This is about your very first notion of fear, going from a younger character terrified of her closet to a father dealing with grief and repressed emotion – I wanted to take the very idea of the Boogeyman and apply it to the way fear manifests throughout this family.”

He explained: “It feels like there’s been 600 movies called The Boogeyman, but I bullishly want to do the one that takes ownership of that name, puts all the silly connotations to bed and states the true meaning of this character.

When people have asked him what he’s been working on next, they’ve rolled their eyes at the idea of a movie about the childhood monster, and so he felt a responsibility to make the audience “feel like they’re back in their childhood bedrooms, staring off into a dark corner.” In other interviews about the movie, the director has spoken about the need to “redeem” the idea of the Boogeyman. They opened up the short story – which consists entirely of an unsettling conversation between a man named Lester Billings and his therapist – to make it the inciting incident for the titular monster coming to invade this family’s home, feeding on their grief following the recent death of their mother. Screenwriters Scott Beck and Bryan Woods ( A Quiet Place) worked on the initial drafts of the film prior to Savage boarding the project.

It freaks me out when I watch it back, and I made it!” “So to design a creature who would shoulder that responsibility was huge, but I think where we go in the third act, where it becomes a Lovecraftian creature feature within a haunted house story, nails it. “My challenge was: how do I make the audience feel as terrified as I was as a kid reading that short story? It’s both a gift and a big responsibility to take on the Boogeyman, a word that’s a cipher for anything and everything that first scared us as children – when we realised there was danger out in the world, the Boogeyman was the name we put to that feeling.

The Gathering Dead by Stephen Knight