Boogeyman

Barry Watson is Tim, he is an up-and-coming news editor and he has this uncanny fear of the closets in this scary-fest with weird psychological undertones and surprisingly unforeseen twists and turns. As a child, Tim witnessed his father's abduction by the Boogeyman, who lurked in the dark shadows of his bedroom closet. The vanishing was downplayed by his family and he was persuaded to believe that his father simply abandoned them. His mother was committed to an insane asylum soon afterwards. It is now fifteen years after that dreadful night and yet Tim still hasn’t gotten over his fear. He has been consulting with psychiatrists over the years and he has not been successful in combating this terror inside his heart. Soon, he is forced to relive his nightmares once again when his mother dies. At the funeral, he meets a mysterious child who may or may not be the key that will unlock the secrets of the evil phantom. This movie works surprisingly well. The terror and suspense it generates was sustained pretty much all throughout the tense one-and-a-half hour running time. There are clichés, of course, but it was effective in building up the creeping atmosphere of dread and helped provide rooms for effective twists in scenes where you think you know what will happen next based on how movies of this kind usually play out. For a low-budget thriller ($7 million), this movie achieved what the loud and visual-effects laden big-budgeted horror flicks fail to do: take the audience into a wild jolting ride of dreadful anticipation. The use of psychological and mental suggestions in some of the scenes bring to fore additional questions that further make the story more involving: could those things be really happening or are we just being played by Tim who may not have taken his father’s abandonment well and played out this neatly woven tale of a Boogeyman who will, at any moment, strike from behind the darkened shadows of the closet and take away your loved one? We don’t know for sure but we are thinking.