With the Halloween season in full effect, director Rob Savage pitches his idea for a haunted house experience based on The Boogeyman. Adapted from the Stephen King short story of the same name, the horror movie centered on a family grieving the loss of their mother who face a new terror when a malevolent spirit begins haunting them, intent on feeding on their sadness. Led by Sophie Thatcher, Chris Messina and Vivien Lyra Blair, The Boogeyman garnered mixed-to-positive reviews from critics and performed strongly at the box office, grossing over $82 million against its $35 million production budget.
In honor of the movie’s home media release, Screen Rant spoke exclusively with Rob Savage for The Boogeyman. When asked about the possibility of adapting the Stephen King movie into a haunted house experience, the director was very enthusiastic in his hopes to do so, pitching his idea for how the maze should be set up and how it could “be a whole new kind of canvas for scaring people.” Check out what Savage pitched below:
Oh, completely. I’ve always wanted to do something like that, something interactive. This is my third year living in LA and I love doing the Universal Horror Nights and all that kind of horror mazes. It’d be a whole new kind of canvas for scaring people. But yeah, I’d love to do something like that, and I think The Boogeyman would really lend itself to that as well. I’d love that to be a Boogeyman maze. I think you’d have to start in the kid’s room from the beginning where the Boogeyman creeps up on the kid in the cot, and then you’d probably end down in the basement with the Boogeyman and have to face it off with the Christmas lights flashing. That’d be so sick.
Disney Is Missing Out On The Haunted House Experience
As referenced by Savage, the month of October has proven to be a lucrative one for Universal Studios for decades with their Halloween Horror Nights experience. The theme park designs a variety of special mazes and has iconic genre characters terrifying patrons throughout the park, ranging from Freddy Krueger and Michael Myers to more recent popular titles like The Exorcist: Believer and The Purge franchise. Even the California-based Knott’s Berry Farm has occasionally participated in this trend, partnering with Sony Pictures for a maze designed around The Grudge 2 in honor of the 2006 sequel.
Disney has occasionally explored their own take on a Halloween-set experience with the likes of Mickey’s Halloween Party and Halloween Screams at their various Disneyland parks around the world, utilizing such properties as The Nightmare Before Christmas, Haunted Mansion and even the more recent WandaVision to offer patrons a seasonal fun time. Though not technically age-restricted, the Disney Parks’ events have differed from that of Universal’s Halloween Horror Nights by skewing towards a more family-friendly environment, an understandable choice given this is already their base demographic.
That being said, with Disney’s acquisition of 20th Century Fox, there are a lot of horror properties being left on the table for haunted house experiences. In addition to The Boogeyman, the House of Mouse owns the rights to the Alien and Predator franchises, as well as the recent Hellraiser reboot, all of which would make for more-than-terrifying attractions for fans of the respective properties. The main hurdle at this point would be finding a location at which to host these experiences, but if Disney were to recognize its potential, the King movie could be one of many entertaining ones to explore.
