The combination of a child's wild imagination and the shifting shadows of a night-time bedroom can conjure up some truly terrifying apparitions. Director Stephen T. Kay taps into this effectively with Boogeyman's opening scene, where the young Tim lies wide-eyed in his bed, subconsciously willing darkness-shrouded items to form into the titular spook. Of course, it's all in his head. OR IS IT?
Sadly, Kay's subsequent efforts to keep us guessing as to whether the adult Tim's a psycho or victim of a supernatural stalker never match up to his shocky opener. Featuring an eerie child, a big, creepy house and eardrum-pummeling orchestral shrieks, Boogeyman quickly slips into join-the-dots horror mode; although, frankly, it neglects to even join all the dots, relying on some messy CG splurging to hide the gaps.
Its biggest stab at originality is to have a pretty boy (Barry Watson), rather than a pretty girl, struggling at the centre of all the scares. And Watson struggles valiantly, but with a script so lazy that Tim is never described as being anything more than a journalist who works on "a magazine" in "the city", his flailing can only fail.