Dir. Rob Savage | Now In Theaters | Rating: 3/5

I’ve been afraid of the dark my whole life. Even as an adult, I don’t sleep in the dark and for the majority of college I actually slept with all the lights on. This set up The Boogeyman to be a hellish time for me, which it mostly was.

The Boogeyman is yet another lens of grief, which is beginning to saturate the genre more than any other theme in my humble opinion. We watch widower and therapist Will grapple with the loss of his wife and the mother of kids, alongside another unexpected tragedy. In this film, the entity of The Boogeyman is said to thrive off sadness and pain. If this is feeling vaguely familiar to you, that’s probably because it is.

Boogeyman doesn’t reinvent the wheel, but there is a bit of weakness in how heavily it relied upon on it. There are clear foils of IT, as to be expected with any King work, but also Stranger Things and Until Dawn. In a way, this film feels like it has too much of other things, whether it means to or not. With its impressive long tension building shots, this is akin to Insidious. Now that I say that, the drawings and pictures throughout this film also felt like Insidious – are you sensing a theme here? 

Onto its strengths – these jumpscares are some of the most impressive in recent memory. I saw a guy literally throw his popcorn in the theater during the first one. (Good thing we were at Cinema Salem where popcorn does not cost the same as your mortgage.) I’m also in the camp of people who don’t mind a monster reveal, while some feel this ruins the fear and mystique. So in terms of the actual Boogeyman, I felt the monster reveal was solid and creepy, without relying too heavily on obnoxious CGI. 

I have a feeling this will fall flat for some, because though The Boogeyman is good, it doesn’t shine. There isn’t anything about this that doesn’t feel same-same about the grief narrative, and at times this felt pandering. Overall, this was a fun watch and well acted – I’d rank this somewhere in the middle of Stephen King’s cinematic universe.

Know Before You Watch: Features death, blood, suicide, frequent flashing lights.