A mixture of fear and mystery, the Boogie Man promptly got me to go to bed as a child but kept me wide awake for a few good hours before sleep overtook my irrational fear. The Boogie Man never really had a face to me; he was a shadowy figure who would loom in the darkness. Whether he was hiding under my bed or watching through the crack of my closet door, just the thought of a predator in my room made me clutch my stuffed Barney close to my pounding heart.
Oddly, my parents weren’t the ones who “warned” me that the Boogie Man would come for me if I didn’t go to bed at bed time. It was just my wild imagination projecting a lurking figure in the hazy darkness of my room. Looking back, I still seriously wonder why I was afraid of a faceless, amorphous being I never really saw in the first place. I guess I just didn’t want to be left alone with a monster, in the one place in the house that’s supposed to be my own sanctuary from things like scary monsters and Boogie Men. Other children like me probably cowered under their own sheets just to hide from this imaginary creeper, who probably looked different from my own Boogie Man, but scared them senseless just the same. Movies over the years, have put various faces for “the Boogie Man,” a la Tim Burton’s Nightmare Before Christmas, and (my personal favorite) this movie:
Obviously, a conniving, animated sack-man, or a stalking, raggedy ghoul would naturally strike some degree of fear. But the Boogie Man is a unique monster. Because there is no universal look for the Boogie Man, the Boogie Man is essentially an embodiment of fear itself. Children fear a monster of either their own or their parents’ creation; or, they just fear the notion of an invisible being threatening their bed time. Even when children’s or parents’ imaginations “create” a Boogie Man, without them, what would the Boogie Man look like? The Boogie Man’s true face remains unknown and has spawned variations in Hollywood and in different cultures. In a way, the Boogie Man also embodies the fear of the unknown. We don’t know exactly what or who will “get” us at bed time, so we conjure a face worthy of being feared. And so we laughably scare ourselves to sleep.
I like that you stated that the boogie man "an embodiment of fear itself." Personally, my boogie men were all of the horror movie villains, like Chucky (mostly before it became a comedy and I still had Barbie dolls in a bin next to my bed) and the Scream guy.
ReplyDeleteI definitely have always put the face of Tim Burton's boogie man on the boogie man since I've seen it. I'm not sure if I was ever scared of the actual boogie man when I was a child; I was scared of little evil weasels that lived under by bed and they would bite at my feet if I got up in the middle of the night--so I suppose that could be 'my boogie man.'
ReplyDeleteI've never really thought of the boogie man as "an embodiment of fear itself," but really, it's entirely true. It's just a symbol of something bad that will happen, something bad that will "get you." I think you did a great job of explaining it.
I agree with you that the boogie man doesn't exactly have a specific image, but that never kept me from running and leaping on my bed as a child to avoid getting my feet grabbed by him.I do however think he/she is not just the embodiment of fear. I think most thinks we fear have a physical form, because we are afraid that these things may harm us. I never thought there was ever anything else to be afraid of other than pain.
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