Chris Messina's childhood love for Stand by Me led him to The Boogeyman

Chris Messina is not a huge horror fan, but the actor is enthusiastic about Stephen King. Specifically, Messina gets inspiration from the performances to be found in the best big-screen versions of the author's work. King was the reason the Air and Mindy Project actor, 48, gravitated towards the just-released The Boogeyman, which adapts one of the writer's early short stories.

"Growing up, Stand by Me was a huge movie for me. I wanted to be River Phoenix," Messina tells EW. "Later on, I saw Dead Zone, which I loved, and of course, Kathy Bates in Misery, and Shawshank. The list goes on. Jack Nicholson in The Shining. That performance I go back to time and time again."

Messina can now count himself among the actors who've tackled King. In The Boogeyman, the Long Island-raised New Yorker plays a therapist named Will Harper, who is grieving the loss of his wife. He has difficulty comforting his two children, played by Vivien Lyra Blair and Yellowjackets star Sophie Thatcher.

20th Century Studios Chris Messina in 'The Boogeyman'

"I read the script, and I foolishly thought, Well, he's a therapist, and he seems to be pretty good with his clients. How come he can't figure out himself and help his daughters?" says the actor. "When I talked to a bunch of therapists, they were like, 'No, it's much easier to focus on others. A lot of times our lives are a bit of a mess.' "

The family is targeted by a terrifying supernatural entity after Will sees a new client, Lester Billings, portrayed by Ant-Man franchise actor David Dastmalchian. The meeting between Will and Lester is the part of the film which is most reminiscent of the author's original tale. Messina felt "a lot of pressure" bringing that to life.

"It is the King short story, so we wanted to do it right," he explains. "Working with David, and the kind of haunted-ness that he brought into that scene, was really something. He reminded me of Chris Walken in The Dead Zone. It could have gone just creepy, and it could have gone menacing, but I thought he was just full of emotion and completely human."

Patti Perret/20th Century Studios 'The Boogeyman'

As something of a horror novice, Messina put himself in the hands of The Boogeyman director Rob Savage, whose previous credits include the 2020 Zoom-seance-goes-horribly-wrong film Host. "He knows the genre so well," Messina says. "I just followed his lead, because he knows how to build the tension very specifically. He knows how to create the jump scares." The most important lesson Messina learned from the Brit filmmaker? "Rob said early on to me, 'You can't have any of these jump scares unless you care about the people,' and that was a goal of all of ours, to try to bring as much humanity to it as possible."

Messina seems to have acquired a taste for genre filmmaking. In his next movie, I.S.S., he plays an astronaut on the International Space Station alongside Ariana DeBose and John Gallagher Jr. "It's a sci-fi thriller," he says of the film, which receives its world premiere at the upcoming Tribeca Film Festival. "We're three Americans, and there's three Russians, and we all get along beautifully. Down below on earth, things have changed, and so now we start turning against each other. It was a really fun movie to make. I'd never been dangling for that many hours, pretending I was in zero gravity."

Whether or not Messina's character survives The Boogeyman, he is keen on the idea of there being a sequel, mostly because he already has a pitch for the title. "Boogieman 2: Electric Boogaloo," the actor reveals, with a laugh. "I say that all the time. It's perfect!"

The Boogeyman is now screening in theaters.

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