The Boogey Man 1980

Two decades after that night, the siblings Willy and Lacey carry the weight of a family memory that refuses to fade. On the night their mother’s partner, the The Lover, intrudes into their home, Willy is bound to a headboard while their mother looks on. Lacey is sent to her room, but Willy frees himself and then turns a terrifying act into a scene seen in a large mirror: he stabs his mother’s boyfriend repeatedly, sealing the bond between past trauma and the reflective surface that bears witness to it.

Twenty years pass, and the two siblings live under the same roof with their aunt and uncle on a farm. Willy remains mute since that night, a silent reminder of the violence that shattered their family. Lacey grows into an adult, is married, and has a young son, a fragile normalcy built on careful routines and hard-won steadiness. One day, she receives a letter from her mother claiming to be on her deathbed and eager to see them one last time, but Willy burns the letter before anyone can respond.

Lacey is tormented by nightmares, the most frightening of which finds her dragged, tied to a bed, and menaced by an unseen force that seems to want to reach through the night. To confront these fears, her husband, Jake, takes her to a psychiatrist and, moved by the pull of unresolved dread, they decide to visit the old house where she grew up. They arrive with no real plan beyond looking for answers, posing as potential buyers while the house—quiet and a little lonely—awaits new occupants. Inside, they encounter two teenage girls and their younger brother; the parents have just put the home on the market and are away at the moment. The daughter who meets them misreads their purpose, thinking they’re from a real estate company, and the visit becomes a doorway to what Lacey repressed for years.

In the bedroom where the mother’s deathless memory lingers, Lacey witnesses the terrifying return of the past: the reflection of the deceased boyfriend looming closer in the mirror, and in spur-of-the-moment panic she topples the furniture and smashes the mirror with a chair. Her husband records the break in the mirror’s surface and takes a shard with him, but a piece remains behind, glowing a dangerous red. Soon, the teenage siblings and their younger brother are violently cut down by an unseen force—the vengeful spirit of the lover released from the glass.

Willy himself begins to suffer visions tied to mirrors, and in response he begins painting the house’s mirrors black. A shard from the broken mirror ends up in a bag near his feet, and a separate fragment left behind at the lake shimmers red as light refracts through the water. That glow seems to set off a chain reaction: a skewered kiss in a car, a fatal accident for a couple nearby, and a sense that the danger has moved beyond the house and is spreading through the landscape.

Lacey soon flees back into the house only to feel her shirt tearing apart at the seams, a sign that the force has found its way into her body. She discovers her aunt and uncle dead in the barn, victims of the same wrath that haunts the mirrors. To understand what’s happening, the family calls in a priest, who confronts the mirror and watches it turn red as a new presence tries to claim Lacey. A shard drifts across the room and lodges over Lacey’s eye, allowing the ghost to possess her for a time and drive her to threaten her husband and attack the priest.

The priest frees her by removing the shard from her eye, tossing it into the kitchen sink where it bursts into flames upon contact with water. He and the remaining pieces of the mirror are then cast into a well, and the explosion that follows releases the trapped souls and seemingly destroys the cursed artifact once and for all.

In the closing scenes, Lacey, her brother, and their son Kevin visit a graveyard to say their goodbyes to the past. As they leave, a final shard—still tied to Kevin’s shoe—glows red on the ground, a last, quiet signal that the danger may still linger just beneath the surface.