The Boogeyman
I've read everything Stephen King's every written - in book form, that is, I won't waste my time on his moronic political tweeter views. I remember this short story from one of the anthology collections because it was a) really short and b) dealt with an event so horrific - child sacrifice - it was difficult to fathom.
Boogeyman was in Night Shift, which came out in the late 70s, early 80s and was his publisher's effort to jump on the bandwagon of sudden popularity by recycling anything it could find with his name on it. By the time Night Shift was published, he'd put out Carrie, Salem's Lot, and The Shining. His publisher, having no idea how prolific he would turn out to be, cobbled together every short story of his they could find and rushed this anthology to print with the idea of cashing in on his name before it likely fizzled out. Most of the stories in the book had been previously published in porn magazines, including several in Penthouse. Shortly after Night Shift came The Stand. And then in rapid-fire succession, The Dead Zone, Firestarter, Cujo, and Christine.
Many of the stories in Night Shift eventually became schlock King films, including Children of the Corn, The Mangler, Trucks (which became the film Maximum Overdrive), Graveyard Shift, and Cat's Eye (which incorporated several of the entries from the book). And now almost 40 years later, we have the Boogeyman.
Like many of the Night Shift entries, Boogeyman was first published in a porno mag ($1 to Beastie Boys) before finding its way to the anthology book's pages. I remember reading the 12 pages that made up Boogeyman. It was a short (very short) and quickly efficient bare bones horror tale. One of those ideas that popped into his head, he wrote the basic frame down, and it he explored it no further. In a future world, King might have taken this idea and added several hundred thousand words of extraneous fluff and turned it into a novel. Quite honestly, the original Boogeyman story had a better foundation than many of the ideas he did give full novel treatment.
I remember reading this story (and I've re-read it several times over the years) mostly because it was so short and so effective. It was good.
ALL that to say that the movie, other than the names and the basic idea that there's a boogeyman in the closet that murderizes kids, strays so far from the original story that it might as well have been a different work entirely.
Yeah, it tries at the very end to circle back to the 12th page of this brutally efficient horror tale, but by the time it does it's lost its way amid an extraneous pile of additional characters and improbable events to the point that it fails. And it does so in such a haphazard, half-ass way that it drains all the potential horror out and leaves it in a puddle of pudding on the floor.
It's a shame. The film features my favorite member of the Yellow Jackets cast - the girl who plays young Natalie (Sophie Thatcher). She's amazing in Yellow Jackets, but isn't given much to work with here. She's a much better actress than the bumbling director allowed her to show. She could have done so much more here, but all of her interactions were so astonishingly fake and trite, she just floundered.
The Boogeyman character is fairly well rendered, but the cast and the meandering (made nonsensical from a locational standpoint, when one time you need a ride to get somewhere and the next you can run there in less than two minutes) storyline bleeds too much of the taut effectiveness of the original story out.
Didn't hate it, have seen far worse, but knowing the source material - as well as knowing what Thatcher is capable of - really took away from what this film could have been. It was never about failing dads or girl power daughters like the film was. It was about Lester's character (relegated to little more than backstory here) being pursued by a relentless boogeyman, and the horrific choices he made to avoid it, only to see it come out of unexpected shadows to stalk its prey. THAT was a much better story.
I'll never understand why directors and screenwriters look at a King story and go "let's change all this" instead of taking what clearly works on the page and putting it on the screen.
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