10 Horror Movie Mysteries That Should NEVER Have Been Answered

While Star Wars and Harry Potter were riding high on the new digital landscape of the mid-2000s, when production was shifting from analogue to digital and CGI was expanding the possibilities of cinema in ways previous generations couldn't imagine, smaller budget productions were being lumped with the bargain-bin effects. And nowhere was the budget smaller than horror, where the genre's revival and boom was still many years away and money men still viewed it as a poor investment.

Enter 2005's The Boogeyman (not to be confused with the infinitely better 2023 film of the same name).

As a child, the film's protagonist Tim (Barry Watson) witnessed his father being dragged away by the boogeyman and, despite protestations and reassurances from family and friends, goes on a quest as an adult to prove the monster is real. This psychological setup serves the film well for its majority, throwing red herrings all over the shop, and builds a clever tension loaded with plenty of scares.

Unfortunately, in the film's final segment, the boogeyman makes himself known, bursting out of the closet in a mess of laughable CGI that would have been at home on CBBC. If this was all the production could manage, it would have been far better to keep him a mystery, leaving us uncertain to the end if there really is a monster under the bed.