I havenât seen The Bye Bye Man yet. I know the basic story and Iâve been spoiled onâI thinkâa few of the major beats, but I still havenât seen it and donât know terribly much about it other than it sounds like a mixture of A Nightmare on Elm Street and It Follows. People are saying that itâs very bad and that could very well be the case. At least, thatâs what it looks like theyâre saying when they remember to actually talk about the film.
Because, the truth is, itâs almost impossible to hear any discussion of the feature, good or bad, over the meme that the title has become. People have more widely latched onto this than any horror movie in recent memory, all of them to give their pun on what a terrible, terrible title this is.
Granted, most of my social network feed is entrenched in the horror community anyway, but I canât go more than ten or fifteen minutes at any point during my considerable Internet activity without seeing someone make a joke about the title. Everyone says it sounds like the stupidest thing ever. That it sounds like the least scary name for a horror villain.
As many problems as people might have with the film and as valid as they might be, this is the only thing theyâre talking about. We have memes like The Bye Bye Bye Man, The Farewell Gentleman (which I actually like quite a bit) and the infamous The PeePee PooPoo Man. All of these things are designed to point out that it has the least scary title youâve ever seen.
You know whatâs not a scary horror villain name? Most of them. Honestly, almost all of them. Freddy Krueger sounds like a mailman, Chuckyâs a Rugrat, Jason Voorhees sounds like a German exchange student, Michael Myers sounds like a respectable financier who would have given John Carpenter the money needed to film Assault on Precinct 13. Okay, that last one is who the character was actually named after. I wouldnât have batted an eye if Aladdin had off-handedly referred to his guide as âWishmasterâ because itâs no more or less terrifying than simply calling him âGenie.â And then, well, thereâs Pinhead.
More than anything, The Bye Bye Man relates back to one horror figure in particular. One iconic figurehead in the pantheon of horror from whom so many of the others have spread: The Boogeyman. Thereâs nothing remotely scary about that name whatsoever. Originally, it derives from the German bögge, or boggle-man, which effectively means hobgoblin in English. The origins are scary enough, but to just hear the name on its own it sounds like a man in his late forties trying to recapture his roller disco youth.
The Boogeyman is scary because it is this formless, identityless thing that preys on children. Itâs scary because of what it does and because of what it represents, not because of its name. The same is true for almost every horror villain. Freddy, Jason, Michael Myers, theyâre not scary because of their names, theyâre scary because of what they do and who they are.
Sometimes the scariest thing evil can do is take an innocent, even silly sounding name. A great example would be luring children away with a harmless and goofy name like Pennywise the Dancing Clown. I think Andy would have begun to expect something was up much earlier in Childâs Play if his doll had just said, âHi, Iâm Slash McMurderkill, wanna play?â Or, alternatively as the executives suspect in Childâs Play 2, the doll could have just said âIâm the Lake Shore Strangler and Iâm going to kill you.â
I just assumed that The Bye Bye Man was a semi-innocent nursery rhyme name, but the kind of name that could be scary to a really little kid. Thatâs all I really expected with that title. I think itâs intriguing enough on its own, especially when weâve already had horror films about Leprechaun, Rumplestiltkin and The Tooth Fairy. It seems weird, when this title is just part of such a long, long tradition, to single it out.
At the end of it day, it seems kind of weird to judge The Bye Bye Man for its title when it seems like it could very well be the only thing about the movie that actually makes sense. Why judge it so hard on the name of its monster, when there are probably much better things to judge it for.
But if it works for you, thatâs also great. There are people who like the film, and thatâs awesome. I wouldnât be surprised if I wind up enjoying it to some degree. It was never going to be the next major horror icon, and some of the people who wanted it to be were the people criticizing its name in the first place, which makes no sense. I think weâre due for another Leprechaun or Wishmaster. Â
Thatâs an easier bar to meet than the next Freddy or Jason. Maybe The Bye Bye Man will at least get us there. Maybe it wonât. Either way, itâs a better title than The PeePee PooPoo Man, even if that would have inevitably sold more tickets.