The Boogeyman Parent Guide

When psychiatrist Will Harper (Chris Messina) lost his wife in a car accident, it very nearly broke him. All that kept him going was his daughters: teenage Sadie (Sophie Thatcher) and her little sister, Sawyer (Vivien Lyra Blair). The girls are struggling with their grief, but Sawyer seems to be having the hardest time. She’s developed an intense fear of the dark, insisting that her father check under her bed for monsters and sleeping with a dozen small lights on.

Life goes on, and Will gets a new patient – or, rather, a new patient just wanders right into Will’s office. Lester (David Dastmalchian) tells a harrowing story about the deaths of his three children, for which he has been blamed, but which were really caused by a monstrous creature living in shadows, preying on children in the dark. And when Lester dies in the house, Sadie and Sawyer start seeing something in the night…

My expectations were not high, but The Boogeyman is surprisingly scary. While the rule for storytelling is “show, don’t tell”, the rule for horror films is “show as little as possible”. I don’t need to see the whole monster in the first five minutes, I don’t need eight different scenes of bloated exposition telling me all the mythology around whatever critter is picking off the locals, I don’t need anything but a vague idea that something is very, very wrong. The human imagination is a lot more potent than anything an effects team can digitally add to an old house, and this film is smart enough to milk it for all it’s worth. You don’t even see a piece of this thing for almost an hour, and it’s terrifying that way. You never know where it is…or where it isn’t. Are those little lights just reflections on the wall…or is it a pair of retroreflective eyes hovering in the darkness just past the foot of your bed?

There are, of course, the usual horror movie gimmicks to gussy up the suspense a touch. I’m not sure what the going rate for electricity is, but people in the film have a real aversion to turning on actual lights – despite facing some monster that only functions in the dark. This aversion extends to flashlights, although I couldn’t tell you why. Our heroes also live in a remarkably well soundproofed house, to the extent that I suspect you could set off a small bomb in one room, and be completely unable to hear it in the next room over.

But as PG-13 horror offerings go, this one is a doozy. With good acting, more realistic dialogue (at least, for a horror film), and a monster that plays on some of our earliest, most foundational fears, The Boogeyman is better than you might expect from its gimmicky title. With its lower rating, this is a good option for teens, especially given the low level of profanity for the genre, minimal on-screen violence, and absence of sexual content. Just make sure they’re old enough not to come running into your bed when they end up with nightmares.