How Stephen King Adaptation ‘The Boogeyman’ Scared Up A Hard PG-13

“I can’t believe we got away with it,” exclaimed The Boogeyman director Rob Savage, referring to the PG-13-rated supernatural horror film.

“We always thought of this as R, but we knew we had a PG-13 rating,” recalled co-producer Dan Levine. “We definitely push the limit, and we thought we could get a lot more pushback on things to trim, but luckily we didn’t get those calls. When I watch it, I think it is R-rated.”

Savage added,” I think I thought that it was an R-rated movie until two weeks before we shot it. Nobody told me. And we just had to go through and cut out all the f-words, and everything else stayed, miraculously.”

Their comments came during a press conference in Los Angeles to promote the movie based on a short story by legendary horror author Stephen King. Originally planned to debut on the streaming service Hulu, The Boogeyman landed a theatrical release instead. It’s about a high school student and her family, broken by grief, who become the focus of an entity that targets them to feed on their suffering.

Savage wanted to make sure The Boogeyman was personal, leaving room for the audience’s own nightmares to be projected onto the creature.

“I knew we didn’t want people to leave thinking, ‘I’ve seen The Boogeyman. He’s not all that scary.’ These guys have to fight The Boogeyman at the end, so you had to show him, so we had to create a creature which felt like it made room for everyone’s personal interpretation of the creature,” the filmmaker explained. “That spoke to the short story’s nightmarish ending.

“When it came to creating the monster itself, it’s something that you could glimpse in the shadows and see these pinprick eyes staring out from the darkness. For most of the movie, we’re just allowing it to fester in the audience’s head, and when you finally see the creature, we came up with this kind of weird, messed-up design, and it reveals itself to have dimensions beyond what we see.”

While Savage was keen to use primarily practical effects for the monster in the closet, time, and one of the film’s young cast members, 10-year-old Vivien Lyra Blair, had other ideas.

“I said no,” the actor confirmed.

“Viv wouldn’t do it if we had a real Boogeyman,” Savage admitted. “It had to be ‘Ping Pong Man,’ a ball on a stick. What made me relent in the end is that we couldn’t lock in our design for the creature until very late in the day. We went around the houses on what this creature should look like, how best to represent The Boogeyman, and even what his form looks like when you finally see him at the end.

“We shot 34 days, so we didn’t have much time to mess around with a practical suit. It’s a testament to the VFX company who created our creature that we had a Boogeyman head 3D printed and slathered in KY Jelly. We had that in every single scene, and we had a shot like that, then we could show the visual effects people and say, ‘It has got to look like that.'”

The filmmaker added, “When we were doing the ADR, I showed Viv the first scene where she sees The Boogeyman, and it freaked her out so much that she wouldn’t look at the screen for the rest of the ADR, so I had to explain what was happening. The first time we showed Viv the movie, I and everyone on the VFX team didn’t want Viv not to be able to watch the movie, so, as prep, we gave her the head, which I think now sits in her home.”

The actress confirmed it does and is now in her living room wearing “a bucket hat and a scarf.”

Yellowjackets actress Sophie Thatcher plays the film’s lead role, Sadie Harper, the heartbroken high schooler struggling to come to terms with her mother’s death.

According to the film’s director, one of the first things she said to him was that she was “so sick of playing cool characters” and that she “wanted Sadie to be a loser.”

“I did say that,” Thatcher confirmed. “It’s essential to build empathy for the character, or else you won’t want to follow them on their journey, or nothing will feel earned. Just starting out with Sadie, she’s in such a distinct stage of grieving and just dealing with that and making it feel real, and her relationship with her father feels tense and complicated and how hard it is that she’s been having to take care of her younger sister.

“You build empathy for her early on. I did when I was reading it for the first time. I also wanted to make her grieving feel lived in and real because everybody grieves in different ways. There’s no specific way to grieve.”

A previous plan to bring Stephen King’s The Boogeyman from page to screen was nixed in 2019 due to the Disney-Fox
FOXA
merger. However, the studio breathed new life into the project in late 2021. King was involved in the project’s evolution.

“At first, most of our interaction with him was done through his amazing manager, Rand Holston, but we would get feedback quickly,” recalled co-producer Dan Cohen.

“Like, by the hour,” added co-producer Levine.

“Sometimes 10 minutes,” Cohen added. “I was like, ‘I couldn’t return an email this quickly, and it’s going to Stephen King and back.’ That evolved when he saw the movie, and then he started to email us directly. Rob has become friends with him. He became a huge champion of it and was a key force behind this becoming a theatrical release.”

Levine continued, “He sent an email saying, ‘I love this film. It’s a shame it’s not out in theaters,’ and we used that as a starting point for a conversation with the studio, who also loved the film, and now we’re on big screens.”

Savage admitted that he felt tremendous accomplishment bringing King’s classic story to life.

“I have watched this movie more than any other movie I’ve made,” the filmmaker confirmed. “It’s always super gratifying when you plan a great scare and to sit there in an audience and see everyone jump and throw their popcorn. However, I think the stuff I always get completely lost in are the moments when the performances weren’t planned, where I can see the personalities shining through and are captured in the DNA of the movie.

“I keep discovering new things that I didn’t even realize were in there.”

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