If you're already scared of the dark, "The Boogeyman" isn't going to make it any easier
for you. Here's how the terrifying new Stephen King adaptation ends, and what it all means.
Returning to work shortly after the death of his wife, Will Harper is visited by new
patient Lester Billings. Billings tells him, in a sequence that's the basis of King's short
story and has been lifted faithfully here, that all three of his children died at the hands of
a mythical monster known as the Boogeyman. The short story ends with the twist that the
therapist is the Boogeyman in disguise returning to haunt Lester, but that's not the case here.
As Will goes next door to make a call to the authorities, Lester is heard talking to the
Boogeyman. After teenage daughter Sadie hears this, she goes looking, and finds Lester's body.
Lester's death -- an apparent suicide -- appears to transfer the curse to the Harper household,
as youngest daughter Sawyer begins seeing the monster under her bed.
"There's no such thing as monsters, you need to grow up!"
Eventually, Sadie starts seeing the beast her sister is afraid of, and through research into
Lester Billings, tracks down his family home. While looking around, she discovers that his
wife Rita is very much still living there and is singularly dedicated to killing the Boogeyman for
revenge. After an elaborately staged ruse to lure it out of the shadows -- light hurts the
Boogeyman, it seems -- she attempts to kill it. But even though the Boogeyman can be hurt, it
recovers easily, and soon disappears back across town into the darkness to haunt the Harpers.
His daughters spend much of the film trying to convince him that there really is an evil
force coming for them, and eventually Will finds himself going head-to-head with the Boogeyman.
After leaving Rita's house following the failed attack on the Boogeyman, Sadie hurriedly calls her
father and warns him of what's coming. "Dad, you have to listen to me."
But before Will knows it, he's been dragged into the basement.
When Sadie arrives, she rushes down and finds herself taken captive by the monster almost
immediately; it opens its jaw to reveal a separate body crawling out to quite
literally feed on grief. However, because she understands that its biggest weakness is light,
Sadie takes down the Boogeyman via some crafty thinking. The lighter that once
belonged to Sadie and Sawyer's mom, which Sadie uses to smoke pot earlier in the movie,
is used as a flamethrower. Gasoline is poured on the floor, and the Boogeyman burns up along with
the house and the dark mold which has covered the ceiling and the walls since it showed up.
In the final scene, the family returns to therapy and openly discusses their fears
of losing each other, concluding that they can finally adapt to life without their mom
around. But as they walk out, Sadie is called back in by the therapist who isn't there;
she only sees the closet door ajar and sounds coming from inside. Rather than investigate it,
she decides that's enough for one day and closes the door.
"So you can see that there's nothing to be afraid of, okay?"
The film's ending, where the Boogeyman is apparently still hiding in a therapist's closet,
appears to be an intentional reference to the original short story. There,
Lester Billings returns to the therapist's office after he finds there isn't a nurse
outside to make a follow-up appointment. He sees the room is now empty, but the closet
door is open "just a crack," with a voice inside repeating the phrase "so nice." As it turns out,
the therapist was the Boogeyman wearing a mask the entire time. But the sight of a closet door
left ajar in a therapist's office is as far as the similarities between the two scenes go;
in the movie, we see that the therapist is not a monstrous entity, and Sadie immediately
closes the door, symbolically refusing to let the monster come back out and into her life.
There is only one bit of lore needed to understand this iteration of the monster -- it grows stronger
on human misery, aiming to cause more tragedy where it's already happened in order to consume
more grief. It follows Lester Billings wherever he goes, kills his three children one at a time,
and then finds itself right at home within a family still struggling to
adjust back to normal after a mother's death. After the apparent defeat of the Boogeyman,
we see the family return to counseling in a heartfelt epilogue in which they openly
discuss their feelings and finally conclude that they can "do it without mom." It's an
ending that suggests they're facing up to the loss and healing in a way that allows them to
quite literally lock their demons in a closet. But no matter how far removed from grief you are,
it's still hard to come to terms with. That's enough to ensure a monster that feeds on those
emotions will never be fully banished. You only need to look back at the home of Rita
Billings for proof; her grief may have transformed into vengeance against the being that caused it,
but those emotions are still underpinned by loss. The Boogeyman can get weaker,
but can never be fully destroyed. "I think it's been around forever."
Early in the film, Sadie uses her mother's lighter to smoke weed. This memento connecting Sadie to
her mother seems to portend the Boogeyman's arrival, as the monster soon returns for her.
In the final act, as the family fights back in the basement, the Boogeyman is eventually
stopped in its tracks by the lighter, which is used to help create a makeshift flamethrower.
On first glance, this appears in-keeping with the pre-established weaknesses of the monster;
it can't survive when brought into the light. However, it also suggests that a more effective
way to destroy the Boogeyman is to directly evoke the memories of those you're grieving.
That may sound like a reach but consider what we saw in Rita's house earlier in the movie -- we
know the Boogeyman can be hurt through brutal acts of violence, but it tends to recover to full power
quickly. To truly stop a creature that feeds on grief, you need to weaponize the memories
of your lost loved ones and directly confront your emotional trauma to stop the creature.
As the original story takes place entirely within Dr. Harper's office,
there are very few similarities between the story and the movie beyond the one
scene directly adapted from the source material. Screenwriters Scott Beck, Bryan Woods, and Mark
Heyman opted to mostly use the short story as an inciting incident to get the plot rolling.
Additionally, there is a clear difference in characterization between the Lester
Billings of the source material and the movie's Lester. He's portrayed as a little
shiftier in this newer iteration, roaming around the house and leaving it briefly
ambiguous as to whether he'll attack Sadie. The movie also depicts Rita Billings for the
first time, and her characterization is changed considerably from her husband's
dubious description in the story. There, Lester speaks of her with contempt for her parenting
style that he thinks would've made his children grow up to be "sissies." The Rita of this movie
is similarly wracked by grief, but she isn't a victim -- she's motivated by revenge, refusing
to leave her four walls until she takes down the monster that claimed her children's lives.
Director Rob Savage has been on the record about how he worked with the small team of screenwriters
to completely renovate King's original story into a feature-length script and looked across the
author's entire body of work for inspiration. In an interview with SFX Magazine, he said,
"This movie attacks the source material in a way that's different from any other King
adaptation. We wanted this to feel true to his writing. Me and [co-screenwriter] Mark
Heyman were always going back to the warmth of character that you feel in King's novels. Even
when the subject matter is dark, there's that glimmer of hope. He's not a cynical writer."
This quote is the best reflection of what the movie is going for with its ending,
showing the family ultimately coming together after their grief.
At the recent Los Angeles premiere, the cast were interviewed on the red carpet about the movie.
Chris Messina told reporters, "I think the director did a great job
dealing with grief. This is a family who've been in hard times and they're struggling,
but 'The Boogeyman' is exactly what they need, and it brings them together."
This comment adds an additional reading to the film's ending -- now that they're
beginning to heal as a family unit, they don't need the threat of a monster to hold
them together. That monster can comfortably remain in the closet.
Although this is a story directly about a family, Sophie Thatcher has argued that the monster as a
metaphor could be interpreted in multiple other ways, telling a red-carpet reporter,
"In any culture, there's some kind of Boogeyman, and it can stand for any kind of anxiety,
so you can personalize and internalize it any kind of way. That's why the movie
is scary -- it's not some specific kind of Victorian ghost; it's the Boogeyman!"
As we can tell from the ending, the door is metaphorically left open for a sequel
if this movie turns out to be a box office hit. With several original horror movies delivering
lucrative performances recently, it would be foolish to bet against that happening,
and the direction for a sequel is clearly laid out in that final scene -- a family fully comes
to terms with their grief but struggles to keep the Boogeyman from returning to their lives.
With no mid- or post-credits sequences to speak of, there are no further clues
as to how King's world would be expanded beyond this in a potential sequel. Still,
it's clear that whether or not audiences love the film, King himself decidedly does.
Speaking at the recent Los Angeles premiere, Savage said,
"[King] apparently had the best time, it scared the s–t out of him. He sent me this lovely essay
(after) about how much he'd enjoyed the movie. To have made a movie that scared Stephen King,
that's a 'pinch me' moment." So, with the legendary author on
board as a fan of Savage's film, don't rule out his return if a sequel ever enters development.