Streamin’ King: ‘The Boogeyman’ Expands A Short Story Into A Full-Length Monster Movie

Streamin’ King is grave-digging through the myriad Stephen King adaptations available on streaming. This time we’re watching The Boogeyman, the June 2023 adaptation of King’s 1973 short story of the same name. 

STREAMIN’ KING: THE BOOGEYMAN

THE GIST: A grieving family—therapist dad, teenage daughter, younger daughter—are haunted by the titular shadow-dweller, a monster that may or may not have been brought to them by someone from another grieving family.

PEDIGREE: Directed by Rob Savage (Host, Dashcam), who tweeted he’s “never worked harder on anything in my life,” penned by Mark Heyman (Black Swan) with the screenwriting duo Scott Beck and Bryan Woods (A Quiet Place, 65). Stars Chris Messina (Air, The Mindy Project), Sophie Thatcher (Yellowjackets, The Book of Boba Fett), and Vivien Lyra Blair (Obi-Wan Kenobi). Features David Dastmalchian (Ant-Man, The Suicide Squad) in one of six movie parts this year, including—shortly after The Boogeyman—Oppenheimer and The Last Voyage of the Demeter, as well as Marin Ireland (Justified: City Primeval) in one of five 2023 roles, and LisaGay Hamilton (The Practice, Winning Time). Score by Emmy nominee Patrick Jonsson (Solos, Virunga), cinematography by Eli Born (last year’s Hellraiser reboot).

WORTH WATCHING FOR CONSTANT READERS? If it’s between this and a revisit of one of your favorite King flicks, maybe go for the latter. But if you’re looking for a new stab at his work, this one’ll treat you better than 2023’s Pet Sematary: Bloodlines and Children of the Corn, or last year’s Firestarter. If you already caught The Boogeyman in theaters I’m happy to report it improves upon rewatch, since you already know A) these young actresses are going to crush it, B) the plot’s very independent from the short story, and C) how much of the monster you’ll see. Getting those first-watch analyses out of the way opens things up for you to have more fun and soak in some pretty sharp filmmaking.

It’s also handled in a way where reading the story doesn’t spoil the movie, and watching the movie doesn’t spoil the story’s big twist.

WORTH WATCHING FOR KING NEWBIES/AGNOSTICS? Is there a place for well-made PG-13 horror in your life? You could do worse than The Boogeyman, which has sick creature work, top-notch creepy sound design, a strong score, and two young stars capably carrying the endeavor. If you find teeth/mouth horror unsettling (*raises hand*) this one may test you. It does run in too many tonal directions for periods that are either too short or long—a grief movie, a demonic haunting, a high school movie, a monster hunt—and sags in the middle as a result. The third act bounces back strong, and despite the creature’s rules and regulations being hazy, the situation suddenly gets downright mythological. The feedback loop between Stranger Things and Stephen King is only getting louder, so checking your “Stranger Things did it!” Leo-pointing-meme–isms at the door will help.

8 STEPHEN KING TIES, REFERENCES, AND MISCELLANY:

1. As far as the monster’s modus operandi, there’s a straight line from this paragraph King penned in the early ’70s and the hall-of-famer he’d write over a decade later with It:

2. Marin Ireland is among the elite set of actors who’ve been in an SK adaptation and narrated SK audiobooks, in this case 2022’s tidy Gwendy’s Final Task and 2017’s 25-hour beast Sleeping Beauties, co-written with son Owen King (The Curator, Double Feature).

3. The movie signals its Constant Reader affiliation by putting the Billings at #217 (hi, The Shining) and the Harpers at #19 (howdy, The Dark Tower). 

4. The Boogeyman overlaps with The Outsider’s mythos, with one character in the film explaining, “It must’ve latched on to you now. Goes after the hurt, the vulnerable. Follows you wherever you go. Till you’re all gone. … It likes to play with its food, scare ’em to death. Shit, it can even talk like them. Like a goddamn echo.” The mirroring isn’t coincidental, as The Outsider (published in 2018, adapted for HBO in 2020) referred to its child-killing villain as a boogeyman, and ultimately El Cuco, a regionalized variant.

5. Didn’t get enough David Dastmalchian here? (And really, how could you?) Don’t miss him on The Kingcast’s recent 200th episode extravaganza where he brings his acting chops to his rundown of the short story “The House on Maple Street.” (Specifically hit the 2:11:20 mark.) He’s on the pod longer than he’s in the movie.

6. King famously has a policy where he’ll give rising/student filmmakers provisional rights to his stories for $1 so they can make a short film. The Boogeyman yielded one of the earliest “Dollar Baby” shorts—perhaps the very first—with a 28-minute effort from 1982 by Jeff Schiro. It fascinatingly showed up on an ’86 VHS titled Stephen King’s Night Shift Collection alongside The Woman in the Room, the directorial debut of 20-year-old Frank Darabont, nearly a decade before kicking off his unstoppable SK run comprised of The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile, and The Mist. (Watch on YouTube.)

7. King’s story offers almost no description of the monster, just “something with awful slumped shoulders and a scarecrow head” possessing a “rotted, spade-claw hand.” This gave the filmmakers free reign. “You want to see the monster, you want it to fight our lead character, but also it’s going to reveal some Lovecraftian depth to it that’s ultimately going to kind of set your mind on fire and think that you’ve only seen a fraction of what this thing truly is,” director Rob Savage told SlashFilm, adding—in a way we won’t spoil here—that they did find a way to be very faithful to one aspect of the story.

An Empire review also points out, “In the story, King cites a favorite comic-book artist—‘Ghastly’ Graham Ingels, mainstay of Tales from the Crypt in the 1950s—as the only man who could visualize the creature stalking Lester’s family. The Boogeyman monster design looks to Ingels, specialist in knuckly, toothy, moldy contortionist creeps, and manages to be archetypal and yet not like anything seen before.” In an interview with the same magazine, Savage said of a test screening, “The first time you see the creature, the audience screamed so loud, and then immediately started talking with their neighbors and chattering, that they completely missed the next lines. So we had to recut it and build in 45 seconds of padding, just so they didn’t miss any vital information.” 

8. Leading up to The Boogeyman’s release, the BloodyFM podcast network coordinated on four short audio dramas (with 20th Century Studios’ blessing) expanding on the Boogeyman lore. The stories aired on The Losers’ Club, Scare You to Sleep, Creepy, and Mayfair Watchers Society.

CRITICAL CONSENSUS: Empire called it a “teen-centered family-values ghost story, powered by gnawing grief and childish wonder and calculated to deliver the maximum number of scares with minimal fuss.” Observer flayed it for being a “pointless, misguided and totally incomprehensible waste of time, [marking] yet another horror film that exists for the sole purpose of exploiting the endless desk-drawer doodlings of writer Stephen King.” Inverse praised it as “a testament to the well-constructed jump scare,” specifically “the unique kind of dread that can build as one waits for the next jump scare, and the sudden, violent catharsis that a jump scare can inflict.” Vulture’s nuanced review deemed it “the quietest horror movie I’ve seen in ages” (in a good way), but found its hyper-bleakness “is matched by the hollowness of the people onscreen, the darkness and the silence feel less like a challenge to these characters and more like a comment on the movie’s general vaporousness.” The New York Times bemoaned how many “idiocies abound,” such as a “creature that feeds on darkness is battled by burning dozens of miniature candles instead of, say, shining a flashlight.”

General apathy is the recurring theme among critics. IGN likened it to the “way car salespeople might market their mid-range best sellers: sturdy, dependable, and efficient.” The Guardian opined that “Savage does far more than the disappointingly rote script…deserves, as do his performers, all trying their best to distract us from the story’s grinding anonymity.” The L.A. Times said “a woeful metaphoric derivativeness takes over as swiftly as icky black tendrils spread across the Harpers’ walls and ceiling,” in the end offering “no memorable deepening of King’s ruthlessly efficient, vividly sketched black hole [of a story].”

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL CONTEXT FOR “THE BOOGEYMAN” (1973): A simple, horrifying 12-pager that debuted in Cavalier magazine before appearing—just half a year before The Stand—as the sixth story in his debut collection of short fiction, 1978’s Night Shift. That book yielded adaptations including, in order and with varying degrees of unfaithfulness: Children of the Corn (1984), Cat’s Eye (’85), Maximum Overdrive (’86), Graveyard Shift (1990), Sometimes They Come Back (’91), The Lawnmower Man (’92), The Mangler (’95), and Trucks (’97).

Zach Dionne writes and records Stephen King things regularly at SKzd on Patreon.