Reviews
FEAR THE DARK (BEHIND YOUR EYELIDS): ‘The Boogeyman’ (2023) Review
I believe that cliché slashers and creature features that retread the same beats are fun. Cliché demon movies that do the same are not. Every Friday the 13th movie or Nightmare on Elm Street entry has a horde of imitators with varying levels of quality, the latter of which are especially entertaining and deserve an article all their own. But they’re forced to stand out, forced to make themselves special through their story or their directing or their creature design. Demon movies, often, aren’t backed into that corner and forced to fight. They’re the easiest for big studios to pump out with copy-paste plots ad infinitum, they take no risks, and they’re taken more seriously by both studios and audiences despite being infinitely more underwhelming, and usually sillier. Would you like to hazard a guess whether The Boogeyman cares to break that streak?
The Boogeyman: A Familiar Horror Story
The Boogeyman follows older sister Sadie and younger sister Sawyer, whose therapist father Will is one day confronted by a would-be patient named Lester, claiming his children were killed one by one by a malevolent entity that can mimic voices and lurked in shadows. Disbelieved by everyone, Will is driven to commit suicide in the family’s home. The entity then moves on to terrorize Sadie and Sawyer, beginning to brutalize the two as he grows nearer and nearer to taking them.
That sounds familiar, right?
Because this movie was so poorly advertised, I assumed it was a remake of the Eric Kripke-penned movie of the same name. No, it’s an adaptation of the Stephen King short story of the same name, though this is mostly different and radically inferior. Put aside the fact the movie is without a pulse, it is definitively the worst Stephen King adaptation yet, which is like adding a triple homicide charge onto whatever crime derailing a multi-million-dollar train would be (public endangerment? I don’t know, I’m a writer, not a lawyer).
Failing Stephen King’s Legacy
It’s bad enough that it rejects the massive sprawling spider-web that is Stephen King’s beautifully messy, interconnected works; an ironic choice given how spider-like the monster is. It also fails at the one thing King is most adept at: making you care for the characters being put through their paces. This is not The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon. This is not Under the Dome. It’s not even The Langoliers. It is, emotionally, borderline nothing. I could not tell you the characters’ names three hours after without searching them up. The stock characters we get are as lifeless as it gets, and it hurts to see this happen to even a minor, relatively unimportant piece of King’s bibliography.
It’s ironic double jeopardy that the movie bumbles as it steals its whole third act from Stranger Things season 1, because 21 Laps Entertainment, who produced this movie, ALSO produces Stranger Things, a show which at least understood the basic elements of what makes King stories great. It’s like a matryoshka doll of aping Stephen King’s works! I’d be impressed if I wasn’t so ANNOYED.
Lackluster Performances in a Big-Budget Horror
Beyond the realm of King, let’s touch on those performances. For a movie with a $35 million budget, the cast sure doesn’t say $35 million budget. I don’t mean they lack star power, just that they lack screen presence. When it comes to performances, there are two redeeming ones: Dastmalchian as bereaved and haunted father Lester, and Vivien Lyra Blair as little sister and “boogeymagnet” Sawyer. Everybody else generally faceplants through a dark corridor several times over.
Sophie Thatcher’s Underwhelming Role
This is a shock since Sophie Thatcher is a great actress. If you haven’t seen her in Yellowjackets, you’ve probably seen her in the short film Blink, where she carries the entire performance through her eyes alone as a paralyzed woman haunted by a monster. If you haven’t seen that, watch it here.
But here, it’s abundantly clear that either Thatcher is actively fighting to phone it in, or subject to some of the worst directing available. This also doesn’t make any sense because I know from Host and Dawn of the Deaf (which you can watch below for proof!) that Rob Savage is an outright INCREDIBLE director who knows how to lead his actors! Surely, it’s not him being intimidated by the scale of things, since he’s proven he can manage low-budget and more official affairs with equal skill. Something fishy is going on.
Studio Interference and a PG-13 Letdown
Of course, readers, all this coupled with a neutered PG-13 rating and a lot of hype-building nonsense articles about being too scary means I smell a whole lot of studio interference. And as much as I can sympathize, I can’t in good conscience recommend this movie because I know they’re not responsible. It hasn’t had time to get its Blair Witch 2 treatment, it hasn’t aged enough in 24 hours.
In terms of technical details, the film ranges from nice to disappointing. Savage’s directing is good, as usual, but you would think a movie this focused on playing with light and dark would be better lit. I’ll give it credit where credit is due, The Boogeyman has a handful of good jumpscares that hinge on flashing and flickering lights, and despite how needlessly loud they are, the visual build-up is effective. It’s just a shame the best one was spoiled in the trailer.
Toothless Horror and Uninspired CGI
When we do get to the action in the light with our titular boogey oogey, it’s all toothless as far as these movies go, with everything going blurry and cutting away just as the truly terrible stuff is happening. You never have a sense anyone, most of all Sawyer, is in danger, or that the Boogeyman even wants to kill them that much. What else would you expect from a PG-13 horror movie? I don’t need everything to try and outpace Terrifier 2 levels of nastiness. I just want a bit more peril in my movie which is fundamentally about parents leaving their children alone and the horrors that concept entails.
(And splurge on a bit more blood if you’re going to rip someone in half. Come on, cheapo.)
But above all, this movie’s greatest crime is having the same old uninspired CGI creature design since the late 2010s (i.e. the studio screaming, “We wanted something Javier Botet would play without actually having to pay Javier Botet or makeup artists because we hate actors, and we hate practical effects artists even more!”).
And all of that would be fine if they just didn’t show it so much. I feel like by the end, I’ve seen more of the creature than I have of Sadie or Sawyer. This is impossible given its only 99 minutes, but somehow even that is too long. I’m aware it sounds drastic, but this could stand to be 8 or even 10 minutes shorter for the sake of brevity. Not that the film is badly paced, quite the opposite. Just that its good pacing is wasted on an unoriginal story.
The Boogeyman: A Forgettable Horror Flick
And so, The Boogeyman (2023), is like many of its “the demon has been passed onto you, and you must defeat it to save your family” counterparts: you’ve seen this movie, ten thousand times. Which I would be okay with if it just grew a personality and stopped hiding behind the ajar door. It fully fails to capture everything that makes being a child, or hell, even an adult staring into pure dark scary. It doesn’t relish the quiet, it clumsily dances in loudness to little entertainment value. It might work well as someone’s first horror film to give them an idea of genre tropes, but it doesn’t work for me, and probably won’t for you.
I have made it a personal principle of mine to avoid telling people not to watch movies, even if they suck. But don’t waste money on a ticket and steer clear until this comes to streaming or cable. And even then, you’re better off watching something on Shudder. We’ve got more than enough recommendations. Take your pick.
Luz: The Flower of Evil is a movie simultaneously charged with and mired in ambition. It’s genuinely comical how overly ambitious of a first-time film it is for writer-director Juan Diego Escobar Alzate: a microbudget, shot on location in the mountains of Colombia, character driven psychological horror film meant to explore the very nature of good and evil while also tackling cults and misogyny.
So, it’s shocking how much of it works. Not all of it works, not at all, but it is cohesive enough to serve as a surprising experience with the colorful aesthetic it employs and incredibly dark places it goes to.
What Is Luz: Flower of Evil About?
After the death of their mother Luz, three sisters in a rural cult community find their faith waning. The three are the centerpiece of an elaborate theology crafted by their cult leader father, a man who is becoming more difficult to deal with by the day. So, when he brings a mute boy into town, chaining him up and claiming he’s the people’s messiah, an already tense situation devolves into outright madness. What ensues is the slow dissolution of the cult, and the torturous end of an already fractured family.
Let this usual synopsis section also serve as a content warning: the film does depict sexual violence very early on, about 25 minutes into the film. It’s not Irreversible levels of horrifically long, but it’s also not particularly brief and still graphic content by its nature. It can be difficult to stomach, so I’m mentioning it now for those who would rather avoid that sort of thing.
A Ponderous Arthouse Folk Horror About Good and Evil
The film has shocking moments, but it’s not very interested in shock value. This is first and foremost a slow burn, a piece of arthouse folk horror that is more about bleeding out than it is about a violent demise. The most obvious comparisons are to The VVitch and Midsommar, but even that feels like an inappropriate mix, even when it leans towards Aster’s commercial darling or Egger’s colonial nightmare.
Fundamentally, Luz is a study about people who mythologize suffering and cruelty and excuse it as being driven by outside spiritual forces rather than their own decisions. It’s about deconstructing harmful religious and cult mentalities, and it wears its philosophy on its sleeve (aggressively so). Alzate creates a visually and textually fascinating meltdown of his characters and the community they find themselves within.
I would say it’s a “descent into madness” if it didn’t feel clear that the characters were already in a tailspin right at the film’s outset. The script, especially through its second act, starts to feel repetitive and a little simplistic, with a somewhat anticlimactic ending and dialog that starts to feel less naturalistic and more tedious. But it’s an interesting dissection of a family, even if it’s rough around the edges.
Hyperreal Sense of Color, But Shaky Directing and Writing
The film’s most obvious and striking feature is its hyperrealist palette, bearing a rich Technicolor aspect that permeates throughout the entire runtime. Colorist Felipe Martinez U paints the mountainous countryside with such vibrancy, a simple but very effective contrast to the dying days of a cult the story centers on; bleak, muddy times, punctuated by vibrant nature all around. Aesthetically, it’s pretty clearly visually inspired by the early works of Pedro Almodóvar and the visual warmth of Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man.
Even the naturalistic tendencies of Terrence Malick make an appearance here, though how much of that is just in the gorgeous location scouting and how much is actually emulated by Alzate is up for debate. All around, the film lacks polish. The camerawork is amateurish in some ways, slightly cramped and occasionally uninspired in its framing. Sometimes the oversaturated look of the film can feel a little saccharine and heavy, but the pop of color here feels purposeful enough that I can forgive it as being highly stylized rather than trying to mask the weak points of a first-time director.
Is Luz: The Flower of Evil Worth the Watch?
In the search for great Latin American horror, Luz was an odd duck to stumble upon to be certain. But I’m a champion of strange birds with a lot of character, so you do the math.
Luz: The Flower of Evil is a struggle of a film, hard to watch at points despite how visually appealing it can be. It’s a brutal, bleak piece of psychological folk horror that certainly has a thin audience and will test the patience of even those the premise appeals to. But it does have as much substance as it does style, even when it treads into murky waters, and for that I think it’s worth the watch.
If you’re not watching Indonesian horror, you’re missing out. The region is producing some of the craziest genre movies around right now, thanks in no small part to the efforts of writer-director Joko Anwar. His latest, Ghost in the Cell, which celebrated its North American premiere at Fantastic Fest 2026, combines everything we love about the filmmaker’s work—supernatural scares, inventive kills, and gnarly gore—along with a strong vein of comedy and political satire.
What is Ghost in the Cell About?
Ghost in the Cell centers around Dimas (Endy Arfian), a journalist whose life falls apart after he tries to run a story on corporate corruption and mysterious worker deaths. Wrongfully convicted of the horrific murder of his boss, Dimas finds himself with a one-way ticket to Cell Block C, where he quickly meets a colorful cast of prisoners—the good, the bad, and the seriously nasty. Among the good guys, there’s Anggoro (Abimana Aryasatya), who is constantly getting into trouble for defending fellow inmates, and Six (Yoga Pratama), who claims he can see people’s auras.
As if Dimas’ situation couldn’t get any worse, his arrival seems to trigger a series of brutal killings in the prison. Bodies are showing up mangled beyond recognition and displayed in positions that wouldn’t look out of place in Hannibal. It soon becomes clear that Dimas isn’t behind the murders, which begs the question: what did he bring in with him?
Anwar Embraces Horror-Comedy Whole-Heartedly
Prison is a scary place, and Anwar makes great use of the setting, with the action moving from the dingy showers where predators lurk to the bleak cellblock where inmates are at the mercy of their captors and the cafeteria where rival gangs eye each other up with ill intent.
But for all the human misery contained within the film, Ghost in the Cell is ultimately a horror-comedy, one that isn’t afraid to lean into broad slapstick and quippy dialogue when it wants to raise a chuckle. The tonal shifts can take a little while to adjust to, especially if your previous experience with Anwar comes from his more serious horror outings like Impetigore. This might be a problem if the film wasn’t actually funny, but Ghost in the Cell has enough laugh-out-loud moments to make you forget about any whiplash.
Ghost in the Cell Is a Genre-Bender to the Max
Comedy isn’t the only new flavor that Anwar has tossed into the mix. In Ghost in the Cell, dance sequences and martial-arts fight choreo sit side-by-side with some of the most extreme gore scenes seen outside a Terrifier movie in recent years. Then there’s the eerie way the spirit presents before it kills (trypophobia sufferers, beware) and the extensive critique of political corruption, power, and inequality. It’s an everything-and-the-kitchen-sink approach that shouldn’t work on paper, but under Anwar’s assured hand, it does.
It helps that for all the slapstick, the film lands a surprisingly earnest message, amplified by its vast ensemble cast. Dimas and Anggoro at times feel like main characters, but everyone in Ghost in the Cell has a big part to play, and that’s the point: in seemingly impossible circumstances, there’s strength in unity.
Ghost in the Cell Is an Endlessly Entertaining Blend of Goofiness, Heart, and Gore
If you’re looking for nonstop scares, you won’t find them in Ghost in the Cell. What you will find is a delightful blend of horror, comedy, and action that is apt to leave you grinning from ear to ear.
The film doesn’t skimp on the gore, throwing flesh and fluids at every surface. But it’s also charmingly goofy, with a cast that doesn’t take itself too seriously and a script that’s all too happy to devolve into a comedic dance scene when it feels like the spirit might strike. In every sense, Anwar is doing the most, and the end result is a film where there’s nary a dull moment in sight.
