The Scare Salon

The film was directed by Ulli Lommel, a German actor/director who frequently collaborated with R. W. Fassbinder, and also hung out with Andy Warhol as part of that whole Factory contingent. After directing the iconic Blank Generation, a film that focused generally on the punk rock scene in New York City and specifically on Richard Hell and the Voidoids, Lommel decided to try his hand at a horror film, since of course low-budget horror flicks were really making a splash in the wake of John Carpenter’s Halloween.

And one criticism that gets hurled at The Boogeyman quite often, in fact, is its “homaging” of Halloween, particularly in its opening scenes. The movie also has shades of The Exorcist and additionally gives a clear nod to The Amityville Horror, but as I mentioned, it doesn’t so much rip off those movies as uses bits and pieces from them to construct its own oddly quirky edifice. And I guess something about the movie resonated with audiences, because it was a modest hit, and spawned two sequels (both of which heavily leaned on utilizing scenes from the first film as “flashbacks”), as well as a series expanding on the lore that began airing in 2018.

At the beginning of the film, set in the late fifties or early sixties, we see a young brother and sister out on their porch at night, peering in through the window at their mother and her brute of a boyfriend as they prepare to get busy on the couch. Mom takes off one of her stockings and puts it over the guy’s head, making him look like he’s about to rob a convenience store of some Huggies and whatever cash they got, but just then, the guy glances sideways and sees the kids looking in. With Mom’s approval, the guy ties the boy, Willy, to his bed and puts a gag in his mouth, while Mom yells at the little girl, Lacey, to get her ass off to bed and mind her own business.

Little Lacey, who’s about three or four I guess, doesn’t go to bed, though; she actually goes in the kitchen, grabs a big-ass knife, and uses it to cut her brother free. Her brother then takes the knife down the hall (in a POV shot that’s VERY reminiscent of the sequence from Halloween with a child-size Michael Myers stabbing his sister) and stabs the absolute shit out of his mom’s boyfriend, while Lacey watches the whole thing in the big mirror across from the bed.

The movie then jumps ahead twenty years, and Willy and Lacey are now grown. Lacey (played by Suzanna Love, who not only co-wrote the screenplay but was married to director Ulli Lommel at the time) seems on the surface to have her shit together; she’s married to a local cop named Jake (Ron James) and they have a well-adjusted young son named Kevin. Willy, though, is clearly still suffering some trauma, as he’s been completely mute since the whole murder incident twenty years ago. They both live and work on a sprawling farm owned by their aunt and uncle, and it’s implied that they were sent there as kids and have stayed there ever since. Willy, by the way, is played by Nicholas Love, Suzanna’s brother in real life.

It appears that there’s been some kind of uneasy peace achieved in regard to the past event, but one day a letter arrives from Lacey and Willy’s mom, who tells them she’s dying and wants to see them one last time. This letter dredges all the bad memories up again, and Lacey begins having nightmares; both Lacey and Willy also begin freaking out when confronted with mirrors. The weird thing about the plot point with the letter, however, is that even though Lacey and her husband Jake discuss actually going to see Mom, they never actually do, and the whole thread is eventually completely forgotten about. Anyway.

Because Lacey is starting to act a little bit looney tunes, claiming to see “him” every time she looks in a mirror, Jake takes her to a psychiatrist (played by John Carradine!), who says she definitely should go see her mom, and while she’s at it, she should also go back to the childhood home where the stabbing occurred, so she will have memories of it the way it looks now instead of the way it looked twenty years ago. Which seems like a pretty solid idea, so fair play to Dr. Carradine.

Jake takes Lacey to the house, which happens to be up for sale. The only people at home are the two teenage daughters and one obnoxious pre-teen son of the owners, who let Lacey and Jake come in and have a poke around under the guise of possibly purchasing the house. Everything seems to be going swimmingly until Lacey goes up to what used to be her mother’s bedroom, and notes to her horror that the same mirror is still hanging on the wall. In the mirror (though not in the actual room), she sees her mother’s dead boyfriend, complete with stocking over the face, lying on the bed. He then gets up and seems to come after her, at which point she screams her fool head off and smashes the mirror to pieces with a chair.

Her husband, growing tired of all her hysterics, arranges it so he takes the broken mirror back to the farm, complete with (almost) all the shards in a paper grocery bag. After Jake and Lacey leave, the teenagers and their brother give a bit of lore by mentioning how their grandma always said that when a mirror broke, anything it had seen would be released (uh oh), and though this isn’t mentioned outright in the film, putting the broken pieces of a mirror in a paper bag and burying the bag is a fairly common folklore thing, intended to circumvent the bad luck you would normally get for breaking a mirror. So there’s that.

Jake meticulously puts the mirror back together and hangs it on the kitchen wall at the farmhouse, hoping that Lacey will eventually realize that it’s just a regular old mirror without any supernatural shenanigans going on within its reflections. Both Lacey and her brother Willy are dubious, knowing for sure that there’s some ghostly shit going on with these mirrors; Willy, in fact, starts painting over all the other ones in the house with black enamel. But Lacey at least tries to play along, not wanting Jake to think she’s gone completely off her rocker.

Meanwhile, because a shard of the mirror was left behind in the house with the teenagers and the boy, all three of them are horribly killed, either in a way that makes it seem as though the mirror is possessing them to do things to themselves, or by other paranormal means. For example, one girl stabs herself in the throat with scissors, the other girl is killed when the door of the medicine cabinet bashes her in the head (must be one of those titanium medicine cabinets I’ve heard so much about), and the boy gets his neck crushed when a window drops on it. So not only is the mirror housing this angry ghost, but simply pieces of it can control the environment to a staggering degree.

After that, several other sort of related events occur: Willy nearly strangles a neighbor woman who comes over to get eggs and starts flirting with him, though it isn’t really explained why he does it; Lacey’s son Kevin gets a shard from the mirror unwittingly stuck on the bottom of his shoe before going with his mom on a fishing trip, which indirectly causes two completely random people across the lake from them to get killed by the mirror ghost (by being skewered through their mouths, no less); and Willy is almost run through by a supernaturally compelled pitchfork, but is saved at the last minute by his sister.

After some more crazy shit happens, it seems that the family is now on board with the idea that the mom’s dead boyfriend from twenty years ago has indeed escaped from the mirror and is going on a rampage, so they call a priest for help. However, a piece of the mirror in the kitchen flies off and lodges itself over Lacey’s eye, which causes the ghost to possess her. Lacey’s aunt and uncle get killed, the priest gets killed, and Jake almost gets killed; Willy also overcomes his muteness at the height of the festivities. Finally, Jake, Willy, and Co. toss the damned mirror into the well out front, and an enormous fireball erupts from the well, while lurid red light glows from the Amityville-shaped windows of the farmhouse in the background.

There’s also a bit of a coda at a cemetery, clearly there to set up the inevitable sequel, at which it’s demonstrated that one shard of the mirror still remains, meaning that Mom’s boyfriend will eventually be back to fuck with the family anew.

As I mentioned, this isn’t all that great of a movie from an objective standpoint. The acting is generally pretty sub-par, the editing is sort of wonky, the pacing is too ponderous in places, and the exact mechanics and rules of the cursed mirror aren’t really laid out very concisely. Some plot threads, such as visiting the mother, were introduced and then went nowhere, and some incidents, such as Willy’s attack on the flirtatious neighbor lady, weren’t really explained. In addition, the kills and gore aren’t all that special; despite this film turning up on the UK’s infamous “video nasties” list, this movie is exceptionally tame in the grue department, and fans of gratuitous nudity will probably also be disappointed, as there’s only a single partial titty shot in the whole thing.

All that said, though, this was still absolutely worth watching; it cobbles together bits from lots of other movies, true, but the mirror thing does actually give its lore a fairly original angle, and that goes a long way in my book. I also absolutely LOVE the score by Tim Krog, which I could listen to all by itself.

So if you’re in the mood for an 80s slasher with a supernatural twist, gaze into the abyss of The Boogeyman and see what gazes back. And until next time, keep it creepy, my friends.