Rob Savage’s The Boogeyman features two of the most promising talents on the rise right now, Yellowjackets’ Sophie Thatcher and Obi-Wan Kenobi’s Vivien Lyra Blair.
The pair plays Sadie and Sawyer respectively, sisters who just lost their mother. While Sadie is eager to share her feelings and talk things through with her father, Chris Messina’s Will Harper who works as a therapist, he remains closed off while struggling with his own grief. When Will agrees to see a new patient at his at-home office, he doesn’t realize this man is tethered to a malevolent entity, an entity drawn to human suffering, making Will’s own family a prime new target.
With The Boogeyman now haunting theaters nationwide, I got the chance to chat with Thatcher and Blair about their experience making the film, including discussing the difference between nailing a quick jump scare reaction shot and powering through a lengthier and perhaps more technical scare scene. Thatcher explained:
“It can get really difficult when it's technical, but it's also nice to have a scene that you can really build the emotion. It’s hard going into a scene and starting from the most intense emotion. And that’s where Rob really helped. He would throw books. Like throw books to make noise. I would ask for it! I’d be like, ‘Just scare me!’ And it worked.”
In Blair's case, Savage wasn’t the only one who her. She took a moment to call out YouTubers who took it upon themselves to create the scariest possible thumbnails with the trailer footage:
“I was trying to figure out what [the boogeyman] would look like and then Rob showed me some concept arts, and then he showed me the 3D printed VFX version, in not a very subtle way. He just waved it around until I went, ‘What is that?’ Also, some very lovely people on YouTube have decided to take the jump scare screenshot from the trailer of the boogeyman under the bed, brighten it so you can see it and then put it as the thumbnail of the trailer. So on YouTube, if you look up The Boogeyman trailer, you're going to see him like three down."
While Blair is into genre video games like Five Nights at Freddy's right now, Thatcher is a hardcore horror game and movie lover.
“I feel like this kind of just naturally happened because I started with very genre-y — like I started with this movie Prospect, which is very sci-fi and people can see that I can do those very heightened circ*mstances. I'm open to any genre, even just within — I went through a huge B-movie phase. Me and Rob bonded over this movie Nekromantik and then he got me a Nekromantik 2 poster and then I got my boyfriend a Nekromantik 2 to puzzle. I'm just a big horror person. [To Vivien] Same with [how] you like horror games, I love Silent Hill.”
What if Thatcher got the opportunity to join the horror franchise of her choice? She was quick to reply, “Silent Hill 2.” The latest Silent Hill movie, Return to Silent Hill, is already in the works so it might be too late for that one, but given the series’ popularity, odds are, yet another installment will be added to the film franchise in the future so it’s a good thing Blair had her co-star’s back and insisted, “Now you gotta wink at the camera. Make sure the producers see it.”
Taking the horror of The Boogeyman into the real world, I asked Thatcher and Blair for their real-life boogeyman-fighting partners of choice. If they encountered a boogeyman, who would they tell that would actually believe them and also help them fight the entity? Thatcher went with her sister; “My twin sister. She’s just as crazy as I am. So she'll go along with anything I say.”
As for Blair, she gave a wildly sweet and sincere response when picking her mom:
“My mom, for sure. My mom and I are all about trust and she knows me really well. She knows when I have real true honest to god seriousness in my face and I'm not just making something up. And I think if I really told her there is a boogeyman in my room and I'm not kidding, I think she would believe me.”
Looking for more from Thatcher and Blair? Be sure to check out our full conversation in the video interview at the top of this article! And if you’re looking for even more Boogeyman talk after that, you can find my interview with David Dastmalchian who plays Lester Billings below:
- Interviews
- Movie
- Horror
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