The Boogeyman Used A Split Screen Effect To Pull Off One Of Its Most Unnerving Shots [Exclusive]
This piece contains spoilers for "The Boogeyman."
Rob Savage's "The Boogeyman" is full of spooky moments featuring a leggy, spindly creature crawling on the ceiling, creeping around corners, or lurking in the darkness of open closets. But one of the movie's most unnerving moments happens in the middle of a well-lit room.
After a troubled man reveals some eerie information about a creature who killed his children during an unconventional therapy session with her father, teenager Sadie (Sophie Thatcher) discovers dear old dad's recording device in their home. As she listens to the man's horrible tale, creepy noises begin infiltrating the device until the recorder leaps out of her hand, flies across the room, and lands in an open jug of water, almost as if it were possessed and simply had to be silenced or else it would explode. Whoa. It's a disquieting scene made all the more eerie by its completely unexpected conclusion, so when I had the opportunity to speak with director Rob Savage, I had to ask him about how he and his production team actually pulled that off.
It turns out, according to the director, that may have been the only shot of the entire film that was done in one take.
'We ended up just doing it as a simple split screen'
Savage explained how the "recorder in the water jug" moment was accomplished, and also spoke about what it did for the story on a more macro structural level by giving the film a little WTF moment as a way to provide some levity:
"Well, we had two of the most intense scenes of the movie kind of intercutting, building, building, building. We just needed something to puncture that dread, a little laugh in order to jump us over to the next scene. We came up with this idea of her flinging it into the water jug, and then we had to figure out how to do it and we ended up just doing it as a simple split screen. Sophie reacts and throws the thing off screen, and then we got our second AD to come in and throw it like he was making a basketball shot, and he got it in one take, amazingly. I think it's the only shot in the movie that we did in one take."
Splitting the screen as a way of creating the appearance of a seamless take has become a commonplace tool in Hollywood, with filmmakers like David Fincher using this technique on a near constant basis. "If you've got more than one actor in the frame you can be pretty sure, you can kind of bet on it, that 99% of the time I've split the screen and sped up someone for their reaction time or to replace the take in the background," Fincher's longtime editor Kirk Baxter told frame.io.
Hats off to Savage and editor Peter Gvozdas for putting their own spin on this approach and delivering an ominous jump scare in unpredictable fashion.
"The Boogeyman" is in theaters now.