ComingSoon Editor-in-Chief Tyler Treese spoke with The Boogeyman director Rob Savage about the movie adaptation of the Stephen King short story. Savage discussed turning the short story into a feature-length movie and his history with found footage. The film is available now digitally and on Blu-ray and DVD.
“High school student Sadie Harper and her younger sister, Sawyer, are still reeling from the recent death of their mother,” reads the movie‘s synopsis. “They’re not getting much support from their father, Will, a therapist who’s dealing with his own intense pain. When a desperate patient unexpectedly shows up at their house seeking help, he leaves behind a terrifying supernatural entity that preys on families and feeds on the suffering of its victims.”
Tyler Treese: I imagine it is just such an honor to be working with a story set in the world of Stephen King. The Boogeyman is a short story of his, and this is set basically afterward. David Dastmalchian’s character in the film is the main character in the story, so how cool was working in that world and putting your own stamp on this story?
Rob Savage: It was amazing, the amount of freedom we had. You’re right, it’s like [both]. [Scott] Beck and [Bryan] Woods, who wrote the first draft of the screenplay, described it really well. They said the movie is an adaptation of the short story and also a sequel to the short story all-in-one. I was amazed by how much we were able to extrapolate out from the short story and how supportive King was of the whole thing. We showed him the script before we went to shoot, and he got really on board with it and was really complimentary about it being a great way to take a short story and build it out into something that deserves to be longer and deserves to be feature-length.
It was the kind of important thing for us, that even the stuff we were inventing wholesale felt like it deserved to be in the Stephen King universe. So me and Mark Heyman — who’s the guy who wrote the movie — we’re always going back to the short story and to King’s other works and just making sure that it felt like as we were building out, it was something that belonged in the canon of King.
I loved Sophie Thatcher’s performance as Sadie. She’s really the emotional core of The Boogeyman. Can you speak to her as an actress? I thought she killed it.
I mean, she’s insanely great. She’s a wonderful person, a wonderful actor, and a wonderful collaborator. The amount that she had to put herself through for this movie is insane. I don’t think anyone, including me and her, really realized it until we were on set that every single day, she was having to scream and cry and run and fall. It’s such a committed physical performance. I’m in awe of her stamina for doing a movie like this, where she’s basically in every single shot of the film. She would turn up every day and give it completely her all. The great thing about Sophie as well, other than her ability as an actor — which is incredible — is she’s a genre lover.
She loves horror and she understands the beats of it. She understands the grammar of it. And so she can take a scene like when Sadie walks down the hallway with a zippo lighter that won’t turn on. She can take a moment like that — it’s essential horror grammar, these scenes of characters following strange noises and wandering into dark basements. She understands them, she understands the language, but she can also ground them in great performance and understand what I’m asking of her in these moments that, perhaps, other actors who aren’t as enamored with horror movies wouldn’t.
I was curious about how you approached the actual Boogeyman in the movie. How was balancing the usage of him? You want to build suspense, but you also want to feature enough of him to have an impact. How was it finding that balance?
Well, luckily the balance had kind of been found for us in other movies. So I went in being like, “Alien and Jaws are our two references.” They show the perfect amount of the creature. They’d let your mind do a lot of the work, but the glimpses you do, you’ll never forget. You’ll never forget Bruce the Shark and you’ll never forget the Xenomorph.
So while we were editing the movie, we had the amount of time the Alien is on screen and the amount of time the Shark is on screen, and every week during the edit, we would time how much the monster is in the movie and compare it to those two. We were trying to hit that sweet spot of making the audience feel paranoid that the creature was always going to pop up and that the creature could potentially be present in any moment.
Your background right now is a poster image from the movie, which speaks to what we were going for. You’ve got this huge area of darkness and then this little hint of the creature. Me and Eli Born — the cinematographer — were constantly framing shots of like keeping my open closet in the background, so the audience’s eyes were always going to these dark areas of the screen and imagining the creature, even if he wasn’t there. So even though he is not on screen for very long, hopefully, it feels like his presence is there throughout the movie.
David Dastmalchian is having a great year. His role in The Boogeyman is small but very important. Can you speak to what he brought to the character?
He’s incredible. I’ve said this before, but I want him to be in every single movie that I ever make. He’s just a phenomenal actor and a great human being and also, like Sophie, is a rabid horror fan. The thing that he brought to the movie and the thing he wanted to bring to this part was an empathy that is ultimately there in the King short story. But the character in King’s short story is much more abrasive, and he’s racist and bigoted and sexist and kind of softens over the course of the short story.
Whereas with David’s conception of the character, working with me and Mark Heyman, the writer, we wanted this to be a guy who is in need of somebody to listen to him. Somebody who’s reaching out, somebody who wants to be understood, and someone who you have a lot of sympathy for when he enters the room.
Slowly, there’s a kind of sinister grip that takes over that scene and you start to kind of suspect that this guy might have had something to do with the death of his children and he was just able to play that so beautifully, this kind of vulnerability, but still the kind of like physicality and presence and threat of violence. It was a kind of re-imagining of the character that was, in large part, down to David’s take on the character.
With The Boogeyman out, you have Night of the Ghoul coming up in the future. Scott Snyder’s an incredible comic writer, and it’s a great comic. What about that comic got your attention and showed you that it was primed for a movie?
I’m a huge film buff, and I love the era of movies that he’s harkening back to the classic Universal monster movies. But I’ve always been looking for a curse movie — something that’s in the vein of The Ring. Something where you get a sense of something having been passed onto you like It Follows, and there’s a great sense of claustrophobia and mounting dread that’s in the comic book that comes from such an unusual place.
The idea of combining The Ring with this dark chapter of Hollywood history … it’s such a great way into that type of horror that I’ve never seen before. We’ve got a great — I don’t know if it’s been announced who’s writing that yet — but we’ve got a great writer who’s already turned in a fantastic draft on that. So I’m excited, hopefully, to be shooting that one soon when a deal’s made on the strike front.
You obviously have a fondness for found footage and stuff like the Blair Witch Project. Is that something you want to do within that genre, or do you feel like you’ve explored that space?
I feel, for now, that I’ve kind of done what I wanted to do with both Host and Dashcam, which are both such wildly different movies. I think if I was to make another found footage movie, it would have to be something that was breaking new ground for me. I wouldn’t want to try and go back and repeat the success of Host or the kind of mania of Dashcam. I’d want to find a story that justified itself. But I think it’s so much about context, you know?
I wouldn’t have imagined myself making either of those movies. Then, obviously, the world went through such a huge shift during Covid that both of those movies felt like they needed to be made and needed to be made back-to-back. So I love to keep myself open because you can make them faster, cheaper, and with more freedom. There’s so much inventiveness that comes with that, which, even as I’m going on and making studio movies like The Boogeyman, I don’t want to lose the ability to go off and make small, nasty little found footage movies like those.
