The Boogeyman movie review & film summary (2023) | Roger Ebert (2024)

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The Boogeyman movie review & film summary (2023) | Roger Ebert (1)

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Rob Savage has proven twice that he can aim higher than “The Boogeyman,” an emotionally numbing horror movie and counter-intuitive self-challenge to make PG-13 horror scary. The filmmaker’s previous ventures—“Host,” about a haunted Zoom seance, and “Dashcam,” about a rapping anti-vaxxer’s live-streamed descent into hell—led with innovation and provocation. They’re as current as a WiFi signal and in turn, helped push horror forward. Primed to be this June’s Horror Movie of the Month, “The Boogeyman” is packed with familiar beats and little personality, the horror equivalent of a rising music star making a fan-friendlyChristmas album as their biggest project yet.

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To be fair, it’s not the best source. When "The Boogeyman"short story came from “The Mind of Stephen King,” as this movie's poster boasts, the mythic creature was stretched into a broad embodiment of fear and paranoia, conveyed in a two-person conversation and capped with a cheesy twist. Now, adapted here by “A Quiet Place” writers Scott Beck & Bryan Woods, and Mark Heyman, the dark-loving, door-bursting, child-terrorizing night monster’s significance is even broader with the significance of loss.

Savage has thrown together a wonky seance for PG-13 horror movies from over a decade ago, with the smothering self-seriousness of recent “elevated horror” debates intact. It’s both soft around the edges from its reliance on peek-a-boo jump scares and also so deadset on being the latest gut-wrenching story about grief, this time dragging a therapist father, Chris Messina’s Dr. Will Harper, and his two daughters, Sadie (Sophie Thatcher) and the younger Sawyer (Vivien Lyra Blair) through the murk. The family’s mother passed away a year ago in a car accident.

We sense the grief in the home’s stark atmosphere and the craven blacks and browns from production designer Jeremy Woodward and cinematographer Eli Born that make darkness prevalent even in the daytime. But “The Boogeyman” does not have the emotional tact to make us feel such vital sorrow, only pity for the sisters (Thatcher, giving an excellent genre performance, is our lifeline not to lose interest entirely). Instead, in between some decent flashbang sequences where the girls are terrorized at night by something we only see in brief moments, we are stuck with a dour tone that numbs us and makes the film feel much longer than it is.

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The Boogeyman enters the Harpers' hollowed-out and extra creaky home in the form of Lester (from the short story), played here by David Dastmalchian at his most cryptic and also as a type of character development shorthand. After sharing a gruesome tale about the death of his children and a strong monster, he sneaks away and hangs himself in the dead mother’s art closet, planting the monster in their home.

Lester’s suicide is just another death in the Harper world, and like the loss of Will’s wife and the children’s mother, he doesn’t really want to talk about it. In ways both proverbial and literal, Sadie and Sawyer are left in the dark. Sadie is a vulnerable loner and wears one of her mother’s dresses to school only for a bully to smash food all over it; Sawyer is so timid that she sleeps with a giant light ball. Both of them just want some inner peace, which is disrupted by aggressive bumps in the night and closet doors that suddenly burst open or slam shut.

Savage likely got the job to direct “The Boogeyman” from how he previously used negative space and points-of-view, whether it’s the darkness behind someone on a candle-lit Zoom call or the fuzzy image of a figure standing in the middle of the road, waiting for a camera’s focus to adjust. There are only such passing thrills in this movie, which has a formulaic approach to scares that rely greatly on sound mixing, false alarms, and kids in danger. In the film’s first half, it makes for a sometimes uneasy—but hardly scary—atmosphere. The use of spare light and soundis its most clever facet, like when Sawyer tumbles her big light ball into the unknown down the hallway, hoping she isn't right about what's on the other side.

Throughout this modern-set story, Savage’s technological sense is curiously neglected. For all the talk about how the Boogeyman hates light, the script more or less ignores the handiness that a cell phone flashlight could have in thwarting its creature or inspiring more clever screenwriting. Such an omissionbecomes glaring as the monster's terrorloses its scant power over us later on. To put it in Stephen King-speak, isn’t Pennywise from “It” much more frightening as a clown in the distance than a giant spider up close? Savage’s “The Boogeyman” is a dated pest control saga in need of an update.

Available in theaters on June 2nd.

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Film Credits

The Boogeyman movie review & film summary (2023) | Roger Ebert (9)

The Boogeyman (2023)

Rated PG-13for terror, violent content, teen drug use and some strong language.

98 minutes

Cast

Sophie Thatcheras Sadie Harper

Chris Messinaas Will Harper

Vivien Lyra Blairas Sawyer Harper

David Dastmalchianas Lester Billings

Marin Irelandas Rita Billings

Madison Huas Bethany

Maddie Nicholsas Natalie

Mabel Tyleras Abby

Director

  • Rob Savage

Writer (based upon the short story by)

  • Stephen King

Writer (story by)

  • Scott Beck
  • Bryan Woods

Writer

  • Scott Beck
  • Bryan Woods
  • Mark Heyman

Cinematographer

  • Eli Born

Editor

  • Peter Gvozdas

Composer

  • Patrick Jonsson

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The Boogeyman movie review & film summary (2023) | Roger Ebert (2024)

FAQs

What is The Boogeyman movie 2023 about? ›

What happens at the end of The Boogeyman 2023? ›

Eventually, the monster is defeated, and Will, Sadie and Sawyer escape their house, which is now engulfed by flames. We next see the family at the office of psychiatrist Dr Weller, who Sadie and Sawyer had been meeting throughout the movie to help with the loss of their mother.

Is there anything inappropriate in The Boogeyman? ›

Parents need to know that The Boogeyman is a horror movie based on Stephen King's classic short story about a darkness-lurking creature that preys on a family grieving the loss of a parent/partner. Violence includes children in peril, monster attacks (a child is thrown across a room), shotgun blasts, a teen's

Why is Roger Ebert important? ›

Roger Ebert (born June 18, 1942, Urbana, Illinois, U.S.—died April 4, 2013, Chicago, Illinois) was an American film critic, perhaps the best known of his profession, who became the first person to receive a Pulitzer Prize for film criticism (1975).

What is the plot of The Boogeyman movie? ›

What is the theme of The Boogeyman? ›

The central theme of "The Boogeyman" is the power of fear. It explores how fear can consume and control individuals, leading them to question their own sanity. The story also touches on the themes of parental guilt and the loss of innocence.

Is The Boogeyman Based on a true story? ›

The boogeyman is not real, but most cultures have some version of the boogeyman myth, although they go by many, many different names. The actual "boogeyman" name most likely originated sometime in the 19th century, but the mythology of these kinds of "monsters" have been around for much longer than that.

What did the ending of The Boogeyman mean? ›

The Boogeyman's Ending Real Meaning Explained

Despite Sadie and her family getting to a much better place, with Will openly talking about the loss of his wife and The Boogeyman seemingly dying in physical form, the film suggests that grief will continue to be prevalent in one's life no matter how much time has passed.

What is the meaning of the story the boogeyman? ›

Bogeymen may target a specific act or general misbehaviour, depending on the purpose of invoking the figure, often on the basis of a warning from an authority figure to a child. The term is sometimes used as a non-specific personification of, or metonym for, terror, and sometimes the Devil.

Is The Boogeyman movie really scary? ›

What to Know. The Boogeyman might fall short of its terrifying source material, but a spooky atmosphere and some solid performances help keep the chills coming. If you don't mind spending a lot of time waiting for things to happen, The Boogeyman is worth watching for some solid jump scares.

Is The Boogeyman worth watching? ›

The Boogeyman has become a great horror film based on a short story by Stephen King. The film is exciting and the makers respond well to the childish fears of a monster in the closet or under your bed. No unnecessary filth or an extremely bloody whole, no, The Boogeyman plays more with the viewer's imagination.

What happened to the mom on The Boogeyman? ›

Sadie & Sawyer's Mom Died: What The Boogeyman Reveals

The Boogeyman reveals that Sadie and Sawyer recently lost their mother in a car crash.

What did Roger Ebert say before he died? ›

Sometime ago, I heard that Roger Ebert's wife, Chaz, talked about Roger's last words. He died of cancer in 2013. “Life is but a tale, told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

What was Ebert's last review? ›

The last review by Ebert published during his lifetime was for The Host, which was published on March 27, 2013. The last review Ebert wrote was for To the Wonder, which he gave 3.5 out of 4 stars in a review for the Chicago Sun-Times. It was posthumously published on April 6, 2013.

What did Ebert believe in? ›

Friedrich Ebert (born February 4, 1871, Heidelberg, Germany—died February 28, 1925, Berlin) was a leader of the Social Democratic movement in Germany and a moderate socialist, who was a leader in bringing about the constitution of the Weimar Republic, which attempted to unite Germany after its defeat in World War I.

What story is The Boogeyman based on? ›

It is, we learn in the credits, indeed based on the King story of the same name, from his 1978 collection “Night Shift.” Sort of. A couple of the characters in the film share names with characters from the book, and one of them does similar things.

What is the monster in Boogeyman movie? ›

The Boogeyman is the titular main antagonist of the 2023 horror film The Boogeyman, based off the Stephen King short story of the same name. It is a monster of unknown origin that targets and murders entire families, usually ones that have experienced a loss of a family member.

Is The Boogeyman about depression? ›

Some kids have a traumatic past; they're confronted by a monster that doubles as a metaphor for depression.

Is The Boogeyman movie demonic? ›

The Boogeyman turns out to be a real demonic force. The demon threatens the ones he loves, so Tim decides to take action. BOOGEYMAN the movie is filled with scary scenes and scary supernatural encounters with the demonic title character.

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