Boogeyman is a 2005 horror film produced by Sam Raimi and directed by Stephen Kay.
Tim Jenson (Barry Watson) is a man who, when he was a boy, witnessed his father being taken by the Boogeyman living in his closet before his very eyes. Ever since then, he has lived his life making sure the Boogeyman can't do the same to him. Sleeping on a mattress on the floor, keeping his clothes in dresser drawers, and owning a fridge with a glass door that's lit at all times.
However, when his mother dies, Tim has to return home to attend the funeral. While he's there, he meets up with an old friend of his named Kate (Emily Deschanel), and is told by his psychiatrist that staying in his childhood home might be good for him. From there, Tim goes to face the Boogeyman and finally overcome the monster that haunted his childhood.
The film was released on February 4, 2005. It has two sequels, Boogeyman 2 (2007) and Boogeyman 3 (2008). Not connected in any way to the 1980 film or the 2023 film.
Boogeyman contains examples of:
- Abusive Parents: Tim's father taught him about the Boogeyman in an attempt to scare him into behaving, but Tim took it to heart and may have actually encountered the real Boogeyman. To teach him not to be afraid, his dad would lock him in a closet under the stairs.
- Antagonist Title: Boogeyman, of course.
- Batter Up!: Tim uses a baseball bat to destroy his crow mobile and plasma globe, two of which were objects that gave The Boogeyman its form.
- Berserk Board Barricade: When confronting the Boogeyman, Tim boards up all the doors in his old house, except the one to his closet. When the Boogeyman arrives, all the boards burst off of their doors.
- Bloody Handprint: At one point, Tim finds the bathtub Jessica was in is empty, with a bloody handprint of the rim of the tub. Turns out he left it there while pursuing the Boogeyman later on.
- Creepy Crows: When Tim is driving to the old house after his mother's funeral, a crow crashes into the windscreen of his car; almost causing him to swere into the path of a semi-trailer.
- Eldritch Abomination: The Boogeyman seems to be an unusually malicious version of this, folding time and space to travel to children's closets all across the world, and bringing some of his victims back in time for the sake of cruelty. He doesn't have any single form, but appears to Tim as a gray, bald-headed Humanoid Abomination, having assumed the form of an action figure and a bathrobe in Tim's childhood bedroom.
- Missing Child: Tim is given a large amount of missing children's posters at one point. Each one of them are kids who were taken by the Boogeyman. Franny was one of them.
- Nail 'Em: At one point, when Tim sees Mike in his old house, Mike inexplicably grabs a nail gun and starts shooting at him. Of course, it some kind of flashback, and Mike was shooting at the Boogeyman before it took him.
- One-Word Title: Boogeyman, naturally.
- Room Full of Crazy: The inside of Franny's dad's house has all kinds of research notes and messages proclaiming things like "FACE HIM!" written all over the walls. One room in the house is covered in missing children's posters, including Franny's.
- The Stinger: After the credits, we see a shot from inside a closet, where a little girl asks one of her parents to close said closet's door.
- Things That Go "Bump" in the Night: The creature lives in the closet of Tim's childhood home, and took his father right in front of him. Tim kills the Boogeyman by destroying the things from his childhood that gave him physical form.
Boogeyman 2 contains examples of:
- Actor Allusion: You can expect a lot of Jigsaw allusions in Tobin Bell's character, the most glaringly obvious being his voice on a tape recorder while the Boogeyman rips out a patient's heart.
- Ambiguous Situation: Was the knife-wielding intruder who killed Henry and Laura's parents really the Boogeyman, or just a murderous human? From what we see of the Boogeyman in the first and third movies, he doesn't typically wield knives or any other implements. On the other hand, lightbulbs flicker in his presence and there seem to be implications that he possessed Henry.
- Bloodier and Gorier: The first was rather tame, given its PG-13 rating, with the most violent things onscreen being a crow hitting a car windshield and the rotting corpse of a cat falling down a chimney. This one goes all out with the slasher movie violence.
- Contrasting Sequel Antagonist: In the first movie, the Boogeyman is clearly and unambiguously supernatural, dragging his victims away to a fate unknown. He doesn't speak, doesn't physically manifest until the climax, and seems to prefer child victims, though he will kill adults if they're in the way or if they survived him in their youth. Henry is a victim of childhood trauma who witnessed his parents being murdered, and was further broken by Mitchell's unethical treatments, becoming obsessed with the Boogeyman (or perhaps possessed by) and going on a killing spree.
- Cruel and Unusual Death: Almost all of them.
- Henry and Laura's dad is pinned to the wall by the Boogeyman and slowly disemboweled.
- Mark is cut in half, presumably by the elevator car.
- Paul, panicking when he finds cockroaches in his bag of chips, drinks a cleaning solution that he made. It burns a hole in his throat.
- The crowning jewel for this would have to be Allison. She has maggots burrowed into her cuts, and is given a scalpel to cut them out, peeling her flesh back.
- A close runner up to Allison would have to be Nicky. She's strapped down to a table, injected with tubes, and has a bunch of fat pumped into her until she explodes.
- Downer Ending: Everyone in the ward is dead except for Laura, who mistakenly beheaded the catatonic Dr. Ryan when she was dressed up in Henry's Boogeyman costume, and is subsequently blamed for the rest of the murders while Henry seems to have gotten away scot-free. Mitigated by the third movie, where an article identifies Henry as the real killer, implying that Laura was cleared of those charges. Even so, she's probably going to be even more deeply traumatized.
- Genre Shift: From a supernatural horror to an ultra-gory Slasher Film.
- Gutted Like a Fish: Henry watches his father get pinned to the wall by the home intruder and eviscerated with a kitchen knife.
- Happy Ending Override: The cheerful ending of the first movie apparently didn't last, as Tim was blamed for the Boogeyman's child murders, institutionalized, and Driven to Suicide by Dr. Alan's treatments, which most likely made him encounter the Boogeyman again, despite apparently defeating him.
- Hidden Heart of Gold: Nicky comes off like a stuck-up snob who mocks Laura for her fear of the Boogeyman but shows that she has a soft side and comes close to bonding with her until she has a Mood Whiplash when Laura probes her about Darren.
- Jerk with a Heart of Jerk: Darren spends most of his screentime being obnoxious, displaying a Lack of Empathy for Mark and Paul, and pushing away everyone who tries to help him. He eventually lets his guard down around Nicky and tries to help her and Laura escape, only to turn back around and start berating Nicky for her body.
- Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: Henry is revealed to be behind the clinic murders, but it's left up in the air if he had a psychotic breakdown and assumed the identity of the Boogeyman, or if the Boogeyman possessed him. For what it's worth, Henry claims he didn't kill anyone, but that could just as easily mean that he saw the Boogeyman as a split personality.
- Morally Ambiguous Doctorate: Mitchell is a Dr. Jerk who dismisses his patients' fear of the Boogeyman, putting them through treatments that are questionable at best to help them conquer their fears, only for them to drive at least one patient to suicide and another to mass murder. On the other hand, he believes in the Boogeyman himself, but wants to defeat him by convincing his patients that he doesn't exist.
- Nightmare Face: When we finally get to see the Boogeyman, his face is a lot scarier than it was in the previous movie. His eye sockets are empty, his face is rotten, and he wears a perpetual Slasher Smile with a mouth full of sharp teeth.
- Theme Serial Killer: The Boogeyman kills the patients based on their own fears that they're seeking treatment for.
Boogeyman 3 contains examples of:
- The Bad Guy Wins: Zig-Zagged|Trope. Sarah foils the Boogeyman's gambit to murder all the students in her dorm by taking credit for murdering David to take his power away from him, but he still kills her in the end, and his murder spree continues into the present day.
- Evil Wears Black: We only get a few rapid glimpses at the Boogeyman, but he wears a black robe of some sort.
- Gods Need Prayer Badly: As was implied in the previous movie, the Boogeyman lives off the belief and — more broadly — the fear of others in order to exist. As it turns out, he was counting on Sarah to warn others about him so that he could perpetrate his massacre as planned.
- The Peeping Tom: For his frat initiation, Benny has to plant cameras in the vents above the women's locker room. He's mainly doing it to avoid hazing, but he's clearly enjoying the eyeful he gets.