Behind 'Boogeyman,' the Stephen King-based horror film that's terrorized test audiences and critics

As 20th Century Studios was conducting test screenings for its new horror movie The Boogeyman, director Rob Savage found himself with a definitive “good problem” to have.

Audiences were screaming scared so much at one of the film’s perfectly executed jump scares, they spent the next minute recovering from it — mumbling, turning to friends, conversing, reenacting their fright.

The problem? They weren’t paying attention to the movie, and the very next scene after that scare relayed intel that would be pivotal to following the plot of the film.

“The audience was screaming all over the next scene,” Savage (Host) tells us during a recent Los Angeles press junket. “They totally missed the next scene, which is quite an important scene. So we had to pad it out [making the next scene twice as long] just to make sure the audience had time to wind down from being so terrified.”

“People were having such an intense reaction, they had to find a balance,” says cast member David Dastmalchian.

Even the trailer was too much. “They had to take the trailer out from before Ant-Man [and the Wasp: Quantumania]. I heard a bunch of kids were getting too scared,” explains 10-year-old co-star Vivien Lyra Blair. (Amazingly, The Boogeyman has maintained a PG-13 rating.)

Those early reactions, plus a plea from famed author Stephen King, whose beloved 1973 short story the film is based on, changed The Boogeyman’s whole trajectory. After it was originally slated to be released exclusively to Hulu, Disney — which owns 20th Century Studios — changed gears and set the film to open in theaters instead.

“He’s been supporting it all the way through,” Savage says of King, noting they set up a private screening at King’s local theater in Maine, where the director got live updates on how the author was reacting to it. “He was instrumental on getting it on the big screen. He wrote an essay about it and said, ‘They’ll be f***ing idiots if they put it on streaming.’”

King’s short story — first published in the magazine Cavalier in 1973 and later included in his 1978 collection of shorts, Night Shift — focused on a distraught man who tells a therapist about the murders of his three young children by a supernatural force. Adapted for the screen by Scott Beck and Bryan Woods (The Quiet Place) and Mark Heyman (Black Swan), The Boogeyman opens with a similar interaction (with Chris Messina as therapist Will Harper and Dastmalchian as the desperate patient, Lester Billings) before expanding the story to focus on Will’s daughters Sadie (Sophie Thatcher) and Sawyer (Blair), who are reeling from the death of their mom when their own home becomes terrorized by the eponymous spirit.

“You can’t have great jump scares without caring about the characters,” Messina (The Mindy Project, Air) recalls Savage telling him in his pitch to the actor. “King writes such delicious characters who are so deep and vast… We talked a lot about ordinary people and grief and that all that combo together made me want to do it.”

Savage made sure to keep his actors on edge throughout filming. He would scream randomly, and create loud sudden noises to scare the cast.

“He would clap, and he had this book that he would smack on a chair,” says Blair (Bird Box, Obi-Wan Kenobi). “He’s keeping us on our toes. But he did it so often that finally I came up and took the book away from him and said, ‘Rob, no more book.’”

“He’s such a passionate director,” Messina says. “He directed this like he was directing Apocalypse Now.”

It worked. The Boogeyman has proven one of the buzziest horror movies of the year, in part due to stories from the test screenings — not to mention the reactions of media professionals, at least a couple who admitted to running scared out of an early screening of the film at CinemaCon in Las Vegas in April.

“That’s the goal, we’ve done our job then,” says Thatcher (Yellowjackets, The Book of Boba Fett).

“Just as a testament to how scary the film is, we did a test screening the other night,” Dastmalchian (Ant-Man, Dune) begins. “A friend of mine, he’s about 6’7” and very burly and intimidating. At one point he yelped and sounded about 7.”

“I haven’t watched the full thing,” admits Blair. “I’m terrified to watch the full thing. So I watch the beginning scene and the end scene. And then I just kind of sit outside for the rest of it.”

The Boogeyman is now in theaters — where it belongs.

Watch the trailer: