The Boogeywoman
2019 · 18m · USA
Directed by Erica Scoggins
Genres: coming-of-age, fantasy, horror
Tones: mythic, surreal, tender
Late-blooming teenager Sam Rains gets her first period during her small town's annual all-night skate and is drawn to the local legend of the Boogeywoman, who turns out to be flesh and blood — the mother she never had.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
It's a coming-of-age horror film that actually earns its mythology instead of winking at it — the Boogeywoman could've been a punchline, but Scoggins commits to the tenderness underneath, which is either profound or deeply weird depending on your patience for sincerity.
Scoggins positions this squarely in the lineage of folk-horror-as-maternal-metaphor (think *Ginger Snaps*, *The Babadook*), but the film's real sophistication lies in how it lets the surreal and the intimate occupy the same space without irony — a assured formal choice for an 18-minute narrative.
The film's entire electrical charge comes down to one decision: treating the Boogeywoman not as threat but as recognition, which reframes the skate-rink setting from coming-of-age cliché into genuine mythic space — it's the kind of tonal pivot that costs nothing and changes everything.
Reviews
A genre-bending coming-of-age Horror, this 18-minute short celebrates the onset of womanhood by uncannily turning the old boogeyman folklore on its head and exploring the psychology of female sexuality and biology. Scoggins' Boogeywoman is a fantastical version of everything women desire to be and ultimately represents a mythological rite of passage to womanhood.