This conversation is presented in partnership with the Refocus Film Festival, which celebrates the art of adaptation. The 2nd annual Refocus Film Festival will take place in Iowa City October 12-15, 2023. Passes are on sale now , with individual tickets and full festival announcements coming in September. * Scott Beck and Bryan Woods had their work cut out for them. The screenwriting duo behind A Quiet Place and 65 were tasked with adapting Stephen King’s short story “The Boogeyman,” from his 1978 collection Night Shift , a text that Hollywood has ransacked for seven film and five TV adaptations thus far, including Children of the Corn , Cat’s Eye , and Graveyard Shift . First published in 1973 in Cavalier , “The Boogeyman” is like a lot of early King short stories: it’s very good until it’s very bad. In it, a dejected man named Lester tells a therapist about the deaths of his three children, all of which he blames on the boogeyman. His story unfurls with macabre effectiveness (though it is a bit mired by Lester’s casual hard-R racism and abusive misogyny), and one can see a young King, who during this period was a new dad and a struggling writer, worrying about his ability to protect his child from the horrors of the world. Like Pet Sematary , one could almost be moved by the man’s performance of grief and the rationalizations it often generates; you can see the humanity beneath the supernatural horror. But then King pulls a stupid horror-magazine bait-and-switch and reveals at the end that the therapist has been the boogeyman all along. This monster with “a scarecrow head” that smelled like “a dead mouse in a pop bottle” apparently disguised its monstrousness and concealed its stench with a human mask, I guess? I don’t know. It’s the kind of ending a 13-year-old boy would think of. Aside from the bed-shitting conclusion, “The Boogeyman” is a solid story, but there’s really not much to it. How does one turn this 12-page tale into a full-blown Hollywood production? And what do you do […]
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