From short story to streaming
Rob Savage’s 2023 supernatural horror-thriller The Boogeyman is officially streaming on Netflix. Based on Stephen King’s 1973 short story from the Night Shift collection, the film takes significant liberties with its source material.
The original text is a dialogue-heavy, single-night encounter centered on a man named Lester Billings consulting a psychiatrist about the mysterious deaths of his three children, each of whom cried out “boogeyman!” with the closet door ajar. In contrast, Savage’s film functions more like a sequel, focusing on Dr. Will Harper and his daughters Sadie and Sawyer as they cope with the death of their wife and mother, following an encounter with Billings.
The adaptation moves the setting to the present day and redesigns the titular creature into a skeletal, spindly-limbed entity with glowing eyes, differing from the humanoid, face-wearing description in the short story.
Stephen King’s reception
While King has historically been vocal about his disdain for film adaptations that he felt strayed from his books or ignored their themes—such as Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, Paul Michael Glasser’s The Running Man, and Ralph S. Singleton’s Graveyard Shift—he expressed strong approval for Savage’s take.
Director Rob Savage shared that King wrote the production team an extensive message praising the movie. According to Savage, King remarked that the studio would be “fucking stupid to release this on streaming and not in cinemas.”
Despite the author’s endorsement, The Boogeyman received mixed responses from reviewers and audiences during its theatrical run. The film grossed $82 million worldwide against a $35 million budget, and holds a 60% score on Rotten Tomatoes’ Tomatometer alongside a 65% audience score on the Popcornmeter.
