The Boogey Man (Ulli Lommel, 1980)

Ulli Lommel had a strange and fascinating career in film. Born into a German show business family (his dad was a famous radio personality/writer/actor/comedian/theater manager in the years between the World Wars) but intensely discouraged by his father from following him into the biz, Lommel ran away from home as a teenager to become an actor. He had successful parallel careers in theater, television, and film for years before meeting Rainer Werner Fassbinder and joining his Anti-Theater troupe. Fassbinder (one of my top two or three favorite writer/directors) was a driven, insanely prolific man with enormous talent, ideas, and work ethic and an instinctual eye for aesthetically simpatico collaborators. His personal life was a tornado of chaos, but his work was incredible, and when he died young at 37 from a drug overdose (possibly intentional), he left an enormous body of work comparable in size and scope to artists who lived well into old age.

Lommel, a striking man with jet-black hair and sharply defined features, worked on dozens of Fassbinder films and plays as an actor, production designer, producer, and assistant director. Lommel started directing himself in 1971 with the assistance of Fassbinder, though he remained a much less talented visual stylist than his mentor. His most famous film as director from this period is Tenderness of the Wolves, a gay cannibal horror film produced by and starring Fassbinder, with the rest of the cast made up of Fassbinder troupe members, including Kurt Raab in the lead.

Lommel moved to New York City in 1978, becoming a part of Andy Warhol's circle in the waning days of the Factory scene. During this two-year period, Lommel directed a couple of Warhol-produced cult films, Cocaine Cowboys with Jack Palance and Blank Generation with Richard Hell. Neither of these films have a reputation as being particularly competent, but they sound fascinating. (I have yet to see either one.) While making Cocaine Cowboys, Lommel met the woman who would become his wife and bankroll his next several films, a Dupont heiress named Suzanna Love. In 1980, Lommel and Love moved to Hollywood and made The Boogey Man.

The Boogey Man, an oddball horror film whose tone my wife accurately described after we watched it as being derivative of several other horror movies but uniquely strange, is probably the only slasher movie to involve the spirit of a vengeful murdered man trapped inside a mirror who gets released when the mirror breaks and who uses shards of the mirror to either possess people to harm themselves or others or to make reflected inanimate objects move on their own. Complicated shit, man. Lommel and Love cowrote The Boogey Man with the mysterious David Herschel (his only film credit), with Lommel directing and Love starring. With grindhouse and drive-in theaters still in reasonably good health in 1980, The Boogey Man became a low-budget hit, making a decent profit and inspiring a few sequels.

The film begins with a man and woman preparing to have sex on a couch while a little boy and girl spy on them through an outside window. The woman puts her hose over the man's head before spotting the children. We learn she's the children's mother and the man is their stepfather. Enraged, the man ties the little boy to a bed and beats him, then leaves him tied and gagged. The mother shoos the little girl away. Later that night, the girl grabs a kitchen knife and cuts her brother loose. He takes the knife and kills the abusive stepfather.

We then flash forward twenty years. The sister, Lacey (Suzanna Love) lives on a farm with her husband Jake (Ron James), her son Kevin (Raymond Boyden), Jake's aunt and uncle, and her brother Willy (Suzanna's real-life brother Nicholas Love). Willy is mute, not speaking a word since the night he killed his stepfather. He helps out on the farm and broods silently. Lacey is relatively content, but she's started having nightmares, visions, and panic attacks related to that night and sees a therapist, Dr. Warren (John Carradine). The therapist and her husband are both pretty condescending, and they decide for her that she needs to see her childhood home again to replace the memories of how it looked then with what it looks like now. For some reason, no one seems to think Willy needs help even though he's clearly still reeling from that night, too.

Lacey and Jake drive to the home, currently occupied by a family preparing to move to another state. The parents are out of town, but the two teenage daughters and incredibly obnoxious pre-teen son are home, so they tour the house with their permission. (Note: one of the teenage daughters is played by Jane Pratt, and several Internet sites claim it's the same Jane Pratt that later edited Sassy magazine and hosted a couple talk shows. I'm not sure if it's the same person. The actress doesn't really look like Sassy's Jane Pratt, but maybe it's her. Anyone know for sure?)

Weird shit happens to Lacey when she looks into the old family mirror, the mirror gets broken, and the boogey man's spirit enters the various shards of broken glass, wreaking havoc and raising hell, mirror-style. For husbandly gaslighting reasons, Jake takes the broken mirror back to the farm, painstakingly gluing it back together to prove to his wife that she's crazy. What a dick. More wild mirror shenanigans ensue, harming many people, including some wisecracking beach teens having a cookout insanely close to the water. (They also seem to be grilling only one hot dog between the four of them.)

Lommel is a pretty mediocre visual stylist (odd for someone who spent so much time with Fassbinder), but there are some pretty cool images once the mirror insanity really kicks into gear. There are also some very satisfying, darkly humorous kills throughout, and the movie goes in sometimes expected directions and sometimes weird places all its own. This is a strange movie that nevertheless satisfies most of the generic slasher horror requirements. 

I wonder if this film's story is inspired by frustration Lommel felt on the Fassbinder sets. Once Fassbinder began working with the amazing cinematographer Michael Ballhaus (who had a long creative relationship with Martin Scorsese after severe burnout led to his break from Fassbinder), he was able to pull off some extremely technically complex scenes. Many of these scenes involved mirrors, and sometimes preparation for these mirror shots took hours of setup to get the lighting and camera placement just right. Lommel (and anyone else on the set not on the camera or lighting crews) must have been bored out of his mind waiting through all this preparation. I have no proof of this, but I like to imagine the evil mirror in this film is a weird love/hate tribute to Fassbinder's methods.

Lommel continued to make low-budget films for the rest of his life (mostly horror) at a suitably Fassbinder-like prolific pace. He also continued acting. He and Love wrote several more films together until their divorce (she retired from the movie business to Maine with her Dupont money), and Lommel spent the majority of his last twenty years as a director making straight-to-video films about the lives of famous serial killers. He died in 2017.