When Sadie encounters Billings’ wife later in the film, the woman explains that the creature follows its prey, reaching out to the injured and vulnerable. She also says that the boogeyman likes to play with his food, representing a thematic connection between the type of being who would orchestrate an elaborate and dramatic ruse in the short story only to kill Billings and the one who would sneak in to speed scare Sawyer. and Sadie like in the movie. “I think it’s been there forever,” Billings’ wife says, linking the boogeyman to another iconic Stephen King villain: him, the alien life force who takes the form of Pennywise the Clown and taunts his prey. because the more she is afraid. can arouse, the better the taste of its victims.
This connection is also emphasized at the end of the film when the creature finally comes face to face with Sadie, revealing its hideous full form to her by opening its own face (in a callback to the short version of Dr. Harper’s mask) and sucking the Sadie’s life, almost like the “deadlights” scenes in “It”.
As you probably already know, Sadie survives by calling on her dead mother’s spirit in the form of a flame to help her defeat the creature. “It’s this eternal demonic thing that we just call the boogeyman, but it’s basically this force of darkness that we should kind of counterbalance with a spiritual force of good,” Savage tells me in an upcoming interview. “That’s one of the hallmarks of a lot of Stephen King is that there’s always hope and humanity even in the dark. It was a piece with his work to go as far.”
“The Boogeyman” is in theaters now.