Filmmaker Rob Savage got his start as a director of short films, moving on to television series like Fear Haus, Brittania, and Soulmates before tackling the innovative horror movies Host and Dashcam in 2020 and 2021, respectively. His latest feature The Boogeyman, from 20th Century Studios, is currently scaring audiences in theaters.
During a recent press conference in promotion of The Boogeyman, Savage talked about creature design, visual effects, working with his terrific cast, and the effective use of jump scares in horror movies.
The first thing director Rob Savage was asked during the press conference was about the design of the creature in the film. “The thing that I was really aware of is that we didn't want people to leave the cinema thinking, ‘I've seen the Boogeyman. He's not all that scary." You know? And obviously these guys have to fight the Boogeyman at the end, so you had to show him. We had to create a creature which felt like it made room for everyone's personal interpretation of the creature, that [also] spoke to the [Stephen King] short story. The short story's got this nightmarish ending where a character is revealed to be the Boogeyman, so we wanted to speak to that. So the design was about creating something that you could just glimpse in the shadows. You could just see these kinda pinprick eyes staring out from the darkness. For most of the movie, we're just allowing it to fester in the audience's head. And then when you finally see the creature, we came up with this kind of weird, messed-up design, whereby the creature reveals itself to have dimensions beyond what we see. So there's still kind of room for people's own nightmares projected onto our creature, and yet we've got this horrific design which our team came up with, which will hopefully create some new nightmares.”
The next topic addressed was the use of CGI effects versus building a Boogeyman puppet. “Viv wouldn't do it if we had a real Boogeyman,” Savage joked about the movie’s co-star Vivien Lyra Blair. “It had to be ‘Ping-Pong Man.’ I mean, the thing that made me relent in the end is that we just couldn't lock into our design for the creature until very late in the day. We went around the houses on what this creature should look like and how best to represent the Boogeyman, and even what his form looks like when you finally see him at the end. So it kind of immediately became apparent that one, we wouldn't have enough time to build a suit, and two, [considering] the things that we had to have this creature doing, practical [effects] would be very cumbersome. It would add onto our days. We shot 34 days, so we didn't have a huge amount of time to be messing around with a practical suit, although that was definitely how I saw this originally. It's a testament to our artist folks who were the VFX company who created our creature. We had a Boogeyman head that we had 3D printed and slathered in KY jelly and lit by Eli Born, our incredible cinematographer. And we had that in every single scene– we had a shot like that that we could show the VFX people and say, ‘That's what a real Boogeyman head looks like. It's gotta look like that.’ When we were doing the ADR [dialogue recording in post-production], I showed Viv the first scene where she sees the Boogeyman, and it freaked [her] out so much that [she] wouldn't look at the screen for the rest of the ADR, so I had to explain what was happening. But then the first time that we showed Viv the movie, me and everyone at the VFX team, we didn't want Viv to not be able to watch the movie. So as prep, we gave her the Boogeyman head, which I think now sits in [her] bedroom.” [laughs]
Savage was also asked about the process of working with the cast on set. “It [was] so much fun. One thing that people don't appreciate is that we improvised a lot. We played around with the script a lot. These guys [in the cast] are so much fun to play around with. Every day we'd say, ‘Well, this is the scene. How can we make the best version of this? How can we make this come to life?’ That was from our first conversation. That was something we spoke about: ‘How can we make this not just feel like another horror movie with a [generic] horror movie family?’ We want this to feel authentic. We've spoken about this before, but one of the movies we referenced was Ordinary People and trying to get that kind of authenticity. And some of the best, funniest, most heartbreaking lines [and] moments in this movie, [the cast] improvised in the moment or we were making notes on the script as we were playing around with it. The movie has so much life in it because of these guys and because of that process of just throwing ideas around constantly. I’ve watched this movie more than any other movie that I've made. And the stuff that I always get completely lost in are these moments of performance that [the cast] brought. It's moments that weren't planned. It's moments where I can see [their] personalities shining through, and we captured that in the DNA of the movie. That's the stuff that I keep going back to, and I keep discovering new things that I didn't even realize were in there.”
The topic of jump scares in horror movies came up during the conversation, and this inspired a final thought from Savage. “I just want to stand up for jump scares, because I think jump scares get a lot of bad press. I think there's nothing better [than] great jump scares, and I think one has to earn the other. It's always super gratifying when you plan a great scare and you sit there in an audience and you see everyone jump and throw their popcorn. If you've got great underlying themes and the audience feels like you've invested in the characters and you're actually trying to say something, it's totally fine to have something burst out of a closet and scare the hell out of you.”
The Boogeyman is now playing in theaters nationwide.