German film director Ulli Lommel crafted his bizarre art horror film The Boogeyman in 1980 for around $300,000, filming it exclusively in the Chesapeake Bay area of Maryland. The film became a modest box office success, and Lommel has extensively featured clips of it in about half of the films he’s made since then, so it’s clear that Lommel realizes The Boogeyman is his most popular film and has a personal affection for it. Some people have described it as a rip-off of Halloween, which is pretty ridiculous. While The Boogeyman can in fact be described as a slasher film with a supernatural angle — and the Tim Krog score is mildly similar to John Carpenter’s immortal Halloween theme — it feels nothing like Halloween , or The Exorcist for that matter (which it has also been accused of stealing from). The Boogeyman was labeled as a ” Video Nasty ” in the UK upon its PAL release due to a scene featuring a pair of scissors puncturing a woman’s throat and unleashing rivers of gore, but in 2000 was passed completely uncut in England.
The Boogeyman begins circa 1960 and introduces the audience to young siblings Lacey and Willy, who are caught spying on their alcoholic mother and her boyfriend (who has Mom’s pantyhose stretched over his face) as they drink and fondle on the living room couch. Mom’s lover punishes Willy by gagging and tying the poor kid to his bed, but later during the night Lacey sneaks into Willy’s room and cuts him free with a large butcher knife from the kitchen. Revenge-seeking Willy then quietly and unobtrusively sneaks into his mother’s bedroom, where Mom and her stocking-faced lover are engaging in coitus, and stabs his neglectful mother’s vile paramour to death as the woman screams “Willy! Willy! No!”
Flash forward 20 years, and Lacey (Suzanna Love) and Willy (Nicholas Love from Fatal Games and Heart of Midnight) are now grown and living on a farm with their adoptive parents Helen (Felicite Morgan) and Ernest (Bill Rayburn). Lacey is now married to Jake (Ron James) and has a young son named Kevin (Raymond Boyden), and Willy hasn’t spoken a word ever since the violent tragedy that marked his childhood and spends his days handling chickens and doing chores around the farm. One day Lacey and Willy receive a letter from their natural mother (who they haven’t seen since the incident) pleading with them to come and see her before she dies of an unexplained illness, possibly cirrhosis based on her former drinking habits. They decide to ignore the letter and continue with their lives, but the childhood trauma that Lacey and Willy share is reawakened in their minds and haunts them, torturing them both with vivid nightmares. Jake brings Lacey to psychiatrist Dr. Warren (horror veteran John Carradine) for an evaluation, and during the session Lacey is “possessed” by the spirit of her mother’s lover from years ago, speaking in a twisted voice from beyond the grave and swearing to get revenge on she and Willy.
Dr. Warren unwisely recommends that Lacey return to her childhood house where the horrific incident occurred, and she reluctantly does so with Jake and meets the new family living in the home. But when she enters her mother’s old bedroom and looks in to the hanging wall mirror — the same mirror that “witnessed” the murder years before — she sees the dead lover, whose spirit has been trapped in the reflective glass, with the stocking still stretched over his head and staring at her menacingly. She instinctively smashes the mirror into pieces with a nearby chair and inadvertently “releases” the vengeful and invisible spirit from the piece of furniture, which proceeds to wreak bloody havoc on the new family living in the house and everyone else it encounters on its way to the farm where Lacey and Willy now reside. The only way to send the evil entity back into its hellish prison is to piece the shards of the broken mirror back together, which proves to be no easy task.
The Boogeyman made around $4,500,000 during its theatrical release, multiplying the original investment required to make it by about 15 and paving the way for two embarassing sequels: Boogeyman II in 1983, the first half of which is composed predominantly of clips from this original, and the utterly reprehensible Return of the Boogeyman in 1994, which recycles almost 75% of The Boogeyman and even a bathtub murder scene from Lommel’s 1982 film Brainwaves . While Part II does have some hilarious and memorable moments, it’s clear that neither sequel matches the artistry of the original . Try to picture a slasher film co-directed by Dario Argento and Ovidio Assonitis with elements involving ghosts and demonic possession thrown into the mix, and you’ll have a pretty good idea of what The Boogeyman is like. It has colorful art direction, lots of creepy atmosphere and some memorably tense, gory death scenes, and Suzanna Love (the director’s wife at the time, a DuPont heiress who starred in and helped finance several of her husband’s films including this one, Brainwaves , Olivia and The Devonsville Terror ) makes a winsomely attractive heroine as Lacey. Her real-life brother Nicholas Love is also excellent in his mostly wordless role as traumatized mute Willy. John Carradine adds an air of distinguished professionalism in his brief role as Dr. Warren.
The Boogeyman is a surreal, eerie and stylish slasher/possession/ghost hybrid that should please horror fans looking for something a little off the general radar. I rate The Boogeyman an 8 of 10.
