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[Video] The Boogeyman’s Chris Messina says keeping family believable is key to making the movie scary

The Mindy Project actor got to spend some quality time with his screen children.

A family that stays together, gets scared together.

When Danny Boyle made Sunshine, the 2007 sci-fi thriller about a group of scientists on a Hail Mary mission to jumpstart a dying Sun (by nuking it!), he had the cast — including Michelle Yeoh, Chris Evans, Rose Byrne and Benedict Wong — bunk together for two weeks, so that the actors could develop their camaraderie before production started and sell it more convincingly onscreen. And it did.  The crewmates really looked like they’d been through a lot of shit together — and you felt their suffering when bad things befell them.

It was a bonding exercise Rob Savage made his ensemble go through as well when he made The Boogeyman.

The Boogeyman, an adaptation of Stephen King’s 1973 short story, marks the studio debut of Savage, the 31-year-old British writer-director who broke out with two super-low budget horror pictures, 2020’s Host and 2021’s Dashcam.

The Mindy Project’s Chris Messina stars Will Harper as a therapist still reeling from his wife’s death. His grief gets in the way of him communicating with his daughters (Yellowjackets’ Sophie Thatcher and Obi-wan Kenobi’s Vivien Lyra Blair), who are threatened by an ogre lurking in the shadows.

“I had a great conversation with the director Rob Savage and he started talking about Ordinary People and the characters in that film and how they deal with grief or don’t deal with grief,” Messina tells 8days.sg. “And he said to me that you can’t have any jump scares in a horror movie unless you care about the characters.”

Savage knew that if the audience didn’t buy his actors as a family, they won’t buy into the perilous situation they are knee-deep in. Even worse, they might end up rooting for the monster.

Good thing Messina had the spare time to hang out with his pretend daughters.

“We had about two weeks of a rehearsal process, which is not usual,” recalled Messina at The Boogeyman’s virtual press conference. “It was really me and my daughters going to the aquarium, or we went bowling, or we had a bunch of pizza and hung out. By the time we got the set, we really liked each other. We really trusted each other. Therefore, we were a family.”

“I wanted to feel like the actors could bring their own ideas and we could shoot a version that’s just as scripted, but then also do alt takes,” Savage told Variety. “I knew we would only get useful material there if they were familiar with each other and comfortable enough to try stuff out and not be afraid to look like idiots in front of each other. So I purposely chose day trips where they had to look like idiots in front of each other.”

Watch our interview with Messina as he reveals his favourite page-to-screen Stephen King stories and the challenges of battling a CG creature.

The Boogeyman (NC16) is now in cinemas.

Photo: 20th Century Studios/Disney

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Hollywood Rob Savage The Boogeyman Stephen King Chris Messina

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