The Boogeyman - Rob Savage and Sophie Thatcher BTS
Photo by Patti Perret. © 2023 20th Century Studios. All Rights Reserved.

The Boogeyman, directed by Rob Savage and written by Scott Beck, Bryan Woods, and Mark Heyman, is based on Stephen King’s 1973 short tale of the same name. The story revolves around two sisters (Sophie Thatcher and Vivien Lyra Blair) who, while grieving the loss of their mother, encounter an evil entity that feeds on their fear and darkness.

We talked with Savage about adapting a Stephen King story, the potential of a sequel, and PG-13 horror films. The Boogeyman is now playing in theaters nationwide.

Horror Geek Life: It’s great to talk with you. I’m a fan of Host. With that film, you reunited the horror community in this really cool way during COVID. It was a time when we were all very disconnected and had this movie we all wanted to watch together. It was a neat experience.

Rob Savage: Oh, thank you. Well, that movie got me through COVID. Making that saved my sanity, I think.

Horror Geek Life: And I love the Host shout-out in The Boogeyman.

Rob Savage: That was the first thing we shot, me and Seylan [Baxter] with a glass of wine on Zoom one night. We just shot that weeks before production.

Horror Geek Life: Taking on a Stephen King adaptation has to be intimidating. What was it like to get his seal of approval?

Rob Savage: Oh, I mean, incredible. It’s kind of like the whole thing peaked right then when he saw the movie and loved it, to be honest. But he was very good at being supportive all throughout the process. So it didn’t feel like an all-or-nothing, like he was going to watch the movie completely out of the blue.

He’d read the script just before we started shooting. And he really loved the script. And he gave us some great feedback. But he was like even shouting out the script while he was doing his book tour. He was talking about how excited he was for the movie as we were going into production.

So we knew that we were on the right track, and he felt like the adaptation was worthwhile. Showing him the movie, I felt like we’d done a good job with it. And then, when he got behind it so completely, it was amazing. Like he loves the movie, and he’s been tweeting and emailing, and yeah, it’s been surreal.

The Boogeyman - Rob Savage, Chris Messina, David Dastmalchian BTS
Photo by Patti Perret. © 2023 20th Century Studios. All Rights Reserved.

Horror Geek Life: The Boogeyman is really a movie for the masses. I would call it a gateway horror film for today’s generation. And I actually saw it in a theater packed with teenage girls. There were lots of shrieks and screams; it just was very energetic. What were some of your gateway horror films?

Rob Savage: My parents tried to raise me with no scary movies, no scary books. So it was like Stephen King was off the table. All of the horror movies that I really wanted to watch, I couldn’t. I had to go into friends’ houses or sneak them into my house. And so, because it was forbidden fruit, I started with the scariest, nastiest video nasties.

I was starting out with movies like Evil Dead, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Hellraiser. It was only after I got my gorehound fix that I started to like ease into some of the creepier, more slow-burn horror movies, which is where I lean today. But I’ve still got a bit of that gorehound in me.

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Horror Geek Life: PG-13 horror can be controversial with fans, but there’s absolutely a place for it. And I think there’s a craft to getting an effective jump scare. Would you agree with that? And how did you go about that?

Rob Savage: Yeah, I’m a big fan of PG-13 horror. I don’t think it neuters the horror. I think it’s really the space that I have the most fun in, which is the buildup of suspense and twisting the screws on the audience. And part of that is delivering great jump scares. Part of that is building up tension.

I think a really well-earned, smart jump scare is a wonderful thing to behold in a cinema, especially a cinema full of teenage girls who are shrieking. But then, the fun of a great jump scare is engaging with an audience who knows the horror tropes, who knows that you’re on a mission to scare them. And they’re looking and searching the screen for where the scare is going to come from. And being able to blindside the audience and play the scare in a rhythm they’re not familiar with.

James Wan always talks about the jump. A typical jump scare is one, two, three, and then the jump scare is on three. He talks about making the audience wait until eight or nine for the jump scare. And I think that’s so important, knowing the rhythm of a scare and then playing the offbeat. It’s a lot of fun.

The Boogeyman - Rob Savage, Sophie Thatcher, Vivien Lyra Blair BTS
Photo by Patti Perret. © 2023 20th Century Studios. All Rights Reserved.

Horror Geek Life: I can think of scenes where you made us wait to where I wondered if it was coming. The Boogeyman has a brilliant cast. Sophie Thatcher and Vivien Lyra Blair are so talented and have great futures ahead of them. What were they like to work with?

Rob Savage: Exceptional. I’m so incredibly grateful to all the cast for just how much they put into this movie. One of the things that I’m always looking for when I’m casting is actors who are going to put a lot of their own personality onto the screen. I think that’s what people really respond to. Coming off movies like Host, where so much of the movie’s personality comes from that group of friends and the improvisation that we did. And it’s the same with The Boogeyman.

There’s so much of Sophie and Vivien in this movie. Some of the funniest, warmest, most tender moments come from the cast playing around with the scene in a surprising way, improvising, bringing a lot of themselves to the screen. And they’re phenomenal collaborators. I couldn’t imagine this movie with anyone else.

Horror Geek Life: There was a lot of stunt work, especially with Vivien’s character. That poor girl goes through the wringer. Were there any particularly challenging scenes?

Rob Savage: Yeah, there was one scene that we spent months and months planning for and talking about. I storyboard the whole movie. We had them all up on the wall and had our entire team standing around and talking about how we were going to pull it off, which is the scene probably where Vivien gets the most punishment, which is the video game sequence.

There’s a shot that culminates that scene where we’ve got four pretty specific stunts. One included Vivien, the rest involved a stunt double, and it’s all happening in one unbroken shot. Because we had to shoot it, we just shot it in four different shots and stitched it together to make it look like one shot. Just the planning, safety, and focus on set that day… it was a relief when we got that done.

It actually came together much faster than we thought, but that was a huge day with all the different departments having to pitch in.

Horror Geek Life: At the climax of that scene, I heard gasps in my theater because you’re not supposed to do that in a PG-13 film. The same for the opening scene.

Rob Savage: Those were the two things that I thought we would never, ever get past the MPAA. They didn’t have an issue with either, weirdly.

The Boogeyman - Rob Savage BTS
Photo by Patti Perret. © 2023 20th Century Studios. All Rights Reserved.

Horror Geek Life: I wanted to ask about the creature. I know CGI was used, but what were the actors working with, and what went into the Boogeyman design?

Rob Savage: Oh, God. Well, we didn’t decide on the creature design until about two weeks before we started shooting. So it was really quite late in the day. We had this concept art, but on the day, the actors had very little to work with. I would show them an image of the creature, and I would kind of describe the scene.

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Most of the scenes, to be honest, this is probably going to make the movie not scary at all, it’s me acting out the creature, making monster noises. Or we had someone from the stunt team who sometimes came on with a little kind of bauble suit. Anytime the creature needed to interact with something or when it was pinning Sophie down, and we needed that struggle and interaction. But a lot of it was me with a boogeyman head on a stick running at the actors and screaming. It is a testament to how brilliant the actors are that they were able to keep a straight face through that.

Horror Geek Life: I last want to ask whether you purposely left the door open – pun intended – for a sequel?

Rob Savage: We have the best idea for a sequel, and we’ll see if the numbers make sense and if we get to do it. But me and Mark Heyman, who wrote the movie, have been playing with this idea. We took it to the studio, and the studio’s excited about it. It’s playing in a whole different kind of horror space.

It connects to this movie, and it deepens the mythology of this movie. But it’s playing in a horror space that I haven’t seen for a long time. I think it’s a really great, terrifying sequel that I’d be excited to direct, even if it weren’t in the Boogeyman universe. But its connection to this movie makes it special. So hopefully, we get to do that — fingers crossed. But we’ve got something exciting if that does happen.

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