Still Afraid of the Boogeyman

by Kylee
(New York, USA)

I've been afraid of the Boogeyman since I was a little girl. I was three when I got scared out of my mind by a babysitter putting me and my older sister to bed. He went into the closet and came out saying 'why don't you go in, the Boogeyman wants to say hello'.

I've been terrified ever since.

When the movie Boogeyman came out in theaters I was fifteen and still terrified to sleep in a room with a closet without a chair or something blocking the door from being opened. Weird, I know.

My mom asked me if I wanted to go see a movie and I was like 'sure why not?' Little did I know that this was her form of therapy. We went in and she bought the tickets, and as we are sitting in the dark theater waiting for the movie to start, I heard a person behind me say how excited they were to see Boogeyman. I started freaking out. My mom calmly told me we were not here to see that (a lie).

The opening scene was a boy laying in bed and his dad telling him there was nothing to worry about. I started to get more and more antsy. Finally the father gets ripped into the closet and the boy screams, right along with me. I stopped after a few seconds of screaming, along with the boy.

While squirming the entire time I sat through this movie that was based on the character I was most afraid of, I couldn't believe I was there.

At the end of the movie however, I looked at my mom and said 'we have to get this on DVD'. It was the weirdest thing - the movie didn't bother me toward the end.

After the twenty-minute ride home I walked into my room and looked at the closet which no longer had a chair in front of it, and with the utmost clarity I shoved that chair right back under the knob.

I'm still afraid of the Boogeyman and I'm now twenty, but the movie is totally different from the picture I have in my head of this villain that scares the daylights out of children when they're young (and some when they're older).

It's just the way the story of the Boogeyman was told that makes the movie less frigetening because it shows a kid fighting back when all along I knew this was not how it happened.