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“I was worried he’d hate it!” laughs the British director at the helm of the film adaptation of King’s short story The Boogeyman which was first published in 1973 and later released in the author’s 1978 collection Night Shift.
It is part of Hollywood lore how much King disliked Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining – despite that film being one of the most popular adaptations of his work. And Savage [below] wasn’t taking any chances.
Passing up an invitation to join King at a small cinema in Maine where an early cut of The Boogeyman was filmed several months earlier, today Savage tells FilmInk, “I’ll meet him in person at some point. We’ve chatted a bit via email and text, but the truth is, I was still finishing the movie at that point, and he saw a not quite finished cut,” he says.
“So, I was in the edit running back and forth between VFX and sound when the call came in that King had seen the movie and loved it. I maybe could have taken a week off from the edit but we were hurtling towards our deadline, so I decided to hide my head in the sand,” says Savage, 30, whose films Host and Dashcam serve as his own foray into the horror world.
If King’s The Boogeyman has previously been adapted into several short films as well as Bobby Easley’s 45-minute film in 2014, Savage’s version offers a fresh spin on the original story which follows Lester Billings – a man who has recently lost all his children to a creature lurking in the closet – on a visit to a psychiatrist, Dr Harper.
In Savage’s take – written by A Quiet Place screenwriting duo Scott Beck and Bryan Woods with Mark Heyman – The Boogeyman is now terrorising Dr Harper’s daughters, Sadie and Sawyer, portrayed by Yellowjackets’ Sophie Thatcher and Vivien Lyra Blair respectively.
“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 who uses jumpstarts to scare the hell out of the audience before slowly revealing parts of his Boogeyman.
“Obviously, these guys have to fight The Boogeyman at the end, so you had to show him. And so, we had to create a creature which felt like it made room for everyone’s personal interpretation of the creature; that spoke to the short story which has this kinda nightmarish ending where a character is revealed to be The Boogeyman.
“It was about creating something that you could glimpse just in the shadows. You could just 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 then, when you finally see the creature, we came up with this weird, messed-up design; whereby the creature reveals itself to have dimensions beyond what we see. So, there’s still room for people’s own nightmares projected onto our creature and yet, we’ve got this horrific design which will hopefully create some new nightmares,” he promises.
“Our concept of the Boogeyman is very different in this movie. I think in previous versions, the way he’s represented is very pantomime. He’s the tall guy and he’s got a hat and he walks on two legs.
“Our idea was that this is a creature that’s kind of ancient and primordial. This thing has existed as long as the darkness has – that Boogeyman is really just a name that we give to it as children but it actually runs a lot deeper than that.
“Ultimately – and this was a big bold ambition – we wanted to make the definitive take on the Boogeyman. Something that blows away all other representations of the character. And part of that, was going back to the source and what’s the thing in the darkness that still gives us goosebumps to this day, to young and old? I hope that we got near to that goal. I think that we came up with a design for this creature that still gives me shivers when I see it,” he says.
Growing up in rural Shropshire, the young Savage found plenty of inspiration for exploring the fears we all share of things that go bump in the night.
“The countryside is really scary. You’d hear a rumour that somebody had two bottles of vodka and their parents were going out of town and everyone would pile in the car, and you’d go out. And some of these parties were out in the hills. It would be like a classic horror movie, driving these tiny little lanes in pitch black and your phone signal would disappear. And you just hope that there wasn’t a murderer living in the house!” recalls the director who was just 17 years old when he launched his horror career with Strings, a micro-budget feature film which he wrote/directed/shot/produced and edited. The film went on to be shortlisted by BAFTA and won a British Independent Film Award.
“I had no idea what I was doing but I managed to raise 3,000 pounds from working paper rounds and I shot it myself and wrote it and a small handful of friends helped make this 90-minute movie, which ended up doing way better than we expected.
“So, you can say I’ve literally been doing this my whole life. I can’t really do anything else. I’m pretty useless apart from making movies,” he says modestly.
Casting David Dastmalchian [above] as Billings and Chris Messina [below] as Dr Harper, Savage was confident that these two veterans would bring their A game and elevate the subject material.
“I think one thing that people don’t appreciate is that we improvised and played around with the script a lot. These guys are so much fun to play around with. Every day, we’d say, ‘Well, this is the scene. How can we make the best version of this? How can we make this come to life?’ From my first conversation with Chris, we spoke about how to make this not just feel like another horror movie with a horror movie family… We want this to feel authentic.
“One of the movies we referenced was Ordinary People, and trying to get that kind of authenticity. And some of the best, funniest, most heartbreaking scenes were when everyone improvised in the moment, or we were playing around with it. And that’s why the movie has so much life in it because of these guys and that process of just throwing ideas around constantly,” says Savage.
The Boogeyman co-producer Dan Cohen believes that Savage has worked magic. “I think any Stephen King fan will agree that this is one of his best and more iconic short stories. And it’s only seven pages long, so we had to expand on it. But I do feel that we did the story justice, which is a very hard thing to do,” he argues.
“And wanting to do Ordinary People with jump scares and a creature sounds kinda nuts. But I think it works really well and each of those two worlds elevates one another. You wouldn’t get that without these amazing performances.
“But we’ve been fans of Rob’s for a while and I’m proud to have made Rob’s first studio movie, because I think it’s gonna be the first of many – and people are really gonna be impressed by it,” adds Cohen.
The Boogeyman is in cinemas June 1, 2023
