The Boogeyman - Review Thread

The Boogeyman is apparently based on an early Stephen King short story but the trailers sure made it look like just another 2010s era jump scare ghost movie and by and large I’d say that the final movie does in fact feel more like the latter than the former. In fact if you didn’t tell me I don’t think I’d have really known that this was based on a King story at all as it lacks a lot of his usual voice and flourishes. The film instead tells a pretty standard haunted house story about a family that becomes besieged by some sort of spectral entity that is repelled by the light and seems to double as a sort of indirect manifestation of the trauma a teenage girl feels after losing her mother and also from a suicide that occurred in the family’s home after one of the father’s patients (he’s a psychologist) killed himself. The ghost’s behavior here will be pretty familiar to those who saw the 2016 film Lights Out, which was itself a pretty generic ghost movie, and some of the rest of the scares here really just seem reheated at this point. If this movie had come out around 2011 I might have been a little more impressed by it but we’ve had a decade plus of this exact kind of horror movie over and over again at this point and it all just feels very tired. It’s not impossible to do one of these the right way still (last year’s Smile was a fresh take on the format) but this one just doesn’t. It’s not an incompetent movie (the characters are likable enough and the visual style is serviceable) but it does not impress and I didn’t have much use for this.