Stephen King devoted more than 4,000 pages to describing the fantasy world of The Dark Tower, and yet at the end of Roland Deschain’s 10-novel journey to the tower, space was still shrouded in shadow. Specifically, todash space.
Before I understood “cosmic horror” as HP Lovecraft’s defining mode, King mesmerized me with the promise of a darkness between worlds, where violent titans lurked and a hapless few lived in a foggy hell for eternity. The idea of todash creeps into other King books – The fog And From a Buick 8 its biggies – but it always looms up in the late Dark Tower novels. If Roland and his and ka-tet, Eddie, Susannah, and Jake eventually learn that ancient advanced societies of Roland’s “Mid-World” parallel universe have found ways to break the fabric between realities and reach todash space, and every being who beheld it seems to agree to be that it is pure terror. The takeaway from the Dark Tower books: the unknown is better left unknown, and if the beasties of the todash ever find their way into your reality, walk.
Technically, King’s cosmic world-building has nothing to do with it The boogeymanthe latest horror movie from Host And Dashcam director Rob Savage – but I was still thinking about it for the full 98 minutes running time. Based on King’s short story of the same name, about a troubled father who discusses his children’s deaths with a psychiatrist and confesses that he believes they were killed by something supernatural. The boogeyman is basically a haunted house movie designed to scare the hell out of people through the people-centered approach that characterizes much of King’s work.
As high school student Sadie (Yellow jacketsSophie Thatcher) investigates the thing that rumbles around in her sister’s closet at night, trying to avoid a mental anguish that she knows many other people have succumbed to. Life: there is a lot involved! Savage, in collaboration with writers Scott Beck and Bryan Woods (A quiet place) and Mark Heyman (Black Swan), give Thatcher a lot to chew on as the centerpiece of a psychological drama that’s a bit like a studio-friendly version The Babadook.
But make no mistake: the Boogeyman is real and ready to kill Sadie’s family. To quote The Dark Tower’s cowboy herders, Savage hasn’t forgotten his father’s face. The boogeyman understands the duality of a King story.
Image: 20th century studios
While The Dark Tower’s books are filled with gunfighters, dimensional gateways, and killer AI-powered trains, King also finds ways to reduce them to human concerns. The universe is imploding, but so is the day-to-day life of its earthbound characters as they try to stay afloat. King makes the personal hurdles of addiction or loss feel as terrifying as killing an army of robotic raiders with lightsabers. (Yes, there are lightsabers in the Dark Tower series.) To complete his quest for the Tower and defeat the infernal creature known as the Crimson King, the hero Roland must cling to a found family plucked from different eras in American history and learn a vulnerable, loving to be a man. He must also kill anything that wanders out of Todash space.
Watching The boogeymanI felt the Dark Tower’s brand of cosmic horror squeeze tension out of the on-screen action – maybe even a part that wasn’t there, since The boogeyman is simple, straightforward and dangerously boring. The adaptation begins like the short story: David Dastmalchian (Dune, prisoners, Suicide Squad) pops up to play the father, Lester Billings, a shattered man who has no idea about the monstrous form that killed his children. His psychiatrist Will Harper (Chris Messina) can barely understand him. His wife recently died in a car accident, and he and his daughters Sadie and Sawyer (Obi Wan KenobiVivien Lyra Blair) are all in mourning.
That kind of death is a tragedy that millions have experienced in real life, but movies have sanded it down to Stock Emotion. The boogeyman doesn’t reinvent the wheel, but a second shock exacerbates the staggering grief: Shortly after Lester begs Will for help, he is found strangled in the doctor’s house. Police rule it a death by suicide. Will assumes they are right. Sawyer knows it was The Boogeyman, and as the evil entity makes itself known to the entire family, so does Sadie.
Photo: Patti Perret/20th Century Studios
The modified version of The boogeyman is full of classically tailored fears and creeping moods. Even more than Lights out or James Wan’s Conjuring movies, Savage’s take on the creature feature is buttoned up and often over-extended in an effort to keep the loss of the Harper family at the center of the story. The action gets a bit repetitive: In the aftermath of Lester’s death, the movie oscillates between Boogeyman attacks in the increasingly familiar Harper house and Sadie’s trips to school, where she is tormented for being a sad sack who steals the dresses of her deceased mother carries. (Are high schoolers the real monsters? Makes you think.) Savage is playful about teasing the dark corners of the house – the ones that are the wireless light ball earns residue on this film, given how often it rolls into the shadows to catch the silhouette of a spindly monster – but eventually the jump scares wear thin.
The middle stretch might feel like a slog if not for Thatcher. From scene to scene, the 22-year-old actor conjures up a sense of dread at the right moment, then switches to the emo teen energy an indie version of the movie could need. When the monster appears, she bursts into protector mode with full fire behind her eyes. Between Yellow jackets And The boogeymanI’m convinced she will follow in the footsteps of Sigourney Weaver and Jamie Lee Curtis as an all-rounder of the genre.
Surrounding this is the big what-if of the film that I couldn’t shake: what is the boogeyman? Where’s the Boogeyman? Why is the Boogeyman? The movie isn’t one of the great entries in the Grief Horror subgenre, but it might be an exceptional King storytelling for how much it does and doesn’t explain on that front. There are no walk-on cameos from it Salem’s Lot characters to explain that our characters are fighting a creature from todash space, but when you know it’s King, you can’t help but wonder.
Because King so casually and constantly inserts Dark Tower crossover elements into otherwise unrelated work, it’s become easy to fill in logic errors with Dark Tower lore and see the characters a little deeper than they actually are. Savage successfully bends the cosmic horror element to his will The boogeymanand for fans of King’s world(s), it’s fair to call it the best Dark Tower movie ever – at least until we get a real one. Wait… what were they doing now?
The boogeyman will be in cinemas from June 2.