The Boogeyman: Silly shocker fails to scare

Director Rob Savage offers a moderately nasty horror without it ever remotely achieving the levels of plausibility which would make it scary.

The gist is that therapist Will (Chris Messina) has disappeared into his own world pretty much after the death of his wife in a car crash, effectively leaving his daughters – high school student Sadie Harper and her younger sister Sawyer (Sophie Thatcher and Vivien Lyra Blair) – to their own devices as they navigate their own grief. When Sadie opens up to him about just what exactly she’s feeling, he shuts her down. He’s marginally better with his younger daughter but is frankly not much use to either of them. And then, one day, without an appointment, into his treatment room wanders a clearly haunted guy who proceeds to tell him that everyone thinks he murdered his three children, one by one, when it fact it was an off-the-leash monster wot did it. When Will shuffles off to get help, the guy promptly kills himself, in so doing dumping the monster on Will and his family.

It’s all based on a Stephen King short story and presumably we are supposed to see it all as an allegory of grief, the nasty monster – which is terrified of the light – symbolising the grief that stalks you in the darkness, takes over your mind and threatens to gobble you up whole. And maybe the film makes some sense if you explain it away in those terms. But there are certainly plenty of sillinesses which undermine it, not least the tugged-out tooth which inexplicably whizzes up the door frame. There’s also something rather odd about the alleged murderer’s house which Sadie visits in the hope of finding a few answers. It’s in a state of total rotting-down decay, and decaying in the middle of it all, gun in hand and with a few rather Heath Robinson traps set up to catch the monster, is his widow. It’s all very bizarre – almost as bizarre as why he is the boogeyman, not the bogeyman. Boogey suggests some kind of disco champion, and that’s one of the many things he most certainly isn’t.

But oddest of all is the semi-darkness the whole family seem to live in despite the fact they always seem to have plenty of lights on. None of the lights are any good. None of them shed terribly much light at all – and they don’t even wake up to the fact once they have realised that beastie is terrified of light. Another reason perhaps to consider him as grief personified. Once we get to the big conclusion, the characters are simply doing the things you’d expect them to do in a second-rate horror movie. I mean, would anyone in any circumstances, knowing there is a monster on the loose, wander down into a pitch-black cellar armed with only a hockey stick? Sadie duly does, and she’s probably the most sensible one of the lot. It all ends in a predictable conflagration – and even when it’s over, it’s not actually over with an odd little coda leaving you with something else to ponder. If you can be bothered. Which you probably won’t be. There are plenty of worse films around. The real horror of this one is that it is all so shockingly average.

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