The Boogeyman movie

BevVincent

A Quiet Place Scribes Beck & Woods Adapt Stephen King Short Story

Twentieth Century Fox is finalizing a deal for The Boogeyman, a pitch package for a horror film that teams an iconic Stephen King short story with Scott Beck & Bryan Woods, the scribes behind the genre hit A Quiet Place. 21 Laps’ Shawn Levy Dan Levine and Dan Cohen are producing.

King’s short story was first published in 1973 and later released as part of his 1978 Night Shift collection. The Boogeyman follows a man who recently lost all his children to a creature lurking in the closet. It becomes the latest King fiction to get an option for film or TV treatment, a pace accelerated after the out-sized success of It.

The Boogeyman has been a favorite of short filmmakers; it has been adapted into shorts seven times, in what King calls “dollar baby deals,” non-commercial and non-exclusive rights options that allow emerging filmmakers access to material they could never afford if they were paying retail. The Fox and 21 Laps deal will be the first studio feature adaptation for the short story.

It’s not a surprise that King would spark to Beck & Woods. King called A Quiet Place “an extraordinary piece of work” in a Tweet. The scribes shared scripting credit with director and star John Krasinski on a genre film that was a critical and financial hit, grossing over $325M worldwide on a $17M budget. A sequel is in the works at Paramount.

BevVincent

Thanks to Disney’s acquisition of 20th Century Fox earlier this year the studio can develop films that are outside of their family-friendly library. Sadly, Disney has reportedly cut some projects, including Flash Gordon, Mega Man, and Magic: The Gathering, amongst others.

One project that Disney hasn’t cut as of yet is Stephen King’s The Boogeyman. MovieWeb recently spoke with A Quiet Place writers Scott Beck and Bryan Woods who are attached to the project and shared an update with the outlet.

We’re writing that to direct for 20th Century Fox, and it’s one of the few projects that we’ve been fortunate has made it through the merger with Disney so far. Fingers crossed. That could change at any day, but it’s still there for now. It’s a short story that we had always kept in our back pocket, and we thought it was horrifying. It was one of our favorites from the Night Shift collection and what we loved about it, kind of speaking to our love of original cinema is even though it builds upon a wonderful story by Stephen King, it is a short story, so there’s a huge sandbox that allows Bryan and I to kind of create a whole new story from the beginning of this 12-page short. So we’re excited to explore some similar territory to what A Quiet Place was. Meaning, it’s a horrifying story about the boogeyman, but also deals with the family grappling with very substantive issues throughout the course of the story.

What’s interesting about these comments, is that The Boogeyman is still apart of Disney’s plans with Fox, as the film appeared on that list of 20th Century Fox films that were reportedly axed by Disney. Which means either Disney changed their mind on the project after seeing the box office success of Stephen King’s Pet Cemetery and IT remakes, of that list was just bogus in the first place.

The Boogeyman is a short story that was originally published in 1973 and was included in Stephen King’s beloved collection of shorts, Night Shift. The story centers on a man recounting the murders of his children in a psychiatrist’s office. The common thread? They were all crying “Boogeyman” just before they died. The story is short and simple, which leaves a lot of room to play with in adapting it for the big screen.

>>> Source