The Boogeyman starts off with the most generic setup imaginable for a horror movie which really threw me off in the first half. There's a family with the recent tragic event who is trying to be part of a normal life again. Also the characters were really generic. You had the father who's trying to keep the family close, the young daughter who's still a child, the teenage daughter who was slightly rebellious and can't cope with the death of her mother and of course a character who has more knowledge about the entity and tells our main protagonist about it. The movie also borrowed a lot of scenes from other successful horror movies. The Boogeyman was afraid of light just like in the movie "Lights Out" (2016) and the design really reminded me of the creatures from A Quiet Place (2018) and there was a scene which was almost identical to another scene from the movie Smile (2022). So for the most part of the movie it's really generic and just nothing interesting happens, but towards the third act the Boogeyman is more on screen and I think that that's where the movie is the strongest because I think that the entity itself was the only interesting aspect the movie had up until now. Sometimes less is more but in this case I don't think this is true because I really enjoyed that The Boogeyman was not just some entity but he was a physically threatening creature that was also able to be harmed with for example a shotgun. This made the creature seem more threatening and scary because it physically interacted with all protagonists. The movie felt more like a Creature-Feature than a movie about some evil entity which I really enjoyed since I'm a huge Creature-Feature fan. Even though the movie is really generic and definitely doesn't reinvent the wheel it manages to keep a spooky atmosphere throughout and given it's a PG-13 rated movie I think it's a decent approach because the third act really helped the movie differentiate from other mainstream horror and it's definitely a better adaptation of the boogeyman than the 2005 version. One thing that really bugged me though was that there are several scenes where the light switches are turned off for no apparent reason, well except that The Boogeyman only attacks when it's dark. But then again the movie had amazing visuals and I think that Rob Savage did a great job directing it and it would have been really interesting to see what he could have crafted with a less generic script. I am looking forward to his upcoming movies. [6,4/10]
Review of The Boogeyman
