By Jonathan Klotz
| Published
Humans have been telling each other terrible stories of the things that go bump in the night since the dawn of language, and tens of thousands of years later, the fear of the dark remains. Typically, we outgrow this fear as we get older, but it’s one of those strange quirks of humanity that every culture around the world and throughout history has told the legend of the Boogeyman, a being that punishes misbehaving children and lurks in the darkness. The monster takes on many different forms and an endless amount of names, but it never broke through in Hollywood; even though the 2005 film The Boogeyman was a surprise hit, it’s mostly forgotten today.
The Boogeyman Is Coming To Get You
The Boogeyman stars Barry Watson, still best known for 7th Heaven, as Tim, a young man who saw his dad get pulled into the closet by the monster inside of it. Years later, while heading back to his childhood home to face his fears head-on, Tim’s girlfriend is murdered by the Boogeyman, and he barely saves his childhood friend Kate (Emily Deschanel, in her last role before breaking out on Bones) from opening the wrong closet door. Kate doesn’t quite believe Tim that a supernatural being has been stalking him and even says that it’s “the thing under the bed that gets you.”
If you guessed what happens to Kate later on in the film, congratulations because you’re right. The Boogeyman is the type of horror movie where every twist and turn can be seen coming a mile down the road, but, like the best of the genre, it does establish a few ground rules and weaknesses for the legendary monster that’s seemingly capable of appearing anywhere and at any time. It also has a simple plot and a few jump scares, that combine with the 89-minute run time to make it a perfect first horror movie for anyone new to the genre.
A Sort-Of Success
A horror movie focused solely on making closets terrifying sounds like a fake movie from Saturday Night Live, but that’s exactly what The Boogeyman is, and against all odds, it was a financial success. With a box office haul of $67 million, the film tripled its production budget and was quickly followed by two direct-to-DVD sequels, the first of which, Boogeyman 2, stars Jigsaw himself, Tobin Bell. Though the film proved that low-budget horror could easily succeed at the box office, its legacy took shape behind the camera by helping to launch the career of Eric Kripke. Sort of.
Kripke is known today as the creative mind behind Supernatural and The Boys, but he also wrote The Boogeyman, and you can see its influence in the long-running CW program’s Season 2 episode, “Hollywood Babylon,” which openly makes fun of the movie. Critics were not kind to Kripke’s horror movie, though he was only one of three writers, and it did have the backing of Evil Dead maestro Sam Raimi as a producer (which also explains why Lucy Lawless makes a brief appearance as Tim’s mom), it has not been spared from receiving a dismal 13 percent rotten rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Fans, though, have been more forgiving, turning the film into an ironic cult classic perfect for teens, but as everyone knows, once you hit a certain age, the thing that goes bump in the night is far less terrifying than the existential dread of waking up every day to go to work.
The Boogeyman is now streaming on Amazon Prime Video.
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