‘Boogeyman’s’ Monster in the Closet [Rotten Outlook]
Bad horror movies have a way of sinking their claws into an audience. They’re like the hooks from the Lament Configuration. No matter how painful, how poorly produced, the pleasures are transcendent, unmatched by any number of arguably better horror offerings. It is, all things considered, the thrust of Rotten Outlook. Some, like Calvaire, truthfully don’t deserve the rotten moniker. Others, like 2007’s The Hitcher remake, are bad movies that do enough right, often trading in grisly gore, to overcome their poor critical reception. While their cross-audience appeal is slim—try getting your grandmother to watch The Hitcher—they’re nostalgic beats, inextricably tethered to a distinct time or place insofar as, for some audiences, they’ll never be anything less than a masterpiece. Then, of course, there’s the curious, odd case of Stephen Kay’s Boogeyman.
Released in 2005, Boogeyman was a bottom-of-the-barrel response to the indomitable chokehold J-horror had on the United States box office. A cryptic, at times incomprehensible tale of high-concept psychological horror with supernatural shadings, Boogeyman was a critical disaster. For the unfamiliar, it looked like a parody, the kind of horror movie that genre critics point to when (inaccurately) contending the genre lacks depth or considerable thematic merit. Still, Boogeyman was the little mid-lister than could, grossing $67 million against a $20 million budget. If nothing else, it’s as good a reminder as any that for time immemorial, horror has been the safest box office bet, quality be damned.
Boogeyman 2 and Boogeyman 3 followed in 2007 and 2008 respectively, and curiously, many critics consider Boogeyman 2 to be a better movie. Both were released direct to video stateside alongside an apathetic international theatrical release. But their shortcomings were more pronounced, and thus, more palatable. $4 million trash is easier to stomach than $20 million trash. The sequels accelerated the gore, the acting suffered across the board, and both were quasi-slashers bearing little in common with the first beyond the titular antagonist (which is to say nothing of The Boogeyman, a cheapie 1980 riff on Halloween).
Yet, in truth, Boogeyman might not be that bad. While it’s certainly no masterpiece, its merits are a little easier to identify with some distance. This is in large part on account of a dedicated Boogeyman fanbase. As someone deeply enmeshed in horror, for years, Boogeyman has matched its Rotten Tomatoes consensus. With a dismal 13%, the site reads, “The plot is been-there done-that generic, and none of the shock effects can do anything to build up suspense.” I saw Boogeyman in middle school and agreed. My adolescent bread and butter was horror. I was too immersed in the genre to see anything worth talking about. I thought I was a cool guy. Boogeyman was nothing—I wanted to see what those dubbed High Tension TV spots were all about.
Horror adjacent audiences tell a completely different story. Boogeyman was so scary, they couldn’t even make it past the (admittedly effective) opening sequence. It scarred them so badly, they’ve resisted revisiting it. Huge swaths of non-horror audiences might reasonably argue Boogeyman as one of the scariest movies they’ve ever seen. It makes sense. The concept is simple. The jolts are plentiful. The entire enterprise reeks of this depressive, dour stench that, if nothing else, feels unusually grim. That atmosphere makes it all the easier for Boogeyman’s ethos to leak into the mind.
With the early aughts’ penchant for “is it real or have I lost my mind” narrative structure, Boogeyman can be hard to follow. For most audiences, though, that matters naught when the boogeyman himself is dragging kids into closets and drowning girlfriends in the bathtub. Upon revisiting the movie almost two decades after release, it’s clear to see how Boogeyman became both a critical disaster and box office success.
Sure, it’s aggressively familiar, but only to those aggressively familiar with the horror genre. Genre knowledge makes it difficult to adopt that disparate perspective, but in doing so, a world of worthwhile horror emerges. Boogeyman isn’t going to give me nightmares, but I jumped several times. I thought Barry Watson and Emily Deschanel were very good. I respect Kay’s restraint with showing the titular monster. Boogeyman might not be an early aughts masterpiece, but it’s better than it’s ever been given credit for.
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