Warning: This article contains spoilers for The Boogeyman.
As though it didn’t already extend Stephen King’s short story enough, The Boogeyman sets up a sequel that goes even further beyond the horror author’s initial narrative. Found in the pages of King’s Night Shift anthology of scary stories, the novella begins with Lester Billings (played by David Dastmalchian in what amounts to a five-minute cameo) explaining to therapist Will Harper (Chris Messina) about a “shadow monster” killing his three young children. In one of the biggest changes to Stephen King’s Boogeyman book, Billings is killed soon after, but not before depositing an evil entity in Harper’s household that immediately begins to prey on his own children.
The bulk of The Boogeyman is devoted to elder daughter Sadie (Sophie Thatcher) and her younger sister Sawyer (Vivien Lyra Blair) trying to convince their father that the monster exists while still processing the grief of their mother’s death a month before. Over time, Sadie realizes that the creature attaches itself to victims of grief who haven’t processed their pain, feeding off of their despair until it sucks the life out of them. Once the family pledges to heal from their loss and use the light of the mother’s memory to destroy the creature, they believe it’s gone forever, but the movie leaves an opening for its return.
The Boogeyman’s Ending Teases The Monster Is Still Haunting Sadie
While initially reluctant to attend therapy with his children, Will realizes that not paying attention to his children and their needs is what likely allowed The Boogeyman to enter their household in the first place. At the end of The Boogeyman, the family is all in therapy together, and it seems like as long as they devote themselves to honoring the mother’s memory while not allowing their grief to consume their lives, they’ll be safe from the monster. However, just as they leave Dr. Weller’s office, Sadie hears the therapist call her back inside for something, and when she enters the room Dr. Weller is gone, but her closet door is cracked.
Stephen King Never Wrote A Sequel To The Boogeyman
Stephen King never wrote a sequel to The Boogeyman short story, but the movie can be viewed as a sequel in spirit. In the story, Dr. Harper is the therapist who reveals himself to be The Boogeyman, and Lester Billings dies, but in the film, he passes on his grief to the Harper family instead. The way The Boogeyman ends implies that the creature could still be present haunting Sadie, and perhaps use her as a conduit to find another desperate and grieving family somewhere in proximity.
King doesn’t write many sequels to his novels, except for The Dark Tower and The Shining series, and never for his short stories. Why King doesn’t write sequels very often has a lot to do with the author moving on from the story once he’s finished, though he does sometimes feature components in interconnected literary universes, like the characters in It appearing in other books. Since he likes to explore things that “tend to run in families,” such as with Jack and Danny Torrance in The Shining and Doctor Sleep, he may be tempted to revisit The Boogeyman at a later date to investigate what happened to the Harpers.
What The Boogeyman 2’s Story Could Be About
Given that The Boogeyman is an allegory for grief, the monster could conceivably return in The Boogeyman 2 in any number of ways. The monster could continue to haunt Sadie until such time as she comes in contact with another grieving individual, and it latches on to them. None of her friends were particularly sympathetic to the loss of her mother or her erratic behavior surrounding her grief, so it would be an interesting morality play if a tragedy befell one of them, and they were forced to experience the sort of suffering they made fun of Sadie for as they battled The Boogeyman.
The Boogeyman’s Box Office Could Determine If A Sequel Happens
Right now 20th Century and Disney haven’t announced a sequel to The Boogeyman for a variety of reasons. After the relatively poor performance of Knock at the Cabin which was also based on a Stephen King story, the studios are most likely waiting to see how this new King adaptation performs at the box office. So far, its numbers are better than Knock at the Cabin and any King adaptation since 2019’s Doctor Sleep, which received generally positive critical and commercial feedback.
If The Boogeyman does well as a slick PG-13 horror movie with enough strong performances, jump scares, and connections to King’s source material, it could spawn an entire franchise. Since it doesn’t have to worry about building off of one of the author’s more established worlds, like in It or The Dark Tower, it has a more creative license for sequels. At the same time, as a mid-budget horror movie that cost somewhere between 30 and 40 million to make like Cocaine Bear, it should be able to recoup its production costs and be a theatrical and streaming success.
