The Boogeyman takes an important cue from Stephen King’s Dark Tower (2024)

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Stephen King devoted more than 4,000 pages to detailing the fantasy world of The Dark Tower, and yet by the end of Roland Deschain’s journey to the tower, there was still space shrouded in shadow. Specifically, todash space.

Before I understood “cosmic horror” as the defining mode of H.P. Lovecraft, King mesmerized me with the promise of a darkness between worlds, where violent titans lurked and an unlucky few lived out an eternity in foggy hell. The idea of todash creeps into other King books — The Mist and From a Buick 8 are biggies — but it’s always looming in the late Dark Tower novels. As Roland and his and ka-tet, Eddie, Susannah, and Jake, eventually learn, ancient advanced societies of Roland’s “Mid-World” parallel universe found ways to breach the fabric between realities and reach the todash space, and every being who beheld it seems to have agreed that it’s pure terror. The takeaway from the Dark Tower books: The unknown is better left unknown, and if the todash’s beasties ever find their way into your reality, run.

Technically, King’s cosmic world-building has nothing to do with The Boogeyman, the latest horror movie from Host and Dashcam director Rob Savage — but it was still on my mind for the full 98-minute runtime. Based on King’s short story of the same name, about a troubled father discussing his children’s death with a psychiatrist, and confessing that he believes something supernatural killed them. The Boogeyman is basically a haunted-house movie designed to scare the shit out of people via the human-forward approach that’s defined much of King’s work.

As high-schooler Sadie (Yellowjackets’ Sophie Thatcher) investigates the thing going bump at night in her sister’s closet, she’s staving off a mental anguish that she knows many other people have succumbed to. Life: it’s a lot to handle! Savage, working with writers Scott Beck and Bryan Woods (A Quiet Place) and Mark Heyman (Black Swan), give Thatcher lots to chew on as the center of a psychological drama that plays a bit like a studio-friendly take on The Babadook.

But make no mistake: The Boogeyman is real, and it’s ready to kill Sadie’s family. To quote The Dark Tower’s cowboy guardians, Savage has not forgotten the face of his father. The Boogeyman understands the duality of a King story.

The Boogeyman takes an important cue from Stephen King’s Dark Tower (1) Image: 20th Century Studios

While The Dark Tower books are populated with gunslinger knights, dimensional gateways, and killer AI-empowered trains, King also finds ways to wind them back down to human concerns. The universe is imploding, but so are the daily lives of his earthbound characters as they try to stay afloat. King makes the personal hurdles of addiction or loss feel as daunting as slaying an army of robotic raiders wielding lightsabers. (Yes, there are lightsabers in the Dark Tower series.) To complete his quest to the Tower and defeat the hellish being known as the Crimson King, the hero Roland needs to cling to a found family plucked from various eras in American history and learn to be a vulnerable, loving man. He also needs to kill anything that wanders out of the todash space.

Watching The Boogeyman, I felt the Dark Tower’s brand of cosmic horror squeezing tension out of the action on screen — maybe even some that wasn’t there, since The Boogeyman is simple, straightforward, and dangerously uneventful. The adaptation starts like the short story: David Dastmalchian (Dune, Prisoners, Suicide Squad) pops up to play the father, Lester Billings, a shattered man who can’t make sense of the monstrous form that has slain his children. His psychiatrist, Will Harper (Chris Messina) can barely hear him out. His wife was recently killed in a car crash, and he and his daughters Sadie and Sawyer (Obi-Wan Kenobi’s Vivien Lyra Blair) are all mourning.

That kind of death is a tragedy millions have suffered through in real life, but movies have sanded it down into Stock Emotion. The Boogeyman doesn’t reinvent the wheel, but a second shock compounds the dizzying grief: Shortly after Lester begs Will for help, he’s found strangled to death in the doctor’s home. Cops rule it a death by suicide. Will assumes they’re right. Sawyer knows it was The Boogeyman, and as the malevolent entity makes itself known to the whole family, Sadie does too.

The Boogeyman takes an important cue from Stephen King’s Dark Tower (2) Photo: Patti Perret/20th Century Studios

The adapted version of The Boogeyman is full of classically tailored scares and creeping mood. Even more so than Lights Out or James Wan’s Conjuring movies, Savage’s take on the creature feature is buttoned up and often overextended in the attempt to keep the Harper family’s bereavement at the center of the story. The action gets a bit repetitive: In the wake of Lester’s death, the film oscillates between Boogeyman attacks in the increasingly familiar Harper home, and Sadie’s trips to school, where she’s tormented for being a sad sack who wears her dead mom’s dresses. (Are high schoolers the real monsters? Makes you think.) Savage is playful about teasing out the dark corners of the home — whoever invented the cordless light ball deserves residuals on this film, given how often it rolls into the shadows to catch the silhouette of a spindly monster — but eventually, the jump scares wear thin.

The middle chunk might feel like a slog if not for Thatcher. From scene to scene, the 22-year-old actor conjures a sense of dread on cue, then shifts gears into the emo-teen energy an indie version of the movie might require. When the monster appears, she bursts into protector mode with full fire behind her eyes. Between Yellowjackets and The Boogeyman, I’m convinced she’s following in the footsteps of Sigourney Weaver and Jamie Lee Curtis as a do-it-all genre star.

Wrapped around this is the big what-if of the movie that I couldn’t shake: What is the Boogeyman? Where is the Boogeyman? Why is the Boogeyman? The film isn’t one of the great entries in the Grief Horror subgenre, but it might be exceptional King storytelling for how much it does and does not explain on that front. There are no walk-on cameos from Salem’s Lot characters to explain that our characters are fighting a being from the todash space, but when you know it’s King, you can’t help but wonder.

Because King so casually and constantly inserts Dark Tower crossover elements into otherwise unrelated work, it’s become easy to fill in lapses of logic with Dark Tower lore and see the characters as a bit deeper than they really are. Savage successfully bends the cosmic-horror element to his will in The Boogeyman, and for fans of King’s world(s), it’s fair to call it the best Dark Tower movie ever made — at least until we get a real one. Wait... they did what now?

The Boogeyman opens in theaters on June 2.

The Boogeyman takes an important cue from Stephen King’s Dark Tower (2024)

FAQs

What did Stephen King think about the boogeyman? ›

Savage says it "means the world" to be sanctioned by King, who has given readers and audiences some of the most iconic scares of our lives. "His opinion was the one that really counted," Savage said. "Showing him the movie was a really terrifying experience. He said that he loved it and that it terrified him.

Where does the boogeyman come from Stephen King? ›

"The Boogeyman" is a short story by Stephen King, first published in the March 1973 issue of the magazine Cavalier and later included in King's 1978 collection, Night Shift.

What does the boogeyman feed on? ›

As Lester puts it, the Boogeyman is a creature that feeds on human trauma and shows up when parents do not pay enough attention to their children. That's precisely why the monster decides to make Dr. Harper's house his home, as the therapist has failed as a father since his wife's passing.

Is the boogeyman related to Pennywise? ›

Trivia. The Boogeyman's pleasure in instilling fear in his victims before killing them recalls Pennywise/IT's similar pleasure in terrorizing his prey. It is not known, however, whether the modus operandi of the two monsters are somehow connected.

What is the meaning of The Boogeyman in the story? ›

The term bogey in the middle of the 19th century was a word for devil or demon. The Boogeyman's personality and appearance can vary greatly depending on the culture and country. Most of the time, the Boogeyman is depicted in a story as a creature who punishes misbehaving children.

Is The Boogeyman good or bad? ›

The Boogeyman is an easily forgettable horror movie that struggles to deliver genuine scares or explore emotional depth. Its derivative and predictable nature, underdeveloped characters and slow-paced plot contribute to its lacklustre impact.

Is Boogeyman based on a true story? ›

Interestingly, while The Boogeyman isn't based on a true experience, Savage has been influenced by another horror movie and how it used the night as a cover to kill.

What does 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 boogeyman legend story? ›

In America, Bogeyman urban legends describe him as a scary figure with no consistent shape or form. He hides under the bed, in dark corners, or in a child's closet waiting for his prey. In other countries, he's a man who wears all black with a sack and kidnaps bad children to either keep them or eat them.

What is the boogeyman afraid of? ›

Quotes. "The Boogeyman isn't just some ordinary Boggart that can be expelled through a simple Riddikulus. That thing is a Tulpa, a creature born from the dreams of mankind, or in his case, nightmare. He isn't just some embodiment of fear of the dark, he IS the fear of the dark, of the strange, of the unknown.

What does Boogeyman mean in slang? ›

countable noun [usu with supp] A bogeyman is someone whose ideas or actions are disapproved of by some people, and who is described by them as evil or unpleasant in order to make other people afraid.

Why is he called the boogeyman? ›

The word bogeyman, used to describe a monster in English, comes from the Middle English bugge or bogge, which means “a frightening spectre.” Bogeyman itself is known from the 15th century, though bogeyman stories are almost certainly much older.

What kills the boogeyman? ›

The hairspray runs out, but Sawyer douses the Boogeyman with lighter fluid and Sadie sets it ablaze with the lighter, causing the monster to burn to death and avenging the countless families it killed, including the Billings.

What Stephen King 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.

Who is Pennywise scared of? ›

Why is Pennywise scared of the turtle in 'IT' by Stephen King? - Quora. The turtle, Maturin, is an entity of the macroverse and the creator of the universe.

What does Stephen King fear the most? ›

The “King of Horror” Stephen King says he's afraid of literally everything. He's afraid of darkness, death, confined space, clowns, the number 13, spiders… Fear of water, darkness and cemeteries haunted Edgar Allan Poe for his whole life.

What did Stephen King say about monsters? ›

Monsters are real, and ghosts are real too. They live inside us, and sometimes, they win.

What does Stephen King think about horror movies? ›

King states that we use horror movies as a catharsis to act out our nightmares and the worst parts of us. Getting to watch the insanity and depravity on the movie screen allows us to release our inner insanity, which in turn, keeps us sane.

What is the point of view of The Boogeyman? ›

The story is told from the point of view of a third-person narrator. The narrator appears to have access to the thoughts and feelings of both Dr Harper and Lester Billings. The story shifts to first-person narrator when Lester tells his account, but it is hinted that he may be an unreliable narrator.

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