The author who reveals your deepest fears is back in the cinema. After Ça, Shining or Carrie, it is the turn of Stephen King's Croque-mitaine (The Boogeyman in VO) to be brought to the big screen.
The master of horror and fantasy, who always manages to make us shiver (and even often frighten us), tackles one of the oldest childish fears, that of the monster that comes out at nightfall. Based on the 1978 collection Danse macabre, the novel tells the story of Lester Billings, who must face the death of his three children. Feeling partly guilty and attributing the deaths to the bogeyman, he will try to relieve his pain by going to the office of Dr. Harper, psychiatrist. Terrified and paranoid, he tells how he found his dead children, one after the other in their room, with the closet door ajar… A terrifying scenario, therefore, characteristic of Stephen King's style, which we never get tired of.
To adapt the work, who better than the screenwriters of probably the most scary film of 2018, Without a noise, currently in theaters. Scott Beck and Bryan Woods were hired by 20th Century Fox to carry out this mission. If the Croque-mitaine has already been adapted several times, including in 1982 under the direction of Jeff Schiro, this adaptation is promising. For the moment, no name has been given for the realization and no release date has been announced, but we are already looking forward to shudder with fear in the dark rooms, praying that the bogeyman does not come out from under our chair to bite our feet.
Stephen King is probably popular right now, with the upcoming release of Ça 2 and the recent announcement of the adaptation of Doctor Sleep, the sequel to The Shining. However, it goes without saying that among the author's many masterpieces, many still remain untapped. We can therefore only long for other daring directors to dare to embark on the complex adventure of transcribing the writings of the master of horror on the big screen.
