Rob Savage Brought Sisterhood and Horror to ‘The Boogeyman’

It’s not easy to make a story like The Boogeyman frightening. Especially not to an audience who has already heard its story. The short story by Stephen King has been one that has haunted audiences since its release in 1973. Since, we’ve had countless film adaptations of its message and the fear of what lurks in the dark has been a staple among the minds of young children ever since. I was a kid once, I remember thinking the Boogeyman was going to get me and now, with a new film from Rob Savage starring Chris Messina, Sophie Thatcher, and Vivien Lyra Blair, that fear is back in full force.

Genuinely a terrifying retelling of the story rooted in the grief of a family who just lost their mother, The Boogeyman (2023) isn’t for the faint of heart. No really, I’ve never seen a group of journalists screaming in a theater like this. I am someone who can handle frightening things but I was even hiding behind my hands. And in getting to talk to Savage about his film, it is clear that’s exactly what he wanted from his audience.

At the core of a terrifying tale are two sisters, Sadie (Thatcher) and Sawyer (Blair), as they come to terms with a life without their mother and so I asked Savage about centering the heart of the film with them and how he worked with both Thatcher and Blair to bring those layers to life. “I felt like the best version of this movie was one that felt like it kind of seriously grappled with those issues,” he said. “It wanted to be a kind of sincere, meaty, traumatic movie about what it feels like to lose someone and how isolating that is. And really that was what we were interested in. And that’s to us what the creature kind of represents more than just grief and trauma writ large. It’s really about the lack of communication between these characters. You’ve got this character of Lester Billings (David Dastmalchian) who comes in and really just wants to be understood. He inadvertently brings this evil into their house, but he’s kind of reaching out to this therapist because this therapist has lost somebody and he’s gone through this trauma.”

In the original King story, Billings is the character haunted by the Boogeyman in question. But in Savage’s tale, Billings brings the Boogeyman to Sawyer and Sadie’s door, left to haunt these two girls grieving over their mother. Savage went on to talk about all these characters interacting together and not talking as they should. “All throughout the movie, these three family members just struggle to speak to their own experiences of grief. And instead they just kind of let it fester. And that kind of unspoken darkness breeds this creature, gives life to this creature. And so it was one of the movies we referenced was Ordinary People, which is a great movie about people failing to communicate and understand each other and validate each other’s experience of grief. So the pitch was basically Ordinary People meets Poltergeist. It had to be really scary and fun and 90 minutes, and it was a rollercoaster. But when we really attacked these scenes of grief and these character scenes, they had to feel meaty and dramatic and weighty.”

He went on to praise his cast, filled with some of the best in the business. “The first step is you cast incredible actors. Like our cast,” Savage said. “We started with Chris Messina, who’s wonderful and has been an actor I’ve wanted to work with for a long time. Who’s got this kind of uncanny ability to ground everything. Even when he’s talking about shadow monsters in the closet, he’s able to somehow make it feel like Cassavetes, you know and then Vivien was somebody who as soon as I first auditioned her, I knew that she was gonna be the heart of this movie. If I could kind of harness just a fraction of her personality and get it on screen, the audiences would fall in love with her. And then Sophie carries the whole movie on her shoulders. And she’s such a kind of warm, relatable presence and is able to kind of exist at this extremely high level of emotional turmoil for almost the entire 90 minutes and somehow not have a complete mental breakdown. So she carried the whole thing for us.”

You can see our full chat here:

The Boogeyman is in theaters.

(featured image: 20th Century Studios)