The Doctor’s Diagnosis: D-
I’ve spent a lot of time ranting about my hatred of modern PG-13 horror movies in last few years. Despite my vehement dislike of these movies, I thought that I had become accustomed to this garbage. However, something about The Boogeyman broke my brain. I don’t know if it was the overreliance on jump scares and modern cliches or the fact that absolutely nothing happens for most of the running time, but I found myself feeling a special sort of hatred for The Boogeyman. I have to somewhat apologize to Megan because I had assumed that would be the worst horror movie of the year, but The Boogeyman heard that assumption and said “hold my beer.” While I still maintain that Megan is awful, this is, so far, the bottom of the barrel for the horror genre this year and that barrel better not get any goddamn deeper.
The Boogeyman is based on a short story by Stephen King from the 70s. When adapting a Stephen King short story that doesn’t contain nearly enough material to sustain a feature-length movie, there are two basic approaches. You can go the route of The Lawnmower Man and make a movie that has absolutely nothing to do with King’s story other than the fact that it does indeed involve a man and, briefly, a lawnmower. Or you can go the route of The Mangler, where the short story is simply a scene at the beginning of the movie and 90% of the film is answering a question that not a single fucking person asked when they read the short story: What happens next?
The Boogeyman chooses the second route. A disturbed man arrives at a psychiatrist’s office without an appointment and relays the story of how the Boogeyman killed his family and that nobody will believe him. After describing these incidents, the man kills himself. These five minutes are the entirety of the Stephen King story. Unfortunately, the film then continues for another 80 minutes or so with the Boogeyman now haunting the psychiatrist and his daughters.
I consider “contagious trauma” to be a full-blown horror subgenre at this point. While the idea that mental illness, depression, etc. can be contagious might have seen live an innovative concept ten years ago, it has become incredibly stale. This cycle of movies dates back to It Follows (which I hate to mention here because its actually a good movie) and has followed through with crap like Truth or Dare up to last year’s Smile. I made a similar argument with Smile, but can we stop pretending that this is a really groundbreaking and topical concept and acknowledge it as derivative, boring bullshit. This film takes the mythical figure of the Boogeyman and reduces him to an allegory for mental health issues. One could argue that such an effort isn’t reductive and the film is actually trying to elevate the material, which does make some intellectual sense.
The problem is that this schtick has gotten old. The idea of contagious trauma and the horror genre’s current obsession with mental health are no longer fresh approaches to the material. Not everything needs to be an allegory for mental health issues and the genre’s constant presentation of this as a novel concept is truly starting to grate on my nerves. In the case of a character like the Boogeyman, it’s also a misplaced paradigm because this is a character built on the childlike sense of fear of the dark and the unknown. It’s an incredibly simple, universal concept that doesn’t need to be over-intellectualized for the sake of shoehorning it into current social discourse.
Of course, horror films can be framed around such issues and be highly effective. I’m listening to an interview with William Friedkin as I write this, so I’ll mention The Exorcist as a convenient example. However, the additional problem is that The Boogeyman just isn’t scary. This is the latest jump scare movie in a long lineage of shitty jump scare movies and there is nothing else to it. It’s a childish film that doesn’t earn its PG-13 rating, lacks any sense of suspense or dread and doesn’t contain an ounce of gore or a drop of blood. Even the title character is amusingly non-threatening, as I often wondered why our heroes weren’t just kicking the rather sad-looking creature. The Boogeyman is purely baby’s first horror movie if you happen to have a particularly non-discerning baby.
The only things saving The Boogeyman from an F grade are the strong performances by the two lead actresses, Sophie Thatcher and Vivien Lyra Blair. They are really trying and bring more credibility to the material than this movie deserves. Other than that, The Boogeyman is a hodgepodge of modern cliches that blatantly rips off Smile, Lights Out and The Babadook without ever having an original thought and without ever having anything that approaches scary for anyone that has been brave enough to read through a Goosebumps book.
Image By: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boogeyman_(2023_film)#/media/File:The_Boogeyman_2023_poster.png
