The Boogeyman Director Rob Savage Thinks The Scares That Don't Happen Are Just As Important [Exclusive Interview]
Rob Savage makes scary movies.
After smashing his way into the horror scene with the pandemic chiller "Host" and the divisive horror comedy "Dashcam," Savage made his first major studio movie earlier this year with "The Boogeyman," an adaptation of the Stephen King story of the same name. And while it was a sleeper hit at the box office, the most exciting aspect of the film was that it proved Savage could take on a much bigger movie without losing his edge. This is a frightening film, one coated in dread and literal darkness, with a story just as interested in its shattered characters as its unsettling monster. Some horror directors abandon their spark when they work on a bigger, more expensive studio project. It looks like Savage thrives.
"The Boogeyman" is now available on home video, and to mark the occasion, I sat down with Savage over Zoom to talk about the film, how he crafted its scares, and his career so far.
Note: This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and brevity.
'I was a bit of a gore hound kid because my parents really didn't want me to watch anything violent'
The last time we spoke, we were doing an online seance for "Host."
I remember that well. My dead dog communicated with us, if I remember it correctly.
I feel like that film has helped define the past few years. It was really good when it arrived, and it's lingered. It's had staying power. How do you feel about "Host," now that it's entered the pantheon of Covid horror?
I'm really happy that it stuck around. We really thought that it was going to be a fad movie that was maybe going to have a three-week shelf life, and then as soon as the world opened back up, it'd be forgotten about. I was worried that it wouldn't really even work or make sense outside of that context. The fact that it's had a longer shelf life and stuck around as a bit of a document of that weird time is really gratifying.
The fact that it's just, it's kicked off three years of being able to work consistently and make this run of movies that I never would've been able to make before. Obviously, it's all shut down now because of the strike, but I've been pretty much consistently making my own horror movies since "Host," and that was not my reality before that movie.
I'm assuming "Host" is probably what opened the doors for you on "Boogeyman." You probably were able to say, "Hey, I can deliver a scary movie. Give me more money, give me Stephen King's name, let me run with it," right?
Yeah. Literally, a week after "Host" came out, I signed up for "Boogeyman." I got sent the script, the Beck and Woods script, and signed on to develop it and work with a new writer to get it made. We actually got the green light for "Boogeyman" just when we were finishing up "Dashcam," or maybe even before we started shooting "Dashcam." I can't remember if we were finishing up "Dashcam." Then immediately, I hopped on a plane and started prepping "Boogeyman."
I think every horror filmmaker or writer has their Stephen King story, the one they started with, the one that made them a fan. Do you have your Stephen King fandom origin story?
I do. It's not as cool as most people's. I wasn't the biggest reader as a kid, but I really wanted to read Stephen King because he wasn't allowed in the house. It was too scary. My parents knew that it was going to f*** me up too much, and I just wanted to be f***ed up. I was sneaking in video nasties and all the kind of gory horror movies I could. Also, I was trying to kind of muster the strength to read "The Shining," but it was this big.
I kind of went to the short stories, and a lot of the short story collections were where I first got into Stephen King. I remember reading the "Night Shift" collection, and "Skeleton Crew." I was a bit of a gore hound kid because my parents really didn't want me to watch anything violent, so that was the stuff I was drawn to. It was "The Mangler," and it was "Graveyard Shift" and the giant rats, and it was all that early King stuff that was really trying to grab people's attention, and being garishly over the top with its violence.
Those were the ones I was drawn to at first. Then there are a few of those stories, and "Boogeyman" included, where I read them and they weren't quite as immediately viscerally scary, but they kind of stuck with me because there was clearly something going on that I just wasn't capable of understanding at 12, 13, or whatever age I was when I was first hiding paperbacks under my bed.
'The audience starts to mistrust the frame they're looking at'
Do you remember what the biggest changes were when you brought on a new writer, when you boarded it? What changed the most?
The structure is the thing that remains the most from Beck and Woods' draft, and I think they did such a great job of cracking how to take this short story that's basically just a scene, it's a two-hander, and turning it into something that deserves to be a 90-minute feature. They came up with this idea of basically taking the short story and making that act one, making that the inciting incident that sets everything in motion.
Their version was much more focused on Will, the therapist father. It took place in the world of adults, and it was just like, to me, felt like missed an opportunity to ... it was maybe kind of closer to King's original short story and those characters, but to me, it felt like it missed the opportunity to make a great Stephen King adaptation, but also a great "Boogeyman" movie, a great definitive "Boogeyman" movie.
To do that, I felt like you needed to focus on younger characters. You needed to have this movie kind of evoke that same feeling as when you first hear about the Boogeyman as a kid, and you're waking up terrified in the middle of the night, and your closet's creaked open. That was the feeling that I wanted to encapsulate with this movie. Me and Mark Hayman, who's the guy that wrote the script that we ended up shooting, we reframed it to make it about Sadie, who she's kind of between those two worlds.
She's not quite an adult, and she's not a kid anymore, between her and her sister. When we decided to flip the character of Sawyer from a boy to a girl, that's really when the movie started to solidify and it became about this sisterly relationship. Then the third act just was completely wholesale, new.
One thing that struck me when I saw this in theaters was the use of darkness in the film. It's a very dark film for its tone, but the darkness is literal. I think a lot of horror movies will, I don't want to say cheat, but they'll put a blue tint on something and say it's nighttime, but there's actual blackness and shadow here.
Yeah. It was a conscious choice to always have large portions of the frame in darkness. The idea was really to give presence to the creature, even when the creature wasn't there. To make it feel like the creature was kind of this omnipresent thing that was lurking, or could be lurking, in any frame. We wanted to be quite sparing in when we actually showed the creature. When we did show the creature, we were taking a leaf out of "Alien"'s book and just having specular highlights in the darkness or playing it in silhouette, and finding ways to show it but not show it.
After you've seen the creature lurking the darkness a couple of times, the audience starts to mistrust the frame they're looking at. They start to stare into the dark corners, and imagine that there could be something lurking there. It was part of this collaboration with Eli Born, our amazing cinematographer, was always trying to find ways to build real contrast into the frame, to have the point of focus where the action is taking place, but also this kind of paranoid, second place for the audience's eyes to be wandering to.
It's a similar thing that I was doing with "Host." With "Host," we were trying to do the kind of open doorway in the background, or something that was a kind of secondary point of focus. It just, in my experience, helps the audience be a participant in the horror, makes them lean forward, it makes them be a detective of the frame. It makes them kind of — like your frame right now, you've got that cracked door.
If I was watching this in a horror movie context, I'd be imagining a face or an eye peeking through that. You want to present a lot of options for where the horror is going to emerge from, and then not deliver on half of them.
I'm reminded of the famous anecdote about people seeing "Rosemary's Baby" in the sixties, and craning their heads to try to see around characters in the frame.
Yes. Yeah, exactly.
'The perfect example of this is the red face demon in Insidious'
You talk about building these suspense moments and not delivering, but then when you do choose to deliver, an effective jump scare unites an audience like nothing else. How do you pull off those kinds of scares?
I think to craft a jump scare that's really going to work, you've got to be ... you're in a bit of a kind of game. There's a bit of playfulness between you and the audience that you have to lean into. There's an element of leaving the audience down a familiar path, and then sideswiping them with something that's unexpected. I think part of that is just knowing and loving the genre, and anticipating the ways that the audience is going to imagine these scares coming from, and sidestepping.
Part of that's to do with rhythm. James Wan famously said, "Most horror movies, the rhythm is one, two, three and the jump lands on three." He said, "I've spent my career basically making the jump scare land on nine or 10, and really keeping the audience in that suspense." That's so true, but it's equally true if you can make a jump scare land on one or two, or you can stretch it out as long as you want.
It's about the audience feeling like you're playing an unfamiliar rhythm with the scares. I think with this movie, we were calling on a lot of haunted house tropes, and trying to make those feel fresh by having this creature element, and also just by sidestepping expectation in some key ways.
Is there a scare you're particularly proud of? One that stands out as the one, the scene that you watch back and say, "Yeah, that's the one"?
Well, the one that I'm really proud of is the scare that happens on beat one, which is the daytime scare, when the creature just jumps through the door at Sadie, which is, it's a cheap scare, but it's a really good cheap scare. It's a nice way of just putting the audience off kilter, because, kind of what I was saying before, about an audience knowing the language of horror, and understanding where their eyes are meant to be looking in the frame, and when they're meant to be engaged in a set piece.
Normally, during a daytime scene, you kind of feel like it's safe to reach for the popcorn, or check your phone, or go and make a cup of tea, and it's nice to put in a really f***ing terrifying jump scare in the middle of a daytime scene, so the audience feels completely unsafe, even in the in-between scenes, or what they imagined to be the in-between scenes.
The perfect example of this is the red face demon in "Insidious," which is the all-timer that makes you completely feel like the movie is never going to tell you when a scare is going to come. It's never going to kind of lull you into a sense of, "Okay, well, now we're entering the scary bit." The whole movie is unsafe.
It took me a little while, but I caught up with "Dashcam" when it hit streaming with Hulu. The reaction was very divisive, as I'm sure you know.
It's a very kind way of putting it.
I was hoping you could talk about how you feel about that reaction, now that you've had a little bit of time and now that you've made another movie.
I love that movie, and I think it was one of, if not the best, screening of my entire life was at the UK premier of that movie at the London Film Festival. It was just this raucous crowd who completely were with it every step of the way, and every scare and joke was landing. It felt like there were audiences out there that clicked with the tone and the humor of the movie. I felt like European audiences, British audiences, the sense of humor kind of clicked with them.
It maybe felt like we were at a slightly different place in our perception of the pandemic, and we were maybe ready for a movie that was being flippant, and playful, and provocative around these ideas of conspiracy theorists, and anti-vaxxers, and all this kind of stuff. It felt like American audiences really were very vitriolic about that stuff. I think part of that was that the world changed under our feet after we'd made it.
We made that movie right after "Host." Three months after "Host" came out, we were shooting "Dashcam." We shot it at the end of 2020, and we shot it just as the world was opening back up again. Certainly, the UK was opening back up again, and there was kind of this sense of like, "Oh, okay, we're on the other side of it now, and we're ready to kind of laugh about what we've been through, and make this movie that's kind of playful and slightly in your face."
Then we made it, and we made it with Blumhouse rather than someone like Shudder, who just puts it out straight away. "Host" was finished three days before it went online. "Dashcam" got finished, and then we got into Toronto Film Festival. We had to wait to premiere it there, and then we got picked up by a distributor, and then we had to wait even further. In the meantime, we'd had January 6, and we'd had the Trump/Biden election cycle.
Just the conversation around vaccines had got to a point where everyone was shouting at everyone else, and it just felt like it was completely not the right time for that movie to come out, that nobody was in the mood for a movie where the main character was an unrepentant anti-vaxxer. Whereas at the end of 2020, before that had really become the story, maybe it would've been a different thing, or maybe...
It's definitely more of a kind of word of mouth midnight movie that, hopefully, 10 years down the line and hopefully I've got a few more movies under my belt, it'll be an interesting one in the body of work. It's always going to play great to a drunken midnight crowd.
'There's an appetite for that kind of grungy, un-sanitized aesthetic'
Do you have any desire to return to movies like "Dashcam" or "Host," the epistolary, found footage style?
I think with "Host" and "Dashcam," they're both at such opposite ends of the found footage spectrum. I think if I was going to do something else, it would have to really earn its place. A lot of that has to do with context. It's like, I never saw myself as being somebody who would make a found footage movie. Then lockdown came about, and it became clear that somebody was going to make a Zoom-set horror movie, and it just felt like we may as well give it a try.
It might be that an idea or something happens in the world, or something happens with technology, that lends itself to another found footage telling. I do like the idea of keeping that open, because I like the speed and spontaneity that you can move with in the found footage space. You can make movies that are really viscerally affecting for not very much money, and you can improvise them in the way we improvised "Host" and "Dashcam."
It's a different kind of creativity [than] one of these studio movies, which is normally three years of your life, at least. Everyone says this, but I'd love to do that thing of going from the big studio movies to the smaller, scrappy, and nastier, more provocative indie movies, whether that's found footage or not. I want to keep a few of those under my belt and zigzag a bit.
I feel like between "Host" and, I don't know if you saw it, but "Deadstream," there's a second wave coming of people reinventing what these movies can be.
Yeah, no, totally. Even, "Skinamarink" isn't a found footage movie, but it shows that there's an appetite for that kind of grungy, un-sanitized aesthetic that we haven't really felt since the first "Paranormal Activity." It felt like that was the underlying hunger for "Skinamarink" was to get back to those slightly dangerous-feeling found footage movies, like "Blair Witch" and "Paranormal Activity." I'd love a found footage movie to come along and make me feel how those movies felt watching them in the cinema for the first time.
"The Boogeyman" is available now on home video.