3/12 ForReel Score | 1.5/5 Stars

If the assignment for director Rob Savage was to create a more conventional horror film to follow up Host or Dashcam, The Boogeyman sees him take this prompt to the most uninspired extreme. Savage had made his mark on the modern horror movie genre with his aforementioned features, expertly crafting a thrilling supernatural screenlife flick and a full-throttle horror house experience respectively. And while The Boogeyman, a supernatural monster story based on a Stephen King short story, seems like a concept that would be right in Savage’s wheelhouse, the resulting film is short on thrills and entirely devoid of Savage’s magic touch.

Image courtesy of 20th Century Studios/Walt Disney Studios

Following a tragic and devastating death of her mother, Sadie (Sophie Thatcher), her younger sister Sawyer (Vivien Lyra Blair), and her father Will (Chris Messina) struggle to cope with the event, relying on therapy to try to deal with their traumas. But when Will, a therapist himself, takes a troubled walk-in client, the family begins to notice odd occurrences, particularly in dark areas of the house. It’s not long before Sadie goes searching for answers in hopes of ridding themselves of the monster haunting her family before it’s too late.

There is great potential and opportunity for a premise like this to be a unique, edge-of-your-seat, nail-biting horror experience. However, the product of daring and innovative horror storytelling, The Boogeyman is not. Rather, it’s a hodgepodge mashup of other, more interesting supernatural horror movies. Think The Babadook meets Lights Out meets Smile or Truth or Dare, featuring a monster that resembles a mini-Cloverfield. The uninspired mashup leaves no room for The Boogeyman to tactfully flesh out its own identity or mythology, rendering the monster unscary and worse, wildly uninteresting.

But however uninteresting the Boogeyman monster may be is only a miniscule representation of how bland the film itself turns out to be. The Boogeyman was penned by Scott Beck, Bryan Woods, and Mark Heyman before falling in development limbo and then resurrected when Savage became attached to the project. Without his hand in the story development process, The Boogeyman avoids that signature full throttle experience Savage has established his filmmaking brand on and instead leans into an overabundance of exposition and narrative meandering. The bet here - and perhaps the best use of Savage’s filmmaking prowess in this film - is on the curation of a haunting atmosphere to carry the entertainment value of the film. But audiences familiar with Savage’s previous work may spend the majority of The Boogeyman’s runtime waiting for the intensity to eventually and suddenly turn up - something the film is unable to commit to and thus, unwilling to actualize.

After all, a high intensity experience doesn’t seem to be the assignment here. Perhaps there are audiences who will appreciate the low simmering nature of this film. And perhaps those unfamiliar with Savage’s previous work will have less expectations to hold against this presentation. But the result, for me anyway, is an unfortunately dull way to spend 98 minutes in a movie theater. In a year that so far has already procured fun, exciting, crowd pleasing horror films like M3gan, Scream VI, and Evil Dead Rise, The Boogeyman is likely to be one of the more forgettable and disappointing horror entries of the year, especially for those (like myself) who wrongly expected more of Savage’s unhinged horror mayhem excursions. The Boogeyman as a devious antagonist might sound like a menacing figure, but The Boogeyman as a movie is a relatively tame beast.

Movie Review: No Sleep Lost Over "The Boogeyman"