Warning: This article contains spoilers for The Boogeyman.
After a shocking crib scene as The Boogeyman opens, Lester Billings (David Dastmalchian) stumbles into Will Harper's (Chris Messina) home office for an impromptu therapy session, and doesn't shy away from telling him exactly what happened to each of his children. Desperate and paranoid, he asks the therapist and father of two to close the door to his closet and begins to talk about a "shadow monster" that invaded his household. After he explains what The Boogeyman is, he sees himself in Will when he recognizes the father's skepticism, and his wild stories inspire Harper to slip out quietly and phone the police.
When Harper returns, he discovers that his teenage daughter Sadie (Sophie Thatcher) has come home early from school only to find Billings hanging from the back of a door after what looks like a struggle. One of the biggest changes to Stephen King's Boogeyman book involves using Billings' death, which concluded the story, as a jumping-off point for the rest of the movie. What evil entity remains after Billings is carted away by paramedics aims to do to Sadie and her little sister Sawyer (Vivien Lyra Blair) exactly what it did to Billings' children.
How The Boogeyman Killed Lester Billings’ 3 Kids (& Why)
The Boogeyman opens with a death scene involving a young child in a crib which, after Lester's surprise visit to Dr. Harper, is revealed to be one of his children. When Lester Billings opens up about the deaths of his children, he explains that the first child died from SIDS, but he suspects that "The Boogeyman," what his children called the "shadow monster" in the closet, was actually responsible. After its death, his next two children died within a year of one another.
The Boogeyman shows that the monster attaches itself to vulnerable people suffering from unresolved grief, hoping to feed on their despair and eventually kill them. After the first Billings child died, The Boogeyman was able to use the collective grief of the family to target each remaining member, which is why his two other children died in such rapid succession, with one of them having their neck snapped. The eldest, Andy, drew the picture that Lester gives to Harper in an effort to explain what happened.
The Boogeyman Changes How Lester’s Kids Die In The Book
In the movie, Lester believes that he's responsible for his children's deaths because he ignored their concerns, whereas in Stephen King's The Boogeyman, the monster haunted his childhood as well. The events of the book take place over a few years, with Lester's first two children suffering mysterious crib deaths before he moves with his wife Rita (pregnant with their third child Andy) to a new neighborhood, and the creature follows them. When Rita leaves to take care of her ailing mother, Lester panics and uses Andy as bait for The Boogeyman and flees his home, eventually seeking therapy after Andy's death and The Boogeyman returns to finish Lester off.
RELATED: The Boogeyman Movie Sets Up A Sequel That Goes Beyond Stephen King's StoryKing's choice to focus on a father so consumed by his own boyhood fears that he abandons his child to die examines how the most abhorrent behavior can be rationalized by the human psyche in an ability to cope with emotional trauma. The character of Lester Billings proves that unless childhood trauma is resolved, what strikes fear in the heart of an adult is really striking fear in the heart of their frightened inner child. The Boogeyman movie not only makes Lester a more sympathetic character by changing what happened to his children, but it also presents the creature as an allegory for grief and highlights its defeat through healing.
