The Boogeyman is a 2023 horror movie that I am pretty sure the studio wanted to fail! Why else would they release this in the middle of Spider-Man Across The Spider-Verse and Transformers: Rise of the Beasts? At my theatre, this movie right from opening night has been on one screen and there has only been one showing per day!
How to Download The Boogeyman
You can expect to be able to download or stream the film from Disney+ sometime (usually about two months) after its theatrical release (that was on June 2, 2023). Click on the Download button at the end of the review to check the current availability
The Movie Review
However, the wife and I love horror and always make an effort to go and see a new horror movie in the theatre, even if it means my old ass has to be out after 9 PM! To be honest with you, I was kind of excited about this, the trailer looked good, I like the premise of a boogeyman and it is based on a Stephen King short story and I like the majority of the movies based on his work.
I walked out of The Boogeyman with a kind of meh feeling. It was not bad, but it was not great either. It just kind of happened and if I was writing this review any longer after seeing it, chances are I would have forgotten most of what happened. Look, there is a fair bit of good in this movie, so let’s start with that.
To start with, our actors, are all great. The two child characters, teenager Sadie (Sophie Thatcher) who is the lead character, and younger sister Sawyer (Vivian Lyra Blair) are fantastic and play these roles very well. Their father Will, is a psychiatrist and played by Chris Messina and he also does a damn fine job.
The story of The Boogeyman is that we have the Harper family and they are having a very hard time getting over the death of their mother. The two daughters, especially Sadie feel like there is an evil presence that is stalking them and wants them dead and this presence is the Boogeyman and of course, no one believes them until it is too late.
It is a kind of formulaic plot for a horror movie, but it is a movie of two parts. The first part is actually a bit of a slower-paced, more psychological horror movie and it is pretty damn creepy. I think had they kept this kind of pace for the whole movie it would have been all the better for it, especially with the way the camera moves and the sends shivers down your spine score.
However, it eventually turns into a very standard run-away-from-the-monster kind of movie and that is where it falls a bit flat. It is not bad, but you feel like you have seen it all before. The actual monster of the Boogeyman is amazing…. When you can actually see it as this is a monster that can only survive in the dark so it makes it very hard to get a good look at it. But, if they had kept that slower more thriller-like pace, I think not fully seeing the monster would have worked.
Overall, The Boogeyman was not a terrible movie, but it certainly is not one of the best Stephen King adaptations I have seen. It is a fairly standard horror movie, but it was still fun in places. As I said, I would say that this is a good horror movie, but I do feel like there is a great one somewhere in here just trying to get out.
