First off, I have to say, The Bye Bye Man is the stupidest title in movie history.

The Bye Bye Man is weird. It tries to start up a new sort of supernatural horror that is almost an urban legend but it fails miserably.

It follows three teenagers, Elliot, John and Sasha who move into a big, old house together. They start finding random things like old coins and scribbles repeating ‘don’t say it, don’t think it’. Alongside these scribbles however are the words The Bye Bye Man. Doing some digging the friends find that a man known as Mr Redmon went on a killing spree in the 1960s killing anyone who knew about The Bye Bye Man before killing himself. During these investigations the group start hallucinating weird things, including Elliot seeing The Bye Bye Man in the library and, on his return home, hitting his friend John over the head with a baseball bat because he believes his girlfriend Sasha is cheating on him with his friend.

The premise of The Bye Bye Man as a character is that once he is in your head he will make you see and feel things that will eventually end in death or murder. The more it spreads, the more people are effected and the more they will kill. Elliot soon realises that Mr Redmon wasn’t a bad man, he was a man who was trying to stop the spread of The Bye Bye Man by killing everyone who knew of him. Once the legend is gone he can no longer hurt anyone until of course his name is found once again by Elliot and his friends. Now Elliot has to make a choice between living with these hallucinations and not knowing what will happen to him or to kill himself and everyone he loves and knows about the curse.

The Bye Bye Man had an interesting idea behind it once you got over that stupid name. We all know of Bloody Mary and other urban legends like that so why not throw another into the mix? It could’ve worked if the actual name wasn’t so dumb.

The story wasn’t too bad, the flick back to the 1960s and the beginning of it all was interesting and I almost wanted to follow Mr Redmon’s story instead of Elliot’s because it looked like it had more going on then just some underwhelming jump scares and random moments of gore.

Honestly, and I don’t usually say this, I would kind of like to see an origin story of this movie. Where did The Bye Bye Man come from and how did it spread? Where did Mr Redmon learn about it? I think that’d make for a much more interesting movie.

If you’re looking for a silly horror movie with not too much tension and a lot of jump scares then this is the movie for you! But if you’re looking for something a bit more sophisticated and worth your while I’d keep scrolling through the Horror category on Netflix.

What do you think of The Bye Bye Man?

Until next time.

Published by shonaharding

Media graduate with a passion for reviewing film and TV. View all posts by shonaharding