Critical popcorn

Ahead of the screening of Rob Savage’s latest horror film, he asked if anyone in the audience scared easily, before saying “you guys are f***ed.” The Boogeyman might not prove to be a true classic of the genre, but it more than delivers on the director’s promise.

Savage is quietly emerging as an exciting voices in modern horror cinema. He’s not yet a prestige director like Ari Aster or Robert Eggers, but is responsible for some of the most effective genre cinema out there. Host was a refreshing take on the often creaky found footage sub-genre, and one of the very few horror films to make an asset of the COVID restrictions (Ben Wheatley’s In The Earth is the other one).

The Boogeyman is Savage’s most conventional film to date, but is no less potent for that. Based on the Stephen King short story, it might not be as terrifying as the short story, but it works well as its own thing, and there’s a reason it won King’s seal of approval. With a child protagonist, a distracted parent and a genuinely unnerving monster, it feels like a film from the ’80s, but refreshingly it doesn’t do that thing where it appropriates the surface level aesthetics of the films it emulates. There’s no John Carpenter font, no synthesizer score and no retro aesthetic, instead Savage emulates the macro elements; the story and the characters, and the central theme of “Listen to your kids!”

The premise is fine if a little unoriginal; the Harper sisters, Sadie (Sophie Thatcher) and Sawyer (Vivien Lyra Blair) are mourning the death of their mother, while their therapist father Will (Chris Messina) seems unable to talk to them about his own grief. When a disturbed patient (David Dastmalchian) comes to him with a disturbing story of a monster that preys on children, it quickly becomes apparent that he has led something sinister to the Harper home.

The monster is wisely kept in the shadows for the majority of the run-time, with its design either obscured or shown in brief glimpses. However, when it is finally revealed in all its monstrous glory it’s worth the wait. It’s a nightmarish, unearthly design that recalls the primal monster from The Ritual, and the way it mimics the voices of the protagonists is reminiscent of the bear monster from Annihilation. The sound design is particularly eerie in these moments, demonstrating the intelligence and malevolence of the monster. Savage deploys a rasping mix of sing-song rhymes and unnatural, guttural noises, and the effect is wonderfully disconcerting.

The film is at its most potent when the monster is an elemental, ethereal force rather than a literal monster creature. It’s much easier to dismiss the leaps in logic / physics when it seems like something less tangible, less flesh and blood. Once characters start planning to trap it, the monster loses a lot of its mystery, and the film gets a little silly.

I don’t mind silly though, especially when the story moves so quickly and efficiently. There’s very little filler, aside from scenes of recovery that Savage apparently put in to allow the audience a breather between scares. Savage clearly went to the Val Lewton school of horror films, with a lot of genuinely terrifying moments that end with an abrupt cut to something else, with no explanation of how the characters extricated themselves from their apparently fatal encounter, alongside several admittedly well executed examples of the “Lewton Bus,” scenes that get the adrenaline pumping, even if they don’t make much impact on the story. I can envisage this annoying sections of the horror enthusiast community but I really didn’t mind it – when your story is so focused on a small group of characters, you can’t go crazy with the killings, and forcing more characters into the situation would just feel contrived. Savage stays true to his premise throughout – the central family is well developed and he never downplays their very real grief.

The performances are great without being showy – Thatcher is a plausible lead, and much better than her turn in The Book Of Boba Fett would have you believe. She and Blair have a natural chemistry (which often elevates the sometimes pedestrian script) and make believable siblings, whether they are being protective, making snarky comments or comforting each other in their grief.

As far as King adaptations go, this is a decent effort – it’s a little slight, and doesn’t linger after the credits have rolled, despite the half-hearted bit of sequel bait in the final scene. It’s not as thought provoking or intelligent as Mike Flanagan’s versions of Gerald’s Game or Doctor Sleep but is infinitely more scary, efficient and fun than Andy Muschetti’s two It films.

It might sound like I’m damning with faint praise but I’m honestly not. I have a lot of time for a small-scale, traditional horror film coming in and nailing the assignment, as opposed to every other big horror release proclaiming to be the next big thing. The Boogeyman is a horror film in the traditional vein, with some genuinely scary moments, and a plot that ticks along breezily without ever faltering. A happy combination of the elevated horror of the modern era and the horror movies of the ’80s, it doesn’t reinvent the wheel, nor does it have the unnerving sense of the uncanny that Host had. Nevertheless there’s something refreshing about a horror film that is simply content to be a horror film, and if nothing else, it marks Savage as a serious presence in genre cinema.

The Boogeyman is out in cinemas now