Are you ready for it? Are you sufficiently tired and disappointed by a couple of really shitty horror movies you tried watching? Well, if the answer is yes, that means you’re ready for our movie recommendation. The Boogeyman is the most generic and stereotypical horror movie I have ever seen, just good enough for one viewing. Even its title is boring and generic. I mean couldn’t you come up with something more creative than The Boogeyman? Just imagine describing the plot of this movie to someone. You have this family, alright, of course, one of the parents died recently, alright, and then this boogeyman shows up and starts fucking with them.
And like one of the girls is this cute and feisty teen while the other one is just this good kid, are you with me? The father is like a total mess, struggling to cope with his wife’s death, right? I mean, I just did that didn’t I? After I let you know what’s going on here, it’s time to move on to the good stuff. First of all, the production values were excellent. The monster itself looks pretty cool and nasty. I also like how slowly it was introduced. Only towards the very did we get the chance to see it in its full glory. It looks positively disgusting and creepy, like something straight out of a nightmare.
The storytelling is straightforward while the story itself offers a few predictable surprises. It also conveniently fails to explain a couple of plot holes but that’s not important. What is important though is that The Boogeyman is a perfectly watchable horror movie. The cast led by young Sophie Thatcher and Chris Messina was solid and you can feel they gave it everything they had. I wonder if they knew that the movie was going to turn out how it turned out. You should also know that this is a movie based on Stephen King’s short story of the same name. I mean, at this point, what horror movie isn’t based on some of King’s works?
It reminds me a bit of another very generic horror movie, Lights Out. It’s just something to play in the background while you’re chilling or coming up with that perfect risky text. As a horror movie fan, I found it utterly fascinating as it was able to hit every possible horror movie cliche in existence. At some point in the movie, I couldn’t believe my eyes because it felt like they were intentionally doing this. It felt like they were intentionally making the most generic and bland horror movie in existence and they fucking got away with it.
Made on a $33 million budget, The Boogeyman went on to make more than $82 million at the box office. The jump scares worked perfectly with the theater audiences making them spread the word about this “safe horror movie”. There’s no graphic violence or anything like that as this is a PG-13 movie. However, the creature is more than creepy enough to make up for that. And we will get a good look at it during that confusing finale. I say confusing because it’s visually excellent but the action was almost comical.
As in every generic horror movie, the characters will keep on making stupid decisions until they finally and very accidentally get rid of the evil presence. I just hope there won’t be any sequels. On that note, I also wanted to tell you that this movie has nothing to do with other boogeyman movies. And there are a lot of them. For example, just one of them, the 2005 Boogeyman, spawned no less than two sequels.
Director: Rob Savage
Writers: Scott Beck, Bryan Woods, Mark Heyman
Cast: Sophie Thatcher, Chris Messina, Vivien Lyra Blair, David Dastmalchian, Marin Ireland, Madison Hu
Fun Facts: The Boogeyman was intended to be released straight to the Hulu streaming platform. However, a strong and positive reaction from the test audience, it was picked up by the 20th Century Studios.
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IMDb Link: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3427252/
