The Boogeyman Isn't a True Story - But It Takes Inspiration From Another Horror Movie (2024)

When it comes to Stephen King adaptations, fans often wonder if the movies are based on true stories. TheBoogeyman is the latest to pique curiosity. That's because it feels like a real-world horror, playing on how kids often think there's a monster hiding in the closet.

It could easily play into some childhood experience King had, with director Rob Savage expanding and plugging in real-life drama. This would, of course, enhance it as a psychological horror. Interestingly, while TheBoogeyman isn't based on a true experience, Savage has been influenced by another horror movie and how it used the night as a cover to kill.

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The Boogeyman Movie Took Inspiration From The Ritual

In an interview with the Kingcast Podcast, Savage admits he was influenced less by things like It's Pennywise and more by TheRitual. That horror movie was a pagan bloodfest, focusing on friends in the woods being attacked by a monster, Moder. This being, based on Norse mythology, stalked and picked them off one by one in the dead of night, feeding on their fears.

The Boogeyman has a similar energy, with its creature haunting the Sawyer family. It uses their grief after the mom dies, coming off as a nightmare as it harasses the girls from the darkness. This builds their trauma up more, allowing it to feed on their emotions until it wants to physically devour them. Interestingly, Savage asked the creature designer of TheRitual, Keith Thompson, to work on this ghoul. He loved how Moder looked battered, worn and primordial, so he challenged Thompson to conjure something with a twist.

And it shows in the final product. Moder looked like a giant elk, with human parts all over its body and head and a shadowy face where its mouth should be. TheBoogeyman's terrifying ending riffs on this, as its monster has an animalistic design that subverts StrangerThings' Demogorgon. It also has, ironically, a head inside its mouth -- nodding to Thompson's love of body warping. But more than the physical look with a face that looks patched together, it's the suffocating, claustrophobic feel of a hunter that Savage's team mimics to great effect.

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The Boogeyman Movie Is Based on a Stephen King Story

King's original short story, also titled "The Boogeyman," came out in the '70s. King's story can be read in his first collection of shorts: NightShift. It can be purchased on Amazon or Barnes & Noble in physical, electronic or audiobook formats. And while it's fiction, it harps on the author's love of the shadows and creatures that go bump in the night.

In this short story, though, the Boogeyman is a shape-shifting therapist who attacks a patient after a session regarding the man losing his family. That was a bit more dramatic and campy until the being revealed its true face and jumped on him in the closet after dropping the mask. In other words, it's a more human story than horror. Thanks to Thompson's genius, however, TheBoogeyman's beast has a more demonic look, as if it's existed for centuries in caves or crawled up from the pits of hell. That said, King ultimately laid a solid foundation for Savage to focus on how a family can be preyed upon by this shadow monster.

To see how its monster compares to The Ritual, The Boogeyman is now playing in theaters.