The Boogeyman

Dad never listens.

It has a really cool and universally relatable premise... But the rules are confusing and convoluted.

A pointless, misguided and totally incomprehensible waste of time, is yet another horror film that exists for the sole purpose of exploiting the endless desk-drawer doodlings of writer Stephen King.

It’s an effectively spooky horror film but a generic one.

There’s good, oftentimes scary stuff hiding in this film’s darkness, all of which helps make this summertime horror offering more treat than trick.

It fits neatly into this lineage of trauma monster movies like Smile, Men, and Hatching...thankfully, despite the lack of subtlety inherent to that approach, it’s probably the best of the bunch so far.

What the film wants to be is a metaphor for the grieving process and how if we let things fester in the darkness they will thrive, but when we bring them into the light, we can triumph.

The Boogeyman shoots for younger movie goers, but I don't think it hits the bullseye.

The lowest common denominator of horror cinema is the film that goes “whisper whisper whisper BANG whisper BANG whisper whisper BANG BANG” then rolls a bunch of credits. Not credit, really. More like blame.

Honestly, if the screenwriters had just stuck with the original framework of the original short story, it wouldn’t be such a convoluted mess.