31 Days of Halloween: The Boogeyman

2023, Rob Savage (Host) -- Disney

Finding it hard to get back into the watching/writing of things, after a week-ish in Las Vegas and a return with ... something that was likely The COVIDs, but could have just been the existential dread of returning to The Work. We ended up just powering through Goosebumps and a few episodes of our highly anticipated Mike Flanagan series for the season, The Fall of the House of Usher. We had started watching this movie just before I left, but because The Peanut Gallery was going to be alone in the apartment while I was gone (kittens don't count; they will let monsters eat you) the idea of watching a movie about a monster under the bed was not going to be helpful. So, pause.

We rather liked Savage's first feature length entry into this genre, Host, and probably will seek out his shorts. This one fits into a sub-genre of the season that I was interested in exploring, the 'urban legend / summoned monster' in particular. This was specifically about the monster under the bed, the shadowy creature in the closet, the peering pair of glowing eyes in a dark hall, i.e. the thing of traditional nightmares. And it was adapted from a Stephen King short story, so as long as he didn't do a cameo, it was bound to be decent.

We begin with Lester Billings (David Dastmalchian, The Last Voyage of the Demeter) blundering his way into an appointment with therapist Will Harper (Chris Messina, Birds of Prey). All of Billings kids have died and while people are kind of blaming him, he is blaming a creature, a thing of nightmares that one of his children drew a creepy picture of. Billings is a broken man, someone who shouldn't be invited into your home, and before Harper can eject him, he finds him in his late wife's studio, seemingly having hanged himself.

Harper and his family are still barely recovering from his wife's death. The children are traumatized and Will is kind of lost, falling into his work, not able to supply the same support to his children as he does to his patients. The Billings thing just makes the situation worse.

And then youngest daughter Sawyer (Vivien Lyra Blair, Obi-Wan Kenobi) sees it. Of course she does, as all young children see the monster, are its most likely victim. And of course it takes a while for anyone to believe her, especially not her angry sad older sister Sadie (Sophie Thatcher, Prospect). Until she does.

This is one of the movies where I envision the classic Monster Hunter appearing, someone with the skill & knowledge to hunt down legendary things, and slay them. In fact, the first thing I did was Google to see if anyone had done D&D Stats for such a creature. Disappointed there weren't more. The movie does treat it as a creature instead of a supernatural entity of legend, in the vein of "if it can bleed, it can die." And the parents not being able to see the creature, until they accepted their children were not lying, and then could. Not quite in the way that The Grimcutty handled it, but more in the way the creature avoided adults, jumping from shadow to shadow, obsessing on the children, until it was time to kill the parents.