A literary master of horror, Stephen King has been both well and badly served by the cinema. Taken from a youth short story contained in the collection Dance of Death, The Boogeyman (The bogeyman) unfortunately falls into the second category, and not just a little. Everything in this horror film turns out to be lame.
The starting point is however ingenious, since it is based on the almost universal childish fear of the monster lurking in a closet or under the bed. We follow, alternately, the three members of a family in crisis: Sadie (Sophie Thatcher from the series Yellowjacketsconvincing), a dark teenager who is struggling to recover from the death of her mother, Sawyer, her smart little sister, and Will, their psychologist father who deals with his mourning by avoiding talking about the deceased.
The original short story, which is only a dozen pages long, is reproduced almost identically when a mysterious patient shows up in Will’s office. Will who is, without even taking into account his “badly shod shoemaker” side, the worst psychologist seen in recent memory in a film. offspring.
This may seem borderline irrelevant in the context of a film that first gives itself the mandate to scare. However, this aspect reveals a perceptible laziness of writing everywhere else.
Take the group of female students: one of them was once Sadie’s best friend (maybe she still is, it’s unclear), while the others are bullies. The film brings them back on a handful of occasions, but without ever doing anything significant with them: these students would not be there without the plot, for the most part, being changed.
In other words, these characters serve only to furnish. A subplot about the surviving mother of a family decimated by the entity is particularly ridiculous: filler, again.
do the wrong thing
This absence of any effort or narrative rigor from co-screenwriters Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, behind the overrated A Quiet Place (A quiet corner) and the flop 65, which they also realized, generates a series of improbable situations where everyone does the wrong thing. This, with boring regularity.
To paraphrase the late critic Roger Ebert, The Boogeyman seems to take place in a world where horror films do not exist: this is the only possible explanation for the stupid actions observed. Thus the characters do not know, among other examples, that it is better to avoid going to explore the dark basement of a house which we already know is home to a monster.
If at least the sequences in question generated real anxiety, but no: we focus on the momentary shock rather than the establishment and development of real tension. The film is sometimes startled, but never scary.
It’s all the more disappointing coming from director Rob Savage, whose ingenious Host, a horror film camped on interposed screens, had a deserved surprise success. Although the recipe then spoiled with dash cam.
Presented with visual economy at the jaws (Jaws), a good point for the film, the creature is technically well designed, but it does not strike the imagination, visually speaking. The film either, far from it. Long, rough, The Boogeyman is as exciting as a “pad” of dust forgotten under a bed.