it becomes easy to assume he’s simply constructed a fanciful lie in order to hide his own culpability. Not so fast! You can almost hear King letting out a mischievous giggle as he unspools the story’s final few sentences – not only is the boogeyman real, but he has one final trick up his sleeve.

Is Lester, then, absolved of all his crimes? Or is this creature some hellish tool of karmic punishment? It’s the same thorny question that drove director Rob Savage’s second feature, Dashcam, which made a conspiracy theory-spouting narcissist the target of a vampire’s wrath and then dared the audience to cheer on her torture. It was the kind of film that made Savage the ideal pick to adapt The Boogeyman – if only the studio were interested in what was on the page, though, and not what its generic title could offer the canon of easily consumed and forgotten summer horrors. Still, it’s better than most: well-constructed, well-acted and good for a few frights.

Lester appears only briefly here. He’s played by David Dastmalchian, an actor of such easy intensity that he’s swiftly become cinematic shorthand for “something bad’s about to go down”. The film continues King’s story by subsequently latching on to Lester’s therapist, Will Harper (Chris Messina), who’s a far more traditional horror hero – a kindly but emotionally repressed widower to two daughters, the cherubic Sawyer (Obi-Wan Kenobi’s Baby Leia, Vivien Lyra Blair) and gloomy Sadie (Yellowjackets’s Sophie Thatcher). No one in this trio has processed the death of the family matriarch and – bada-bing, Babadook – the Boogeyman enters their home as a metaphor for grief.

It may all sound a little tiresome on paper, but The Boogeyman has the right kind of talent on its roster. Screenwriters Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, behind A Quiet Place, and Mark Heyman, behind Black Swan, ground this rollercoaster of misery in a few, more humane touches. When Sadie first returns to school after the death of her mother, she’s greeted by a chattering chorus of “sorry”s. They all feel hollow and insincere. When she tries to talk to her dad, he shuts her down. Hard emotions are for a therapist’s ears only, or so he says. Thatcher plays these moments beautifully, from a place of total, internal collapse. Meanwhile, Blair – at a pitch-perfect level of cute – has the film’s best line delivery: “I’m trying not to die, thanks.”

Savage, for his part, applies much of the same mischievousness here as he did to his previous features (including his debut, the Zoom-based lockdown sensation Host). At first, the Boogeyman appears only as vague suggestions of limbs and eyes in the dark. When the creature reveals its full form, as is inevitable in this brand of mainstream horror, it swaps scary for gruesome. And while its design stays within the general wheelhouse of “long-limbed, saucer-eyed ghoul”, there’s a visceral twist ready to clamber out of its gullet in the film’s final stretch. The Boogeyman is conventional horror, comfortably elevated – the same old monster in a shiny, new hat.

Dir: Rob Savage. Starring: Sophie Thatcher, Chris Messina, Vivien Lyra Blair, Marin Ireland, Madison Hu, LisaGay Hamilton, David Dastmalchian. 15, 99 minutes.

‘The Boogeyman’ is in cinemas from 2 June