A LOT OF GREAT HORROR IS BASED ON GRIEF
AS ONE OF STEPHEN KING’S MOST HAUNTING SHORT STORIES HITS THE BIG SCREEN, RACHAEL DAVIS TALKS TO DIRECTOR ROB SAVAGE AND THE CAST
FEW writers are as prolific, creative or prominent as Stephen King.
From The Shining to It, The Shawshank Redemption to The Green Mile, his novels and short stories have left their mark on the film industry as much as they have on the world of literature, and his back catalogue is constantly being mined by filmmakers looking for the next big thriller, horror, mystery or drama.
So rich is his prose that the latest work of his to be adapted for the big screen is a short story that spans just a handful of pages.
The Boogeyman – a tale of things that go bump in the night – dates back to the start of his career, first published in March 1973 in the magazine Cavalier, and then collected in 1978’s Night Shift.
“The scariest King stories are based on an insidious idea that just rattles around your head in the early hours. The Boogeyman is one of those,” says Host and Dashcam director Rob Savage, who’s at the helm for this adaptation of the tale.
Turning a short story that’s just a few pages long into a feature-length horror requires toeing a careful line of remaining respectful of and faithful to the source material, while embellishing and adapting where necessary to bring the rich themes onto the big screen.
King’s original story takes place in a psychiatrist’s office. It centres on a conversation between two men: Dr Harper, and his patient Lester Billings. Lester talks to the doctor about the “murders” of his three young children, who all died after crying “Boogeyman!”, and whose corpses were all discovered in a room with the closet door ajar despite Lester being certain the door was left closed.
Rob’s movie is told from a slightly different angle. Instead of focusing on Lester’s experience, the 2023 film tells the story of Will Harper’s children, Sadie and Sawyer – played by Yellowjackets’ Sophie Thatcher and Bird Box’s Vivien Lyra Blair respectively – who have recently lost their mother and who, like their father, are haunted by grief.
The girls are still reeling from their mother’s death, and their therapist father Will, played by Chris Messina, is unable to give them the support or comfort they need. When a patient turns up at their house, desperate for help, he brings with him a mysterious and terrifying being that feeds on the family’s suffering.
“A lot of great horror movies are based around grief,” says Rob, 31.
“But the Boogeyman, within our story, represents the unspoken. All these family members living under the same roof are their own separate islands. They’re processing their individual grief alone, not speaking to each other, not validating each other’s experiences which creates this thing that grows and feeds on their separate turmoil.
“The only way they can push through it is by sharing how they’re feeling with each other. I think that’s the only way that any of us can push through grief.”
Often in Stephen King horrors and thrillers, what’s scary about the story comes from the connection you build with the characters, and from the terror being rooted in something very real and relatable, such as grief.
“It has this realistic, terrifying theme of grief, of how if you don’t let go of your grief, it comes back to haunt you,” says 10-year-old Vivien Lyra, who plays Sawyer.
“And I think movies like that are always more terrifying, ones that you can really relate to.
“Even if it’s not a terrifying physical entity, it’s still something that is going to hurt you later on if you don’t let go of it... And it makes it all the more terrifying.”
“I feel like for horror, it’s really important to build empathy for the character or else you’re not going to want to follow them on their journey, or nothing’s going to feel earned,” adds Sophie, 22, who says that it was important to make Sadie’s “grieving feel lived in, and real”.
Chris, 48, agrees. “We talked about finding the heart and the character and the truth – that’s what really attracted me to this film,” says The Mindy Project actor who recently appeared in Nike biopic Air.
“The writing is about a family trying to move forward and dealing with this tremendous loss. How do you deal with grief? Will Harper is more emotionally and psychologically stuck than any other character I’ve played. That was exciting to me as an actor to tackle that.”
For Rob, marrying the story’s psychological thrills with the fun of horror and jump scares that shock the audience was important.
“I think jump scares get a lot of bad press, but I think great jump scares – there’s nothing better,” says the director.
“And one has to earn the other. I think if you’ve got great underlying themes, and the audience feels like you invested in the characters, and you’re actually trying to say something, it’s totally fine to have something burst out of the closet and scare the hell out of you.
“I think a bit of both is fun. It’s like turning a valve, you’ve got to know when to release it and when to keep the tension.”
Of course, to create true scares Rob needed to craft a truly terrifying Boogeyman – the creature that lurks in the shadows and sends shivers down your spine in the dead of night – and he did so with excellent visual effects and motion capture.
“The thing that I was really aware of is that we didn’t want people to leave the cinema thinking like ‘I’ve seen the Boogeyman. He’s not all that scary’,” says the director.
“So we had to create a creature that felt like it made room for everyone’s personal interpretation of the creature, that kind of spoke to the short story...
“It was about creating something that you could glimpse, just in the shadows, you could just see these kind of pinprick eyes, staring out from the darkness.
“So there’s still kind of room for people’s own nightmares projected onto our creature, and yet we’ve got this horrific design which our team came up with, which will hopefully create some new nightmares.”
■ The Boogeyman releases in UK cinemas on Friday, June 2