In a sense Ulli Lommel is the 20th Century predecessor of David Gordon Green. Both directors got their name in the art house cinema world. Ulli worked with Werner Fassbinder and Andy Warhol while making his own art house hits The Tenderness of Wolves and Blank Generation. Green had his Sundance darlings. Both directors went into horror to find a bigger audience. There’s a major difference in their approach. Green “reimagined” already legendary titles made by major directors with John Carpenter’s Halloween and William Friedkin’s The Exorcist as franchise extenders. Ulli Lommel didn’t make officially sanctioned fanfiction. He created an original nightmare that borrowed elements from Halloween and The Exorcist.
Willy and Lacey are having a difficult night sleeping since Mom has decided to bring her new boyfriend home for a night of drunken debauchery. The couple are getting rather kinky including mom putting one of her stockings over the new lover’s head. But their wild night gets interrupted when the kids see what’s causing the strange noises coming from the room. Instead of merely putting the kids to bed and cooling down, mom lets the boyfriend tie Willy down to the bed and sends Lacey to her room. Mom and the boyfriend keep up the freakiness including keeping the stocking on his head. Lacey sneaks out to get a kitchen knife and sets her brother free. He takes the knife and ventilates the boyfriend. The action fast forwards 20 years where we find out Lacey (Olivia’s Suzanna Love) is now married with a kid on a farm. Her brother Willy (Nicholas Love) lives with them. But he’s gone mute since the stabbing night. Things seem as normal as they’re going to get until a letter arrives from Lacey’s mom. She claims she’s dying and wants to see her kids one last time. Lacey and Willy aren’t receptive to it. That night Lacey has a dream that it is she who gets tied to the bed by the mother’s boyfriend who is still wearing a stocking over his face. It’s such a horrifying dream that her husband takes her to see a psychiatrist (House of Dracula‘s John Carradine). He puts her in a hypnotic trance where she sounds like a demon is inside. Her husband decides that the need to visit her mother and have some closure. First, they visit her childhood home which is for sale. A kid living there keeps going on about the Boogey Man. When Lacey enters her mother’s old bedroom, she sees in the mirror the mother’s boyfriend with the stocking over her head. In a panic she breaks the mirror and quickly discovers this was not the right way to proceed.
It’s easy to see why The Boogey Man was popular in the Fall of 1980 and beyond. The film starts off with the nightmare we all have of seeing mom getting wild with a creepy guy. There are plenty of little moments that hint at the hits. The getting the kitchen knife is like the start of Halloween. The demon voice coming from Lacey is like The Exorcist. The “fatal kiss” looks like a Tom Savini effect from Friday The 13th. There’s even a house that has the same sinister window effect as The Amityville Horror. But even with all these references, The Boogey Man has a creepy originality. The neglecting mom is monstrous enough, but the boyfriend with her stocking over his head has to be any child’s nightmare. He doesn’t even have to tie you to a bed to send you to decades of therapy.
The Boogey Man made Ulli Lommel a name in horror without having to attach it to other directors and their cinematic frights. He didn’t have to hope the movie critics would not call him a hack who is cranking out IP sequels for the major studios. This movie is an original creation of Ulli and his crew. They might have left the art house, but they didn’t sell out to a corporate entity. He provides more than enough scares for the drive-in audience by creating a supernatural monster who lurks in shards of a mirror. The kills are creative. The visual of the boyfriend wearing mom’s stocking will stick to your eyeballs. The Boogey Man still has the power to make you think twice before looking in a mirror in your mom’s bedroom.
The Video is 1.85:1. The 4K UHD transfer looks dazzling since the film was shot in 35mm. Ulli went all out to get his nightmare vision looking great instead of grainy. The Audio is DTS-HD MA 2.0 Mono. The tracks are clean, so you hear The Boogey Man sneaking up on his victims in soft ways. The movie is subtitled in English.
Commentary Track with editor Terrell Tannen gets into the how things were on the set and during post-production. Tannen picked a fine film to launch his feature film career. He talks about how the crew cooked for each other.
Commentary Track with historian and author Kat Ellinger has her get into how Ulli went from the art house to the drive-in. There is mention of how Suzanna Love was not merely his muse, but backer.
Scenes from a Marriage (38:57) meets up with actress Suzanna Love. She talks about how she got into acting and eventually meeting and marrying Ulli Lommel. There’s talk about her time on Blank Generation and going into horror. She was not happy going from the art house to exploitation for The Boogey Man. She explains her major contributions to the script.
Boogey Man, and So On (33:59) has cinematographer David Sperling explain how he was also a writer on the script. He explains how he met Ulli while Blank Generation was being filmed. We learn about how connection on the set helps get you film gigs. Eventually he gets hired to work on the camera crew on Ulli’s Cocaine Cowboys which led to being director of photography on Boogey Man. There’s talk of Andy Warhol’s house.
Pick-Up Girl (8:21) catches up with actress Catherine Tambini. Her boyfriend knew Suzanna Love and she got asked to take part in The Boogey Man after the film had wrapped. The distributors needed a longer film and so Ulli shot the barn scene with her and Nick Love. She remembers the place smelling bad because of chickens.
Cuts from the Mirror (20:38) has editor Terrell Tannen discuss how he first met Ulli through a cameraman. Tannen had been working on documentaries at that point. Ulli talked about changed horror. Tannen wanted to learn how to make a feature film and offered to be the editor on The Boogey Man. He was on the set and not merely hidden in the editing booth. The farmhouse belonged to Suzanna Love’s uncle. The Amityville Horror house element was just good luck. They shot the movie in three weeks. He went to L.A. to cut and the film at a suite rented at the Tropicana Hotel. This was the same hotel Warren Zevon mentions in “Desperados Under the Eaves.”
Boogey Man as Art (15:01) allows camera operator Jürg V. Walther to talk about his love of art got him into film school. He was excited to work with Ulli since he shot in 35mm. He gets into Ulli’s way of operating during production.
Archival interview with writer/director Ulli Lommel (18:00) gets into The Boogey Man. He says the budget was $300,000. He drove the negative cross country from Maryland to Los Angeles. He didn’t want to go to New York City because it was too cold. He goes into his experience at the Tropicana. Ulli passed away in 2017.
Original theatrical trailer (2:07) has us warned about The Boogey Man that hurt bad children. This is a childhood nightmare story.
TV spots (0:34 & 0:34) gets into how intense the Boogey Man was going to be when he returns.
Vinegar Syndrome presents The Boogey Man. Directed by Ulli Lommel. Screenplay by Ulli Lommel, Suzanna Love & David Sperling. Starring Suzanna Love, Ron James, John Carradine, Nicholas Love & Raymond Boyden. Running Time: 82 minutes. Rating: Not Rated. Release Date: July 25, 2023.
