New From the Stephen King Factory!

Sadie Harper (Sophie Thatcher) investigates the dark recesses
of her house, in Rob Savage's The Boogeyman

Rob Savage (director), The Boogeyman

Dr. William Harper is better at dispensing psychological advice to his clients, than at following his own principles. Recently widowed, he and his two daughters have dealt with his wife’s passing by refusing to deal with it. But a walk-in client tells a story of intense suffering, as a nameless monster has apparently destroyed his family, one by one. Neither man realizes that, by telling the story, they’ve let the monster into Dr. Harper’s house.

This movie takes a similarly titled 1973 Stephen King short story as its inspiration, but not really its source. It dispenses with the story’s driving characters by the end of Act One, and focuses primarily on Dr. Harper’s teenage daughter, Sadie, played by Sophie Thatcher. Sadie tries to maintain balance between her father, who remains terminally mired in denial, and her sister, Sawyer, who has become frightened of her own shadow.

Although this movie doesn’t faithfully adapt King’s story, the screenwriting team of Scott Beck, Bryan Woods, and Mark Heyman have created a story that could’ve come whole-cloth from King’s repertoire. There’s the family conflict, the tension between science and preconscious fears, the monster older than time, and the resolution that… well, shelve that temporarily. Because this particular resolution is less interesting than the journey to reach that point.

The walk-in client, Lester Billings, vandalizes the Harper house, including the late Mrs. Harper’s art studio, which has remained sacrosanct since her meaningless death. William and Sadie then find Billings hanging in Mrs. Harper’s walk-in closet. They think they’ve endured the worst already, but that night, little Sawyer hears voices coming from her closet. The monster has invaded the Harper house, though nobody believes Sawyer. Yet.

Sadie Turner embraces the pain of her mother’s passing ardently. She wears her mother’s clothes, displays her mother’s artwork, and hasn’t thrown away the last brown-bag lunch Mom packed, although it’s gone rancid. Sadie embraces mothering her sister, because the pain and responsibility give her life meaning. But she hasn’t learned to trust others, or recognize their pain as equally real to hers. Her peers make that process no easier.

Watching the monster unfold, I couldn’t help recognizing Stephen King components. The monster lives in closets, basements, and disused rooms—the id of suburban American homes. Compare Pennywise, who emerges from the municipal sewer. Like Pennywise, we eventually learn the monster is older than time, that it feasts on its victims’ fear, and that once touched, it never entirely goes away. This is a Stephen King monster rewritten by ChatGPT.

Likewise, this movie recycles conventional Stephen King themes of family trauma, isolation, and lack of community. Without visible neighbors or friends to rely upon, or traditional networks like the church or Lion’s Club, the Harper family must fight their grief alone. However, as each survivor exists at different stages of Freudian development, they’re all ultimately alone. Modernity is lonely, in Stephen King’s world, and trauma makes everything worse.

King’s novels usually feature a congeries of outcasts, loners, and misfits unifying to confront an overwhelming horror. We see this in The Stand, or his Castle Rock novels. But at the risk of repeating myself, the Harper family most closely resembles the Losers’ Club that confronts Pennywise. When we see the monster, it even has the janky, seriocomic tone of Pennywise’s primordial form from the 1990 TV miniseries.

So let’s revisit that resolution we previously shelved. (Spoiler alert.) The Harpers have, together, finally accepted the Boogeyman is real and inside their house. They pause their differences, band together, and destroy the monster, though it costs them dearly. Then we see a family-based, very huggy moment where they accept one another—another King trademark—before Sadie discovers the monster is defeated, but not dead.

Stephen King has become such a thoroughly reliable commercial brand that Beck, Woods, and Heyman can create a Stephen King story without King’s actual involvement. Like sweatshops producing unlicensed Louis Vuitton, this movie is an okay knockoff that should satisfy casual fans, although dedicated purists might notice some wonky stitching. It’s scary, sure, but it works primarily by providing audiences with tropes they know and appreciate.

Some professional critics disparaged this movie’s reliance on jump-scares and conventional haunted house atmospherics. Fair play, perhaps, though the jump-scares made me jump. But between those jolts, this movie provides a story so familiar, you could wear it like a Snuggie. And all what a certain subset of the audience wants: the comfort of knowing they’re watching a familiar, time-tested Stephen King story.