Biff (Greg Mullavey, Mary Hartman’s husband) doesn’t get kids. His new wife, Helen (Beth McDonald), has a son, Timmy (Seth Green!), who keeps claiming he has monsters all around him.

Instead of being toughened up and not believing in these supernatural frights, as Biff wants, Timmy decides to make peace with those things that go bump in the night, which include a boogeyman in the closet, an octopus under the bed and a witch in the bathroom. Biff wants to make a man out of Timmy through verbal abuse and threats of physical violence. Ironically, his cruelty works, just not the way he intended. Timmy does toughen up. In fact, he becomes so cold and calculating that he manages to domesticate literal demons.

By the end, when Biff and Timmy are left alone, the drunken stepfather threatens to paddle our hero. Instead, the monsters follow Timmy’s orders. Sure, Biff died of heart complications, yet we know the actual culprit. But then, we must wonder: are these scary things real or just how Timmy deals with abuse? Or maybe that’s what Biff deserves for killing Ernie, his stepson’s pet potato bug. If the monsters are a coping mechanism, Timmy is essentially “weaponizing” his trauma. The heart attack Biff suffers is a convenient medical cover-up for a child’s revenge.

The most chilling part of the ending isn’t Biff’s death. It’s the fact that the monsters are now afraid of Timmy. This suggests that to survive a monster like Biff, Timmy had to become something even more terrifying. He didn’t just reclaim his space. Now, he has become the new landlord of the dark.

James Steven Sadwith, who directed and wrote this, would go on to make the Elvis and Sinatra TV mini-series.