The lowest common denominator of horror cinema is the film that goes “whisper whisper whisper BANG whisper BANG whisper whisper BANG BANG” then rolls a bunch of credits. Not credit, really. More like blame.

Rob Savage’s The Boogeyman is tenuously based on Stephen King’s 1973 short story of the same name. The original work is practically a vignette – one good scare as a punchline to the narrative – however as a feature film that simple narrative is part-extended and part-replaced into a coldly manufactured commercial feature. It lacks original ideas in favour of regular stereotypes and tropes, and even abandons the one killer idea of King’s tale. Of course King’s works have been adapted for film many times, and by no means is The Boogeyman the worst one to have been made. Least interesting? Genuinely maybe.

Chris Messina plays therapist Will Harper, who is mourning his late wife while trying to raise his two grief-stricken daughters (Sophie Thatcher and Vivien Lyra Blair). When a stranger commits suicide in their home, it leads his younger daughter Sawyer (Blair) to begin seeing a hearing a monster in her bedroom closet.

Horror is a broad genre, broad enough to encompass pretty much any viewer’s desire for a vicarious thrill, or a cathartic scare. The simplest, least challenging moment of horror available is what is often called the ‘jump scare’: an unexpected loud noise, or the spontaneous appearance of an object or character when the viewer was not expecting to see them. It is, in effect, a filmmaker shouting ‘boo’ at their audience. Mainstream horror cinema is understandably dominated by jump scares, since those shock moments will be at least passably entertaining to the largest possible number of people.

If you are a more enthused fan of horror, occasionally being startled is not going to be a sufficiently effective experience. More complex, lingering effects are widely available beyond surprise, include disgust, sustained tension, and – my personal favourite – dread. For these enthusiasts, The Boogeyman is difficult to recommend. It is nothing but jumps and noise. It lacks back story, a sense of metaphor, and even logic. In a film featuring a horrible creature that hides in the dark, it is set in what the Taylor family have voluntarily made the darkest house in America. A character goes into therapy for fearing the dark in one scene, but plays videogames in a pitch-black room in the next.

For general audiences, the bottom line that there are better horror films to suggest. There are funnier films, more realistic ones, and more outlandish and imaginative ones. Whatever element of the film that most interests the individual viewer, there will be many other works that do that particular job more effectively. This is poorly written, predictable, oddly uneven in tone, and simply very, very dull.