Stephen King has never hidden his contempt for movie adaptations of his books that he felt failed to live up to the source material. His reasons range from thinking they are exploitative and crude (as he did with Ralph S. Singleton’s Graveyard Shift), to feeling they ignore the original novel’s themes (Paul Michael Glaser’s The Running Man).
The most famous example of King hating an adaptation comes from his dislike of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. Stephen's condemnation was especially shocking, given how quickly the iconic 1980s horror film became a hit after its debut. Even more surprising is King’s affection for a more recent, controversial adaptation of one of his many short stories: Rob Savage’s 2023 supernatural horror-thriller, The Boogeyman, which is now streaming on Netflix.
From the outset, the original story and Savage’s adaptation differ in many ways. The 1973 short story (later included in King’s 1978 collection, Night Shift) follows a man named Lester Billings. After the deaths of his three children, Billings goes to see Dr.
It’s a contained story set over a single night and is very dialogue-heavy, with Billings telling the tale. To sum up Billings' predicament: his children kept dying under mysterious circumstances, most of which were deemed natural by doctors and police. However, the one thing the children had in common was that they cried out “boogeyman!” before perishing.
The closet door was also always ajar when their dead bodies were found. Savage’s take feels more like a sequel than a faithful adaptation. Instead of following Billings, it uses that story to set up another one focused on Dr.
Will Harper (Chris Messina) and his daughters, Sadie (Sophie Thatcher) and Sawyer (Vivien Lyra Blair), as they cope with the death of their mother/wife. After Billings visits Dr. Harper’s office to explain that an evil entity known as the Boogeyman killed his three children, he is eventually killed by the Boogeyman hiding in Sadie’s mother’s closet.
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