The Boogeyman Director Rob Savage on How Horror Conquers Fear

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Rob Savage is one of the most exciting emerging filmmakers today, and he’s making a huge transition with The Boogeyman. The director’s new Stephen King adaptation is a massive, big-budget undertaking, roughly $35 million compared to the approximately $100 thousand budget of his first two films. He showed what he could do with a little bit of money and amazing ideas in the COVID cinema masterpiece Host, and followed it up with the controversial but classic-in-time Dashcam.


He’s putting found footage aside and helming the new 20th Century Studios film written by Mark Heyman following a draft from Scott Beck and Bryan Woods (A Quiet Place, 65). Savage has an intuition for suspense and scares, and was a clever choice to direct The Boogeyman, which doesn’t exactly adapt the Stephen King story so much as use it (and sort of continue it) to create its own world. With a catching enthusiasm and charm, Savage spoke with MovieWeb about the film, King, unlikable characters, and horror itself.

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Rob Savage Grows with The Boogeyman

Rob Savage on set of The Boogeyman
20th Century Studios

The Boogeyman has a more expansive scope than Savage’s other great films, though that’s not saying much; Savage has limited his films, almost to a claustrophobic sense, to small settings and singular characters. This film, however, follows a therapist and his daughters after he becomes widowed, and they become unable to traverse the impasse of grief. When a patient shows up at their house, troubled and very disturbed, he seems to unleash some type of monster upon them, one which is just as emotional as it is physical.

Here’s how Savage describes the movie and the monster moving through it:

The creature, it sort of feeds on suffering and discontent, and it finds in this family the perfect nesting ground. These three characters, the two sisters and the therapist father, they’ve just recently gone through a loss, but they’re all kind of grieving separately. None of them are talking about it, and a kind of lack of communication permeates the house, and kind of festers into this creature. That’s what the creature represents ultimately, to me. It’s all the dark things we don’t like to speak about; they grow and become something monstrous.

The Boogeyman Gets Savage

The Boogeyman
20th Century Studios

Horror fans and viewers who loved Savage’s other titles will get to see a new, highly produced version of his vision. They may be surprised to find out that the money didn’t change him.

Dashcam was this kind of attempt at just pushing everything up to 11 and doing this kind of crazy, over-the-top movie that any studio would probably pass out at the sight of,” said Savage, who then expected to rein everything in for The Boogeyman. “I think I was kind of imagining and projecting this idea of what an experience making a studio movie might look like. I was kind of expecting to have to fight for everything, and having to kind of water things down compared to the last two movies I’ve done, which had been totally independent. But it wasn’t really that way at all.” Savage continued:

I was so kind of ready for it, kind of spoiling for a fight when I started working on The Boogeyman, and it wasn’t necessary at all. I’d say that The Boogeyman is as much my film as those last two that I made with final cut but no money. This one just happened to have a bit more of a budget.

“It’s not so much that I could do whatever I wanted,” admitted Savage, “it’s more that from the very beginning it was clear that we’re on the same page. My pitch was, I want to make a movie that feels like Ordinary People meets Poltergeist, something that’s fun and scary and plays well for a big crowd, but also, the human drama feels meaty and feels real, and doesn’t feel like a movie version of grief, which is what the movie is. It’s about this family, these kids have lost their mom when we meet them in the movie, and the creature itself becomes kind of a manifestation of that grief. And I wanted that to not feel cheap or flippant. So we went in with this idea we want to make a broad, commercial, but classy and grounded horror movie that also felt a little dangerous.”

Related: The Boogeyman Director Explains How Stephen King Creates Unlikable but Empathetic Characters

“It’s a movie about a creature that comes for your kids. I wanted the audience to feel like none of the characters were safe, including the children. That was something that I was really pushing for, that there was a kind of ferocity to this movie that took people off guard in the studio. You know, they were anxious about it. But they let me push this movie pretty far, especially for our PG-13 rating, which I cannot believe we got,” continued Savage.

I won’t even tell you, but there’s one scene, the opening scene in the movie, the studio didn’t even want to bother previewing it because they realized there’s no way this will get a PG-13. And we previewed it, and it killed. For some reason — the MPAA must have been looking at their phones when that was on the screen — we got it past them.

Transforming Stephen King

Stephen King The Boogeyman
20th Century Studios

While Stephen King has about 60 different adaptations across film and television, there are surprisingly still King stories that haven’t been adapted. This mostly includes his short stories and novellas, so it’s cool for a King fan to see The Boogeyman (a small story from the ’70s collection Night Shift) get a big-screen treatment, even if it’s a very different one.

Night Shift was one of the first things I read by King because I wasn’t the biggest reader as a kid,” admitted Savage. “I tried to get better at it. But I knew that I wanted to read Stephen King, because my parents told me that I couldn’t, because it was too scary. So I knew that I needed to. And so I started with the short stories, because they were the easiest to digest. And then from there, I started reading his novels, and I’ve read a whole bunch of them, and he’s been a big influence on me as I’ve started to move into filmmaking. But I read Night Shift when I was way too young.” Savage elaborated with a thoughtful, quiet consideration:

I was a kid reading The Boogeyman, and hit with this sense that it was probably too adult for me as I was reading it, that it was kind of speaking to a horror and a darkness that was very adult and that wasn’t just scary things hiding in the darkness. It was about the inner darkness.

And it really got under my skin in a way that I didn’t really fully understand as a child, and I think part of that is the character of Lester Billings, who is very different in the short story to our version. He’s been kind of given a bit of a makeover by David Dastmalchian, who came with this idea of honoring the King character but bringing a kind of sympathetic quality to him. This character, who you kind of care about and empathize with, but on a dime can switch to being sinister and having this kind of simmering violence there.

“And really, the hard part was done when I came on board,” continued Savage. “I did a lot of work, I’d been on this movie for two and a half years, but when I came on board there was already a script by Beck and Woods, which subsequently we kind of moved away from in a lot of ways. But the thing that they had cracked stuck with this idea of using the scene from the short story, this therapy session, as the inciting incident. And so the therapy session plays out in full and the Lester Billings character almost infects this new family with the demonic presence of the creature. Our film is almost like a sequel to the short story, in a way, more than an adaptation.”

Terror Is the Best Medicine

David Dastmalchian in The Boogeyman
20th Century Studios

The idea of a “boogeyman” in itself is almost like a mascot for the horror genre — it’s like a stand-in for each person’s fears and neuroses. As such, the character (and the film) can almost feel like a meditation on horror itself.

“It’s the first thing that we kind of come up with as kids to give shape to the darkness,” said Savage. “So there’s a creature in my closet — the boogeyman is the word we use for that. And then for parents, it’s kind of the way that you teach kids about the evil in the world. It’s the first idea that there’s something lurking out there, that there’s this real darkness in the world. So it’s interesting to look at it from both sides of that spectrum.” For some of us, the boogeyman never leaves the closet. For horror fans, they become enamored with that closet.

Related: The Boogeyman Review for Scaredy-Cats: A Dream Movie for Facing Fear

“I think horror is a really healthy way to work through your issues,” explained Savage. “One of the things that I love about horror is it deals with these meaty, weighty subjects, but it doesn’t feel like taking medicine. It feels like you don’t have to quite stare it in the eye, you can talk about things through parable and in fairy tales, and also have fun with it as well.” He continued:

There’s a kind of abandon to horror movies out there. It’s like nothing is off the table. We can talk about all those deepest, darkest fears and thoughts that we all have, but nobody likes to speak about. It’s almost like a safe space, because it’s in the realm of the fantastical. You can speak to things that nobody would ever talk about at the dinner party. And I think that’s healthy. It’s a great kind of therapeutic space to talk about how f*cked up we all are.

Overcome Your Anxieties the Rob Savage Way Today!

Ironically, despite reading Stephen King at a young age and being one of the most exciting horror filmmakers to emerge in the last decade, Savage hasn’t always has a loving embrace of horror. “I was so terrified as a kid,” recalled Savage. “It was like playing Russian roulette. You know, I would watch these horror movies and every single one of them would terrify me, and I was just waiting for that one short story or horror movie that would push me too far, and that I wouldn’t be able to unsee. I remember watching The Exorcist for the first time and feeling like my DNA had been changed. Like I would never be able to sleep with the light off again.”

So why does he pursue horror? And how is he so damn good at it? “I think I just I worry about everything,” smiled Savage. “I’m a very anxious person, and I like to put all that anxiety onto the screen. It makes me chill out a bit.”

So just remember that when you’re scared screening The Boogeyman, or terrified of any fears. Dealing with it might just get you through to the other side, even if it’s merely momentary, to a place where there are no closets and the nightlight’s always on. It just might take some screams.

Produced by 21 Laps Entertainment, 20th Century Studios releases The Boogeyman in theaters today.

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