The Boogeyman Removed Star Wars Toy At Disney’s Request

“I’ve got a bad feeling about this” is something Disney executives might have said about The Boogeyman, director Rob Savage’s adaptation of author Stephen King’s short story. Disney’s 20th Century Studios is releasing the horror-thriller movie once slated for Hulu, about two grieving sisters’ (Yellowjackets star Sophie Thatcher and Vivien Lyra Blair) encounter with a supernatural entity that preys on suffering families. To soothe her fear of the dark, Blair’s Boogeyman character Sophie sleeps with a moon ball — a light-up orb that was scripted as a toy lightsaber. As it turns out, Savage was unaware that the live-action Star Wars series Obi-Wan Kenobi had secretly cast Blair as a young Princess Leia, who embarks on a journey across the galaxy with a lightsaber-wielding Jedi. 

Sophie’s moon light is “a real thing that you can buy from Amazon. So we bought a few ofthem, cracked them open and put a light inside that we could control anddial up and down,” Savage told The Hollywood Reporter. “But the interesting thing about that, especially withthe Princess Leia of it all, was that in the original script, she had atoy lightsaber instead of a moon ball that she would hold close to herin bed. That is what I used to sleep with as a kid, and the whole ideawas that it was a knockoff lightsaber that started to fritz out when thecreature was near and eventually shattered.”

“And Disney, in allfairness, didn’t want an image in the movie of young Princess Leia with a sh-tty knockoff lightsaber fritzing out in her hand,” the director explained. “So they said noand that we had to come up with something else, and so me and theproduction team desperately searched for kids’ toys that glow. And thenwe found this moon ball that we thought would be a great prop, and so werewrote the scenes, which ended up being some of the scariest, bestscenes in the movie.” 

Early audiences — and King himself — agree: the first reactions out of Las Vegas’ CinemaCon praised Savage’s “efficient and effective horror movie” based on King’s short story and written by Scott Beck (A Quiet Place), Bryan Woods (Haunt), and Mark Heyman (Black Swan).

The official logline: “High school student Sadie Harper and her younger sister Sawyer arereeling from the recent death of their mother and aren’t getting muchsupport from their father, Will, a therapist who is dealing with his ownpain. When a desperate patient unexpectedly shows up at their homeseeking help, he leaves behind a terrifying supernatural entity thatpreys on families and feeds on the suffering of its victims.”

Starring Sophie Thatcher, Chris Messina, Vivien Lyra Blair, Marin Ireland, Madison Hu, LisaGay Hamilton, andDavid Dastmalchian, The Boogeyman opens only in theaters — and under the bed — on June 2nd.