With the release of The Boogeyman, British horror maestro Rob Savage proves himself more than capable of handling a big-budget Stephen King adaptation. We chat to the director about making horror films for all ages, and why horror is the perfect genre to explore grief and trauma.
A Stephen King adaptation is every horror director’s dream. Director Rob Savage had already made a name for himself with the lockdown horror Host and stirred up controversy with dashcam, but arguably, The Boogeyman is the director’s biggest challenge to date. The film follows the Harper family, who are still reeling from a recent tragedy but come face to face with a terrifying entity.
First of all, congratulations on the film and thank you for the nightmares. Were you familiar with The Boogeyman short story?
As a kid, I started out with a lot of Stephen King short stories because I have a very short attention span. I gravitated towards the shortest and goriest of his short stories. I remember this one just really, truly messed me up. There’s a nastiness to that story which stuck with me. The Lester Billings character in that is a real piece of work, especially compared to our lovely David Dastmalchian.
The opening scene alone is so scary. It’s rated PG-13 in America, but horror fans hate that rating, because it feels like you can’t go scary enough. So how do you make it available for everyone but still scary?
First of all, a message to horror fans: this film is really f*cking scary. And it doesn’t matter that it’s a PG-13. I don’t think PG-13 really impacts what you can do scare-wise. The reason that you might be put off by a PG-13 rating, is because you feel like there’s only a certain amount of damage you can do to the characters, there’s only a certain amount of threat therefore that the movie can elicit.
I knew it was going to be PG-13 going in, although we’d actually written the movie as an R-rated movie and then we changed it to PG-13 a little bit before the shoot. We start with a scene that goes very hard on the violence, it’s a pretty shocking opening scene that shows you off the bat that we’re not afraid to go there. The rest of the movie, I think, has that flavour of unpredictability about it. And also, you just got to know how to push people’s buttons. I delight in messing with people in that way.
(L-R): Chris Messina as Will Harper, Director Rob Savage, and David Dastmalchian as Lester Billings on the set of 20th Century Studios’ THE BOOGEYMAN. © 2023 20th Century Studios. All Rights Reserved.
Do you think it is important to also have those PG-13 horror films? Because surely younger audiences also have the right to experience those thrills?
Totally. This is a perfect gateway horror movie. I want to get the word out there to those kids who are able to go into this movie, that this really shouldn’t be a PG-13. So before the MPAA and the BBFC realise the horrible mistake they’ve made, you should all go and see this movie because it goes about as hard as a PG-13 movie will ever go.
You did Host and Dashcam, and then a Stephen King adaptation lands on your desk. Was it ever going to be anything other than a yes?
Obviously, I was going to say yes to it, but sometimes you get a script, and it’s really good, but you don’t know what to do with it. This one had a script that was really interesting. Scott Beck and Bryan Woods had done a first draft that had a lot of great ideas and a great way of expanding on the short story, which is just two people talking in a room.
Vivien Lyra Blair as Sawyer Harper in 20th Century Studios’ THE BOOGEYMAN. Photo by Patti Perret.
© 2023 20th Century Studios. All Rights Reserved.
As soon as I read it, I realised what I could bring to it, which is to try and make a movie that’s scary and evocative of how it feels as a kid to be terrified of shapes in the darkness and something lurking under your bed, I wanted to put audiences back into that mindset. Even though a lot of people might roll their eyes when they hear I just made a movie called The Boogeyman, to do a movie that really reclaims that character and that title was an exciting idea.
Were you also excited to do something that didn’t take place in the COVID-19 pandemic?
Yeah, I wanted to go totally the opposite way. I wanted this to be a classic haunted house movie that felt like it could have been plucked right out of the 70s. Or you could watch it 10 years from now and, unless we’re all living in AI bubbles, it would be completely relatable in whatever situation you watch it in.
(L-R): Director Rob Savage, Sophie Thatcher as Sadie Harper, and Vivien Lyra Blair as Sawyer Harper on the set of 20th Century Studios’ THE BOOGEYMAN. Photo by Patti Perret. © 2023 20th Century Studios. All Rights Reserved.
This film is very different from Host and Dashcam. Did you feel like you were doing something differently with this, in the day-to-day?
Completely. This is a kind of conventionally shot horror movie, it was a new set of tools. This is more the mode that I’m used to working, I never thought that I would do two found-footage movies back to back. But I hadn’t really proven myself with a big budget, scary, conventionally shot horror movie. I wanted to show that I could flex those same muscles and make something that was just as scary as Host, but in a more conventional mode of storytelling and also bring what I’d learned from those movies onto this movie.
There’s a lot of the same kind of playfulness and improvisation that we use on this movie that obviously we took from Host and Dashcam, which were completely improvised movies. We were able to bring some of that same kind of spontaneity into this one, which hopefully gives it a different flavour from a lot of the more kind of rigidly scripted horror movies that we’re used to seeing.
What kind of spontaneous moments do we see? The cheese scene?
The cheese! Just a lot of the humour, a lot of the scenes where the characters are working through their grief we improvised and workshopped and rehearsed and just made sure that those didn’t feel like typical, trope-y, horror movie versions of those scenes. And a lot of the best, funniest moments come from the cast, just playing around with the scene on the day.
Director Rob Savage on the set of 20th Century Studios’ BOOGEYMAN. Photo Patti Perret. © 2023 20th Century Studios. All Reserved.
It’s a film about grief. A24 has made a whole brand out of making horror films about grief and trauma. Why do you think that’s such a prominent theme?
I think because horror is so great at speaking to the things that we don’t really want to discuss. Horror is great at looking deep within us and saying that thing that we all feel, but never speak about. It’s exactly what I want to put up on the screen, that fear is what we want to represent. The way that we were coming at this theme of grief was the idea of communication. It’s about the idea of leaning on other people when you’re going through dark times. It’s about the idea of validating each other’s experience.
How did the monster design come about?
We just wanted something that was clean and simple and iconic. And it had to feel like some ancient thing that we as kids call the Boogeyman. It’s not like Pennywise, where it’s like a pantomime version of what you’re afraid of. This is fear itself. This is the thing that comes from the shadows, that’s lived there as long as there has been darkness in the world. It also had to be something that you could see in a full 3D rendering and would look amazing, but then you also had to be able to draw it in crayon as a kid and for it to make sense. It had to have that child-like simplicity about it.
The short story is just about Lester, but here we focus mostly on the Harpers. What did that do for you as a storyteller?
I’m going to steal an answer from Beck and Woods who came up with the definitive, perfect take on this. They said this movie is basically an adaptation of the short story and a sequel to the short story, all in one. To me, it felt like this movie, while it touches on these parental fears, the Boogeyman is the first way that you explain to kids that there are scary things out there, that there are things out in the world that might want to harm you. When you think of the Boogeyman, you think of childhood fears, and I wanted to tell a story that really came at it from that perspective.
The Boogeyman is in cinemas 2 June.
