Boogeyman (2005)

Boogeyman is a 2005 American horror film, directed by Stephen T. Kay. The film is a take on the classic "boogeyman", or monster in the closet.

Plot
On the surface, Tim Jensen seems to be a normal person, with a steady job and a good relationship with his girlfriend Jessica; however, a terrifying event that he witnessed as a child has left him traumatized, where his father was taken by the Boogeyman, an evil creature which lives in all closets worldwide. Since then, he has taken precautions to ensure that the Boogeyman cannot get to him, such as sleeping on a mattress on the floor, and removing all closets from his home and keeping all his clothes in a dresser drawer.

After a Thanksgiving trip with Jessica to her parents' house, Tim has a premonition in which his Mother tells him to return to the family home. Tim awakes and will not relax until he finds out what happened with his mother. When he phones the hospital, he discovers his mother has died. Upon returning to the psychiatric ward where he grew up after his father died, he discovers that one of the patients, a young girl, is being threatened by the Boogeyman, which this time lives in the ceiling of her room.

Upon a suggestion by his psychiatrist that returning to his family home to spend the night in that house would be a good idea, Tim returns to his old Victorian style house in the open country, where he relives memories of his mother telling his father that the Boogeyman does not exist and therefore cannot possibly harm Tim. Tim is briefly attacked by the Boogeyman when he enters the downstairs closet; however, despite enjoying a reunion with Kate, his childhood friend, he becomes convinced that he is being watched by the same entity that has terrorized him his entire life. Tim meets a young girl in his woodshed, named Franny, who wants to know that if it's true that the Boogeyman murdered Tim's father. Tim does not know where she heard this information, and he firmly tells her that the Boogeyman cannot exist; however, after Franny leaves, Tim reenters the woodshed and discovers a disturbing file of Missing Person lists and documents left by Franny, and upon flicking through them, he discovers a collection of missing children whom were all taken by the Boogeyman. The Boogeyman has been taking various children throughout history. When Tim looks down from a photo of a missing boy, he discovers the same missing boy standing before him. When he looks around, Tim discovers a huge crowd of the missing children moving towards him, their faces deadly white and ghostly pale. The children all come up and start brushing Tim, who faints. When he awakes, he is alone again in the house.

Tim panics and attempts to leave but Jessica, his girlfriend, abruptly shows up takes Tim out of the house for a night in a quiet motel, where she is murdered by the Boogeyman, who spies at her through the closet in the bathroom before dragging her into the bath.

Tim returns from getting ice and preparing drinks and enters the bathroom, where he finds that Jessica is missing. He realizes what has occurred, and stumbles blindly into a closet, and then walks out into his family home, just as Kate, his friend, has returned to his home and, upon hearing noises from the closets, was about to open the door herself. She is momentarily frightened by Tim's mysterious appearance, but then begins to worry when Tim panics about Jessica, a woman she never met, and then Tim drags Kate back to the hotel, where they find the empty bath; this time with blood on the side. They both wonder what has happened; Kate thinking that Tim might've harmed Jessica; but Tim angrily denies it. Soon the Boogeyman starts showing up in various unexpected places, including Kate's house. Tim attempts to warn Kate of the danger she is in, but she freaks out when Tim begins acting paranoid and strange. Frustrated at Tim's refusal to tell her what is really wrong with him, Kate claims that the person Tim saw in her house was in fact her deaf father. Kate calls Tim's Uncle Mike to have him check on Tim.

Tim returns to his house and meets Franny once more, who leads him to a house full of proclamations describing the Boogeyman. There is a chair in the middle of the room facing a closet. Tim remembers this room as being the home of a doctor whom everyone thought was insane. Franny then reveals herself to be one of the dead kids whom the Boogeyman murdered (and the daughter of the "insane" doctor), and disappears, telling Tim he'd best go to the place where it all started.

Mike arrives at the house to check on Tim to find it deserted. Tim returns to his house to find Mike's truck but rushes in to find that the Boogeyman has taken Mike. Tim proceeds to board up all of the doors in the house except his bedroom closet where he bolts a chair to the floor facing the closet in an attempt to lure the Boogeyman out. Franny joins Tim who tells him to enter the closet. When Tim does, he reappears at the hotel revealing that closets and beds are portals in time and space. There he watches the Boogeyman kill Jessica in the bathtub. Tim is knocked back against the wall and busts the back of his head open. He leaves the hotel through the same closet as before after touching the tub with his bloody hand revealing the blood he and Kate saw earlier was his own. The closet returns him to his house once again where Mike begins firing a nail gun past Tim at the Boogeyman. Mike is attacked and killed by the Boogeyman who wraps him in plastic sheeting and drags him into a closet. Tim follows where he reunites with Kate at her house and saves her from an attack seconds after her phone call to Mike from earlier. The Boogeyman attempts to drag Kate under her bed and Tim holds on to her which deposits them back in Tim's old room. The monster emerges from the closet and turns into various toys Tim was afraid of as a child. He first appears as a murder of crows which Tim smashes the toy equivalent with a baseball bat sending the monster back to the closet. The Boogeyman resurfaces as an electrical vortex trying to draw Tim into the closet once more, but Tim smashes the ball of electricity in a glass case the monster was mimicking. Tim destroys a hooded shirt that scared him as a child further damaging the monster. The monster appears again as a humanoid figurine which stood on Tim's bedside table and frightened him as a child. The Boogeyman attempts to drag Tim back into a closet to kill him, but realizing that the monster is only posing as the figurine, Tim picks it up and slams the toy against a dresser, smashing the torso to pieces, causing the Boogeyman to suffer the same injury knocking the Boogeyman back toward the closet. The Boogeyman resurfaces however causes a vortex of winds, clawing at Tim's legs, but Tim and Kate cling onto grounded objects in the room and Tim kicks the Boogeyman in the jaw, causing him to fall back into the closet and into an ethereal pit.

With the Boogeyman gone, Tim hopes that his and Kate's lives will be safer. Morning dawns and Tim already feels better and the credits roll. However, a post-credits scene reveals a young girl being tormented by the monster, revealing that the Boogeyman has resurfaced out of the closet.

List of Deaths
List of deaths in Boogeyman.

Box office
In its opening weekend, the film ranked at #1, grossing $19,020,655 and nearly equaling its production budget. The film grossed $46,752,382 domestically and $20,440,477 internationally, for a worldwide total of $67,192,859.

Critical reception
Boogeyman received largely negative reviews from film critics. The review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes reports that 13% of 89 critics gave the film a positive review, with an average rating of 3.4/10. The site's consensus states: "The plot is been-there done-that generic, and none of the shock effects can do anything to build up suspense". Metacritic gave the film a 32 out of 100 rating, indicating "generally unfavorable reviews."

Anita Gates from The New York Times gave the film a negative review, writing, "The filmmakers are smart enough to keep the monster out of sight for a long time and then to show only glimpses, but a similar tactic of providing only glimpses of plot and character is disastrous. Moviegoers never learn who or what the boogeyman is, what his particular beef with Tim is, what his powers are and what has stirred up his wrath after all these years," summarizing, "The house is very creaky, but then so is the movie." Marc Savlov from The Austin Chronicle awarded the film one out of five stars, panning the film's pacing, under-lit sets, computer generated effects, and overuse of horror clichés. Frank Wilkins from Reel Talk gave the film a negative review, stating, "Although Boogeyman starts out with a stylishly depicted premise that promises a nightmarish ride into terror, after about twenty minutes the movie falls flat with its cheap terror tactics, its abysmal dialogue and its shamelessly tawdry script." Tom Meek from the Boston Phoenix gave the film one and a half out of four stars, saying, "Director Stephen T. Kay knows how to get under your skin, and Watson nails the internal-turmoil bit, but it’s still just a one-trick pony that comes up lame long before the insipid climax." Jeremy Wheeler from AllMovie complimented Barry Watson and Emily Deschanel's performances, and promising start, but criticized the design of the film's title monster, and the finale, which he called "ridiculous" and "downright embarrassing." Film critic Leonard Maltin awarded the film a mixed two out of four stars, writing, "Despite its predictable blueprint there are a couple of pretty decent scares to be had here... [though] you might consider chapter-skipping on your DVD to get to the good stuff."

Home media
The film was released on VHS and DVD by Sony Pictures Home Entertainment on May 31, 2005, with the DVD release being both on UMD and Special Edition. Universal Pictures released the film on DVD later that same year. It was later released by Sony Pictures in 2006 and 2010, both times as a double feature, with the first release pairing it with When a Stranger Calls and the second with The Fog. Boogeyman debuted on Blu-ray on August 21, 2012, where it was released by Ais.