The Bye Bye Man (2017) - The Glimmer of an Idea in the Murk

The Bye Bye Man (2017) was a film that quickly got on people’s radars. Solely for the, admittedly silly, name. Once it was released at cinemas, nobody was talking about it. And that’s a shame, because there was something of interest in it. Something that couldn’t quite make it to the surface.

The premise – three college students move into a house well above student budget and summon a vicious villain known as ‘The Bye Bye Man.’

I had high hopes for this film when, two minutes in, it acknowledged what a silly name that was for a horror movie villain. Unfortunately, that was never utilised again. This seems a wasted opportunity. After all, The Bye Bye Man does his killing by sending the people who say his name mad – hence the tagline, ‘don’t think it, don’t say it.’ There’s a film there of this name going around the internet and wreaking havoc with the people turning it into a meme, much like the name did in real life.

That’s not our plot. I’m afraid we are stuck with the same college students that are in every horror movie, and they are not any more interesting here. We watch them bumble around invoking the villains name, and see them punished for it.

What did make this film interesting, at least for a moment, was how it played with madness and reality. We start to see two different versions of events and wonder if our protagonist Elliot (Douglas Smith) is really faced with a monster, or is just delving into insanity.

Unfortunately, the film doesn’t take this route either. Whilst it would be interesting to have a story about dissolving into chaos after being consumed by a name in a diary, it just makes its way back into the mainstream and gives us a ‘the villain always returns for one more kill’ ending.

This could also be an interesting idea. We could follow an investigator who has seen crime equated to this Bye Bye Man figure, and becomes obsessed with finding the truth. Also not a particularly new idea, but could be compelling if done well. There’s an element of this – an element of someone else’s story that we don’t get the chance to explore. (Because we are desperate to explore any movie other than this one.)

And the final movie we don’t get is the period drama from the beginning. We are thrown in halfway through the action when it would be interesting to see how this idea would go in the 60s. It would even be interesting to start at the end or go back. Or to have our protagonists find any of this out from more than the one old journal with the one saying in it.

Overall, The Bye Bye Man is a mediocre horror. It doesn’t possess amazing acting or amazing plot but it serves as a good sleepover movie for teenagers. There’s nothing really that awful in it, but there are some glimpses of a good film in amongst it. And that is what makes it truly frustrating.