•Netflix has added Rob Savage’s 2023 supernatural horror-thriller The Boogeyman to its streaming lineup, bringing the film that Stephen King praised despite critics’ lukewarm reception to a wider audience.
King has never hidden his disdain for many of the screen adaptations of his work. His objections have ranged from accusing films of being exploitative and crude—his criticism of Ralph S. Singleton’s Graveyard Shift—to arguing that they ignore the themes of the source material, as he felt about Paul Michael Glaser’s The Running Man.
The most well-known instance of King rejecting an adaptation is his dislike of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, a condemnation made all the more striking given how quickly the 1980s horror classic became a hit. Yet King developed an affection for Savage’s more recent and controversial take on one of his short stories.
The film diverges substantially from its source material. The original 1973 story, later collected in King’s 1978 anthology Night Shift, follows a man named Lester Billings who visits psychiatrist Dr. Harper after the deaths of his three children. It is a contained tale set over a single night and heavily reliant on dialogue.
Savage’s version instead uses that premise to introduce a new family: Dr. Will Harper (Chris Messina) and his daughters Sadie (Sophie Thatcher) and Sawyer (Vivien Lyra Blair), as they grieve the loss of their mother and wife. After Billings arrives to explain that an entity called the Boogeyman killed his children, he is himself slain by the creature hiding in a closet—his death staged to resemble a suicide.
The setting was moved to the present day, and the Boogeyman’s design changed from a more humanoid figure capable of wearing other people’s faces into a skeletal form with spindly limbs and eyes that glow in the dark.
“The nicest thing that he said was, ‘They’d be fucking stupid to release this on streaming and not in cinemas,'”
Rob Savage speaking to GamesRadar about Stephen King’s reaction
According to a report by GamesRadar, King wrote the production team an “almost-essay” expressing how much he enjoyed the film, then followed up the next day with an email saying he was still thinking about it.
The Boogeyman earned $82 million worldwide during its theatrical run against a $35 million budget. It received mixed reviews from critics, holding a 60% score on Rotten Tomatoes’ Tomatometer and a 65% audience rating on the Popcornmeter.
Savage suggested to GamesRadar that adapting a short story built largely around conversation between two characters is inherently difficult, leaving room for creative reinterpretation. He also noted that the film amplifies the source material’s core idea—an evil creature destroying families—by framing the Boogeyman as an allegory of grief and trauma.
The Boogeyman (2023) is now available to stream on Netflix.
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