The Boogeyman is a 1980 American supernatural slasher film directed by Ulli Lommel and starring Suzanna Love, John Carradine, and Ron James. The film's title refers to the long-held superstition of boogeymen beings, and its plot concerns two siblings who are targeted by the ghost of their mother's deceased boyfriend which has been freed from an imprisoned mirror.
The film has received mixed to negative critical reviews, with criticism mainly regarding the heavy similarities from earlier horror films such as Halloween, The Exorcist, and The Amityville Horror. The film was followed by two sequels: Boogeyman II and Return of the Boogeyman.
Plot[]
Young siblings Willy and Lacey watch their mother and her boyfriend kissing in her bedroom. When their mother notices them, she has her boyfriend tie Willy to his headboard before sending Lacey to her room. Lacey frees Willy from his bed and Willy enters their room and repeatedly stabs his mother's boyfriend with a chef knife in front of a large mirror.
Twenty years later, Lacey, now an adult, is married with a young son and lives with her aunt and uncle on a farm. Willy also lives with them, but has been mute since the night he killed his mother's boyfriend. One night over dinner, Lacey finds a letter in the mail from her mother, who claims to be on her deathbed and wishes to see them one last time, but Willy burns the letter.
Lacey suffers from nightmares, and has a particularly frightening dream where she is dragged, tied to a bed and almost stabbed by an unseen entity. Her husband, Jake, takes her to a psychiatrist to help her confront her fears, and decides to go visit the house she grew up in. They arrive not knowing who is actually living there and meet two teenage girls and their younger brother. Their parents, the homeowners, have apparently just placed the home for sale and then gone out of town. The daughter thinks Lacey and Jake have been sent by the real estate company to view the house. Jake and Lacey pretend they want to buy the house so they can look around. At the house, Lacey sees a reflection of her mother's deceased boyfriend coming towards her in a mirror inside the bedroom where he died, and smashes the mirror in a panic with a chair. Her husband takes the broken mirror with him in an attempt to repair it, but a piece is left behind which later glows red. Shortly after, the teenage girls and their brother are all violently killed by an unseen force; the vengeful spirit of the deceased lover has been released from the mirror.
Willy similarly has disturbing visions involving mirrors, which cause him to paint all the mirrors in the house black. Later, pieces of a broken mirror in a bag at his feet cause a pitchfork to levitate and nearly impale him. A shard from the broken mirror becomes stuck to Lacey's son's shoe and is left on the ground where the light refracts across a lake where a group of teenagers are partying by an abandoned house. A couple are soon impaled by a screwdriver as they're kissing in their car, while another couple drives off and leaves them. Soon after, Lacey flees to get in the house, only to see that her shirt supernaturally starts to tear apart. This also leads her to discover her aunt and uncle dead in the barn.
Later, Lacey's husband brings in the family priest to investigate the mirror, only to see that when the priest's hand touches the mirror, it suddenly turns red. A piece of the mirror floats across the room and becomes lodged over Lacey's eye, letting the ghost possess her body. Controlling Lacey's body, the ghost nearly kills her husband and attacks the priest. Before he dies, the priest removes the shard from Lacey's eye, releasing her from the ghost's control, and throws it into the kitchen sink, where it bursts into flames as it touches the water. The remainder of the mirror is then thrown into a well, where the same thing happens, as an explosion releases the trapped souls and destroys the mirror once and for all.
The film ends with Lacey, her brother and Kevin visiting the graveyard. After they leave, the final shard of the mirror on the ground, which had gotten stuck to her son's shoe, glows red.