The Boogeyman (2023)

The Boogeyman arrives as an adaptation of a 1973 Stephen King short story, which is to say it concerns a creature that lives in closets and feeds on grief, and it has no interest in the anxieties of the present decade beyond the universal fear of the dark. Rob Savage directs with efficiency, deploying jump scares and thunderous score cues with the diligence of a man assembling furniture from a reliable instruction sheet. The Harper family mourns a mother, the father stares into the middle distance, and two sisters learn that light is the only defense. It is a tidy machine for making an audience flinch, and it flinches them well enough.

For those of us who catalogue cultural signifiers, the film is a sparse ledger. The cast includes performers of color in supporting roles, among them Madison Hu, yet the film never makes race a subject, a theme, or a talking point. It casts people and moves on, which is either admirable restraint or a missed opportunity, depending on which consultant you employ. The protagonists are two sisters, and the film resists any temptation to convert that arrangement into a statement about gender. The monster does not care who you are. It cares that you are afraid.

There is no sermon here, no lecture smuggled into the third act, no villain revealed as a metaphor for carbon emissions or private equity. The Boogeyman wants only to frighten you for ninety minutes and release you into the parking lot. Critics called it generic, and they are not wrong, but a generic horror film that keeps its politics in its pocket is a small and honest pleasure. The closet door opens. Something is there. We have seen it before, and we will see it again.

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