Photo by Patti Perret. © 20th Century Studios
Sophie Thatcher in 'The Boogeyman'
Sophie Thatcher in 'The Boogeyman'
A Jungian psychotherapist in a horror film? Dr. Harper (Chris Messina)—aka “Dad” to his daughters—makes a passing reference to Carl Jung on fear in The Boogeyman, an unusual allusion in any screenplay nowadays. Well, maybe he’s not strictly a Jungian—he isn’t shown conducting talk therapy long enough for us to tell before the archetypes of contemporary horror begin to manifest.
The Boogeyman’s source is a 1973 short story by Stephen King, whose insight has always been that leafy American suburbs and unremarkable towns are fine settings for horror, places where the reality of evil can take hold over ordinary people, especially adolescents. The Boogeyman’s central characters are Dr. Harper’s daughters, teenage Sadie (Sophie Thatcher) and toddler Sawyer (Vivien Lyra Blair). They recently lost their mother in a car accident and her memory, perhaps her spirit, lingers.
But this isn’t Carrie and mom is not the monster. The proverbial boogeyman enters the Harper house with the arrival (without an appointment!) of a downcast, nervous man called Lester Billings (David Dastmalchian). Shoulders hunched fearfully, eyes downcast, complexion sallow, Billings admits he needs professional help—not from a priest (he’s not Catholic) or a lawyer (he committed no crime, he insists). He tells Dr. Harper about the deaths in short succession of his three children and swears he didn’t do it. It was a shadow, a dark thing, he tries to draw a picture …
Soon enough, Sadie comes home from school to find—let the heart-jumping jolts begin—that strange man hanging in the closet of what had been mom’s room. Closets are one of the lairs where children fear the boogeyman lurks. And under beds.
As the youngest member of the Harper household, her perceptions unedited by social convention and her preconceptions not yet cemented by education, Sawyer is first to notice the boogeyman in the house. (Apparently, it clung to Billings like a barnacle on the hull of a sinking ship.) Sadie gradually comes to believe. Given his doctorate, Dad goes on about projections of the mind, and won’t accept the boogeyman’s reality until the monster drags him down to the ark basement. Why always dark basements in these movies? Jung and Freud would agree that it has to do with unconscious, that cellar of our imagination where fears and secrets are buried.
Many films and series have been made from King’s prolific output. Many have been mediocre and perhaps only one rises to masterpiece level, Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. The Boogeyman is no masterpiece but a good genre picture, visually and sonically adept with the expected panoply of creaking floorboards and doors that open from unseen hands. The Boogeyman even borrows from Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window as Sadie desperately stalls the oncoming monster with blinding flashes of light. Director Rob Savage paces the film to a knife’s edge of anticipation and keeps the boogeyman in the shadows (where it belongs) for a long time (if not long enough). And anyway, the adaptation has Stephen King’s blessing, and who can argue with that?
The Boogeyman is screening at Marcus Southgate Cinema, AMC Mayfair, Marcus BistroPlex Southridge, Marcus South Shore Cinema, Movie Tavern Brookfield Square, Marcus Ridge Cinema, Marcus Showtime Cinema, Silverspot Cinema, Marcus North Shore Cinema, Marcus Majestic Cinema, Marcus Menomonee Falls Cinema, Marcus Renaissance Cinema, Marcus Saukeville Cinema, Marcus Hillside Cinema and West Bend Cinema.
