Ahh, autumn.

Sure, being based in the Tampa, Florida area, I don’t truly get to experience the Fall season in quite the same manner as those in other parts of the hemisphere. For us, the shift in season from Summer to Autumn means a little less rain, temps hovering around 88 instead of the daily 93 (or more) of the past two months, and the sun does set a few minutes earlier, leading to a cloud of mosquito death from all sides, thanks to months worth of accumulated groundwater. Then, there’s the fact that the state still isn’t quite safe from the annual threat of hurricanes…

Okay, so I’m not exactly selling the concept that “Fall is fabulous!”, but when one considers that I have spent the last two months locked inside my house for fear of heat stroke, it’s pretty easy to see why I get pretty excited about Fall. In fact, as the temps do tend to drop even more in the last few days of October, I sometimes see Halloween night as a “reward” for having even survived! Granted, I have spent many a Halloween night sweaty and drained of my life fluids by dozens of miniature airborne vampires, but it was totally worth it. Besides, after my fifth cocktail, I barely seem to notice. 

Thankfully, our friend Andrew Guthlein returns for another year of the Halloween Horrors series to inject a more lively dose of “Fall festiveness” and “Autumn adoration” into things than I admittedly just have. For this year’s Halloween Horrors series, King Andy G took on the fake title “I Love the Night Life” and was tasked with contributing a look at a film featuring a/the Boogey Man. In doing so, he also helps us get a little more in the spirit of the season… the Fall season, and takes us one step further on the road to Halloween.

 

The Boogey Man
By Andrew Guthlein

It’s finally that time of year again! When the leaves start to change into vibrant hues of yellow, orange, and red. When pumpkin spice flavor reigns above all the others and that abandoned K-Mart where you used to smoke cigarettes in high school is now a Spirit Halloween. No longer is it so hot outside that you can make an omelet on any slab of concrete. Now is the season for hoodies and cozy cardigans. Yes, Fall has at long last returned and it brings along with it all things spooky and Halloween.

For this year’s Halloween submission, I’m going to talk about The Boogeyman, and no… not that guy who was shot six times by his doctor in Haddonfield. In fact, this boogeyman showed up two years after John Carpenter shocked audiences with Halloween. While the movie I’m going to be talking about might not rival the legacy of Michael Myers, this movie has plenty of sleaze, gore, nudity, and questionable acting to ensure a fun movie night watch. So, grab the popcorn and let’s Boogey!

The Boogey Man, directed by Ulli Lommel (a director that can sometimes make Uwe Boll look like Steven Spielberg), was released in 1980, just as the “golden age” of slashers was beginning to dawn on more audiences. What sets this movie apart from the “hack and slash” movies to come was that it was presented from a supernatural perspective albeit a little tenuous at times, but stick with me… I’ll explain.

The movie kicks off with a young girl named Lacey witnessing her brother, Willy, kill their mother’s douchebag boyfriend while the couple are having sex. This also involves the boyfriend wearing one of the mother’s stockings over his face during their erotic romp. It’s a bold choice, but it was 1980 and sleaze was kind of a thing. Lacey witnesses the murder through a mirror in the mother’s bedroom, and through horror movie magic, the boyfriend’s vile soul is trapped in the mirror. Does it make sense? No, but do I want to see what happens next? Yeah, I really do.

Cut to twenty years later, Lacey is now a grown woman who is married and has a son. She lives on a farm with her aunt and uncle, as well as Willy; now a grown man child, and mute after he killed their mother’s boyfriend. Everything seems to be going pretty well until one night, Lacey finds a letter from their mother, who claims to be on her deathbed and wants to see her children before she dies. Lacey decides against seeing their mom, who subsequently dies, leading Lacey to have nightmares. Following the advice of her psychiatrist, Lacey goes with Willy and her husband to visit their childhood home in the hopes that it will stop the nightmares. The trio discover that another family has moved into the house. The mother and father aren’t home, but their children are. It being the 80s’, consider them goners.

Lacey enters her mother’s bedroom. In the mirror is her mother’s boyfriend, just laying on the bed with the stocking over his head. Lacey panics and breaks the mirror. Her husband decides to bring the shattered mirror home for some “horror movie” reason, but a shard of it gets left behind. The shard glows red to show us that it’s evil, but also as a way to explain the unseen force that absolutely murders the Hell out of the two teenage daughters and younger brother that live in the house.

With the mirror at the farm, Willy begins to also have nightmares. Now, shards of the broken mirror are having a great time causing all sorts of devious acts of terror. This also includes Lacey and Willy’s aunt and uncle getting butchered in the barn. So, there’s no other solution… they need to bring in a priest.  Unfortunately for this hapless man of the cloth, as soon as he touches the busted mirror, it glows red and a shard flies into Lacey’s eye, possessing her with the evil spirit of the dead boyfriend.

The priest is killed (obviously). However, as he dies, he manages to remove the shard of glass from Lacey’s eye and saves her from the deadly possession. Lacey, her husband, and Willy discover that, for some reason, water can stop the evil. So, they pick up the broken mirror and “Yeet!” it right into the well located on the property. Is evil finally vanquished? Hell no, this is a horror movie! As the movie ends, we see a shard of the mirror laying in the grass as it begins to glow red.

Is The Boogey Man a perfect movie? No, but it has some fun kills, some nudity, and just the right bit of 80’s trash to keep you watching. Believe it or not, there were two sequels. Yes, two. Are they as enjoyable as the first? I’ll leave that up for you to decide! Happy Halloween!