Interviews
How ‘The Boogeyman’ Director Rob Savage Pushed the PG-13 Rating with the Film’s Creature Design [Interview]
Up next from Host and Dashcam director Rob Savage is The Boogeyman, based on Stephen King’s 1973 short story, which is now playing in theaters this weekend.
Savage spoke with Bloody Disgusting about making a studio film on the heels of two smaller-scale found footage horror features, while also discussing his lessons learned from those experiences, as well as his approach to designing a PG-13, boundary-testing creature.
“I’d never really thought of myself as being somebody who would direct found footage movies, and then I ended up doing two back-to-back,” Savage says of transitioning from Dashcam to The Boogeyman. “But it took a little bit of a jolt to get back into that mode of storytelling. I was amazed by how much I was able to take from working on Host and Dashcam and work into this movie. Both of those movies were totally improvised.”
Savage continues, “This movie I assumed would be much more rigid because it’s a studio movie and it’s a very different beast. Actually, there was a lot of room for improvisation and playing around with the scenes with the cast. So many of the best, funniest, most touching moments in this movie we came up with on the day, or the cast brought from personal experience. There was still a lot of room and a lot of shared DNA, more so than I would’ve thought.”
Director Rob Savage on the set of 20th Century Studios’ BOOGEYMAN. Photo Patti Perret. © 2023 20th Century Studios. All Reserved.
If there’s one common throughline among all three Rob Savage-directed features thus far, it’s the filmmaker’s steadfast commitment to scare crafting. The answer from Savage was more complex when asked if that shared DNA helped when making The Boogeyman.
“The parts that I was really having to learn on the job, it was more towards the end of the movie, the action-horror beats,” he explains. “I’d never done anything with, I mean, I guess a bit in Dashcam, but again, it’s like found footage, so it’s a different beast. But that kind of more physical aspect of the creature, especially when it’s an entirely CG creation like our monster was. Wrestling with this thing. We had a 3D-printed creature head that I had on a stick, like a pantomime horse, and I’d be running at the actors screaming.
“I was shooting all the angles, and I’d storyboarded the whole thing, but it’s very hard to know if that’s going to come together until you see it with the creature. But the stuff that was useful was the first two-thirds of this movie; I looked at it more as a haunted house movie. I wanted to not see very much of this creature. I wanted you to feel very unsafe anytime there was darkness in the frame or a doorway, and a lot of that was playing in the same ballpark as Host. So, I felt like I’d done my homework there.”
Because the concept of the Boogeyman is so commonplace and nebulously defined, it created a challenge for Savage when it came to developing the film’s original creature design.
He details, “I didn’t want to invalidate anyone’s idea of what the creature is because everyone’s got their own idea. The Boogeyman is really just this name that we give to whatever we imagine in the darkness as a kid. So, I wanted people to leave and still feel like they could project their own fears onto this creature. We wanted something that was very simple and striking. I also wanted it to be that you saw the creature at the end, obviously because the family’s got to face down this thing, but I wanted there to be an aspect to it that you didn’t quite understand or that hinted at this deeper mythology.
“We ended up pushing in this weird Lovecraftian body horror place that I’m still amazed we got away with in a PG-13 movie. But that was our attempt. It was our attempt to honor the story, which ends with some skin-peeling grizzlies; and hint at this cosmic horror beyond what we see on screen.”
Witness Savage’s cosmic horror in The Boogeyman, now playing in theaters.
Only one episode remains in Season 3 of “Chucky,” and what a bloody road it’s been so far, especially for actor Devon Sawa. The actor has now officially died twice on screen this season, pulling double duty as President James Collins and body double Randall Jenkins.
If you thought Chucky’s ruthless eye-gouging of the President was bloody, this week’s Episode 7 traps Randall Jenkins in an elevator that feels straight out of an iconic horror classic.
Bloody Disgusting spoke with series creator Don Mancini and actor Devon Sawa about that ultra-bloody death sequence and how the actor inspires Mancini’s writing on the series.
Mancini explains, “Devon’s a bit of a muse. Idle Hands and Final Destination is where my Devon Sawa fandom started, like a lot of people; although yours may have started with Casper. I was a bit too old for that. But it’s really just about how I love writing for actors that I respect and then know. So, it’s like having worked with Devon for three years now, I’m just always thinking, ‘Oh, what would be a fun thing to throw his way that would be unexpected and different that he hasn’t done?’ That’s really what motivates me.”
For Sawa, “Chucky“ is an actor’s dream in that the series gives him not one but multiple roles to sink his teeth into, often within the same season. But the actor is also a huge horror fan, and Season 3: Part 2 gives him the opportunity to pay homage to a classic: Kubrick’s The Shining.
CHUCKY — “There Will Be Blood” Episode 307 — Pictured in this screengrab: (l-r) Devon Sawa as President James Collins, K.C. Collins as Coop — (Photo by: SYFY)
“Collectively, it’s just amazing to put on the different outfits, to do the hair differently, to get different types of dialogue,“ Sawa says of working on the series. “The elevator scene, it’s like being a kid again. I was up to my eyeballs in blood, and it felt very Kubrick. Everybody there was having such a good time, and we were all doing this cool horror stuff, and it felt amazing. It really was a good day.”
Sawa elaborates on being submerged in so much blood, “It was uncomfortable, cold, and sticky, and it got in my ears and my nose. But it was well worth it. I didn’t complain once. I was like, ‘This is why I do what I do, to do scenes like this,‘ the scenes that I grew up watching on VHS cassette, and now we’re doing it in HD, and it’s all so cool.“
It’s always the characters and the actors behind them that matter most to Mancini, even when he delights in coming up with inventive kills and incorporating horror references. And he’s killed Devon Sawa’s characters often. Could future seasons top the record of on-screen Sawa deaths?
“Well, I guess we did it twice in season one and once in season two,“ Mancini counts. “So yeah, I guess I would have to up the ante next season. I’ll really be juggling a lot of falls. But I think it’s hopefully as much about quality as quantity. I want to give him a good role that he’s going to enjoy sinking his teeth into as an actor. It’s not just about the deaths.”
Sawa adds, “Don’s never really talked about how many times could we kill you. He’s always talking about, ‘How can I make this death better,’ and that’s what I think excites him is how he can top each death. The electricity, to me blowing up to, obviously in this season, the eyes and with the elevator, which was my favorite one to shoot. So if it goes on, we’ll see if he could top the deaths.”
CHUCKY — “Death Becomes Her” Episode 305 — Pictured in this screengrab: Devon Sawa as James Collins — (Photo by: SYFY)
The actor has played a handful of distinctly different characters since the series launch, each one meeting a grisly end thanks to Chucky. And Season 3 gave Sawa his favorite characters yet.
“I would say the second one was a lot of fun to shoot,“ the actor says of Randall Jenkins. “The President was great. I liked playing the President. He was the most grounded, I hope, of all the characters. I did like playing him a lot.” Mancini adds, “He’s grounded, but he’s also really traumatized, and I thought you did that really well, too.”
The series creator also reveals a surprise correlation between President James Collins’ character arc and a ’90s horror favorite.
“I saw Devon’s role as the president in Season 3; he’s very Kennedy-esque,“ Mancini explains. “But then given the supernatural plot turns that happen, to me, the analogy is Michelle Pfeiffer in What Lies Beneath, the character that is seeing these weird little things happening around the house that is starting to screw with his sanity and he starts to insist, ‘I’m seeing a ghost,‘ and his spouse thinks he’s nuts. So I always like that. That’s Michelle Pfeiffer in What Lies Beneath, which is a movie I love.”
The finale of “Chucky” Season 3: Part 2 airs Wednesday, May 1 on USA & SYFY.
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