The title of The Bye Bye Man could be read as a challenge its filmmakers gave themselves. With such an unscary-sounding movie, their reasoning might have gone, they’d have to try extra hard. And though they don’t entirely succeed, director Stacy Title (The Last Supper) and writer Jonathan Prenner at least clear that hurdle. By the end of the movie, the name “Bye Bye Man” has taken on dreadful implications, prompting tension whenever any character says it aloud. The film probably could have gone with an even sillier name and gotten the same results.
That’s partly due to some creepy filmmaking, especially in the film’s early scenes, and partly because making the silly name sound scary is baked into the premise. Inspired by a chapter in Robert Damon Schenck’s collection of strange-but-true (well, “true”) stories The President’s Vampire, The Bye Bye Man attempts to spin a feature-length tale out of the stuff of compact urban legends. The film opens in Madison, Wisconsin in 1969 where the unassuming-looking Larry (Leigh Whannel, no stranger to horror movies) has begun embarking on a suburban killing spree, demanding his victims reveal if they said “his name” to anyone and killing everyone who says yes. The name, we’ll soon learn, is that of the Bye Bye Man, a demonic spirit who kills everyone who says his name. (Whether or not that’s because he’s embarrassed of it remains unclear.)
Flash forward to the present where three college students — Elliot (Douglas Smith), his girlfriend Sasha (Cressida Bonas) and his lifelong pal John (Lucien Laviscount) — decide to rent a creepy old run down house on the outskirts of town. What could possible go wrong? For once, however, it’s not the house that’s the problem. When Elliot happens on a nightstand he finds the words “Don’t think it, don’t say it” written over and over in a drawer. And beneath that writing, the “it” in question: the name of the Bye Bye Man. And so it begins.
As horror movie premises go, it’s a fairly novel one, even if Title doesn’t fully exploit its connection to obsessive thinking or the way our minds can go places we don’t want them to go. But early stretches of The Bye Bye Man put a supernatural twist on the way friendships can break down in close quarters. Almost from the moment Elliot, Sasha, and John move in together, the cracks start to appear. Elliot suspects Sasha and John are attracted to each other. John seems jealous of their relationship. And Sasha, never that thrilled to be living in a dump in the middle of nowhere anyway, starts to startle at the slightest noise then develop a cough that seems like it will never go away. If the film had thrown in a scene of someone freaking out because a roommate skipped their turn to do the dishes, it would have truly captured the experience of off-campus life.
But the needs of the horror movie must be served, and before long the subtext becomes manifest in the form of the Bye Bye Man (Doug Jones), a hooded figure who begins appearing the darkened corners of their house, sometimes accompanied by a fearsome hellhound. (The Bye Bye Dog?) As Elliot tries to uncover the truth — via, at one point, an inevitable scene in which he types “bye bye man” into a search engine — things get even weirder, eventually leading him to seek out Larry’s reclusive widow (played by Faye Dunaway, now apparently taking the roles Bette Davis got late in her career) to get to the truth of what happened on that day in 1969.
Never less than diverting, especially in these long weeks when a solid PG-13 horror movie offers the best thrills around, The Bye Bye Man most inspired moments make great use of its creepy location. In one especially memorable early scene, a young girl visits a bedroom with kid-sized crawlspace doors and a weird, slanted ceiling. The strange perspective juices the scares, as does James Kniest’s moody cinematography. The film could have used a few more such moments, and a scarier, less frenetic finale. But anyone in the market for a good-enough scary movie right now won’t be disappointed, especially if the name’s not a deal-breaker.
