The Boogeyman doesn’t make a strong case for itself in the originality department. A child being harassed by the beast under your bed, in your closet, in your head? You don’t say. There have been so many movies like this… and that ignores Monsters, Inc. stomping all over the idea (and, lest we forget, they could just hire John Wick to kill the f’ing boogeyman).

So what’s it about this time? Same thing as last time. A little girl and her teen sister are haunted by the monster in the closet… will the adults believe them? It’s based on a short story by Stephen King… I’m sure I read it decades ago but it didn’t make an impression. Wikipedia says it was from Night Shift… okeydoke!

But here’s the thing… it’s all in the execution. There’s an unsettling creepy mood generated by this flick that surprised me. I was expecting Dollar General levels of horror and got, I dunno, Wal-Mart instead? Not a huge improvement, but an improvement. There were some solid scares and the creature design, while not novel, was satisfactorily spindly. It was revealed slowly and build some decent tension. I guess the director and DP (who could have solved the problem by turning on the friggin’ lights) knew how to film spooky scenes.

The characters are fine and are given enough time to reveal personality and backstory. Which includes a few pretty solid funny moments that didn’t feel forced or contrived but also didn’t hurt the suspense. I wound up caring for them… not a lot… but “at all” is something.

It’s not the scariest movie ever and it follows a lot of tropes and has some time-filler scenes, but it’s pretty solid almost despite itself. On its way to being just another bog standard horror flick, it turned out pretty good. Certainly better than expected.

Score: 81