Sometimes Stephen King adaptations work, sometimes they take the core of the idea and do something completely different with it, and sometimes it comes off better than the original story.

Not this time. But sometimes.

This time around they took Stephen King’s short story, The Boogeyman as featured in the Night Shift collection and used it as a launching point for the film. In the short story, Lester Billings (played here by David Dastmalchian) goes to see a therapist, Dr. Harper (Chris Messina) to tell him what really happened to his dead children. He tells a tale of a some thing that can only exist in the dark, under beds, in closets, and how it stalked and killed his three kids, making it look like crib death, convulsions and a broken neck from having fallen out of a crib.

In the story Harper takes all of this in, listening to Billings’ story, and then delivers a horrifying reveal.

In the film, Billings, following his conversation with Harper, ends up dying in one of the Harper family closets, seemingly by suicide, but maybe it wasn’t.

Into this tale comes Harper’s two children, Sadie (Sophie Thatcher) and little Sawyer (Vivien Lyra Blair). The entire family is reeling from the recent death of Harper’s wife, and their mother, unable to process it and move on. Sawyer also has a very real fear of the dark, something that is only augmented when it appears that the Boogeyman has found a way into their house and has attached itself to the family.

And of course no now believes Sawyer, and eventually Sadie that something is lurking in their home, stalking them and preparing to feed.

Can Sadie find the answers and save her family?

It’s not a horrible film by any measure, Thatcher is wonderful, and the effects on the creature are solid, though it definitely benefits from being confined to shadows and darkness.

The idea was to expand on King’s story, I suppose, and instead of telling Billings’ tale on screen, which would have made for a dark, and upsetting film (three kids get killed after all) do something with a bit more hope and promise as the family has to come together to fight this thing.

There’s a nice nod to the book’s original ending, directly tying it to the the therapist, Weller (LisaGay Hamilton), the family is working with and there are a couple of suggestive shots earlier in the film which could support that supposition.

It’s an entertaining enough entry in Stephen King cinema, but not as strong, or as scary as it could have been, nor as disturbing as the original short story. It is a fun way to pass an evening though.