Would you believe this review is meaner than when I called Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2022) a flophouse?

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 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). 

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.

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. 

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. 

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. 

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.

BOTTOMLINE: 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.