The following is from the Calgary Sun - 24 October 2004 about The Grudge and the upcoming sequal The Grudge 2. Brief mention of Lucy and the Boogeyman Movie

Sam Raimi has faith his new horror movie The Grudge is going to be a box-office hit this weekend.

He and his producing partner Rob Tapert are already working on the sequel.

“We haven’t approached Sarah Michelle Gellar about being in the sequel,” says Raimi.

“Firstly, the sequel involves a whole new set of characters, but there are always ways of bringing back a character.”

The ending of The Grudge is ambiguous enough that Gellar’s character might not have survived the haunting.

“Sarah Michelle’s survival in the first one is in direct proportion to the film’s box-office,” jokes Raimi, adding, “she told us she had a great time making the first one, so I don’t think we’ll have that much trouble getting her back.”

Tapert is married to Lucy Lawless, who was the star of TV’s Xena: The Warrior Princess.

“I didn’t even approach Lucy because she was just finishing a pregnancy and we were also looking for a different age group for the lead characters,” says Tapert.

Lawless is one of the stars of Tapert and Raimi’s horror thriller The Boogeyman, which features 7th Heaven’s Barry Watson, who is forced to face the unseen monster that terrorized him as a child.

“We went after Sarah Michelle because she has a name in horror with her Buffy the Vampire Slayer series and the Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer movies.

“We knew that would work for us with her fan base.”
Raimi and Tapert produced The Grudge for $10 million US through their low-budget film company Ghost House Films.

“We’re working on several other horror projects,” says Raimi, who insists such films will be his primary focus once he completes Spider-Man 3.

“We’re developing 30 Days of Night, which is a vampire tale set in Alaska based on a Steve Niles comic.

“We have another called Scarecrow — about a family who flee the city to live on a farm and encounter an evil force.

Oxide Pang Chum and his brother Danny Pang, who made the Hong Kong ghost movie The Eye, are directing for us.
“It will be their American film debut as directors.”

 

The following is an excerpt from JoBlow.com Movie News interview with Sam Rami

I read that Boogeyman was supposed to be the first film released by Ghost House. What is the status of that?

Well, Boogeyman was the first film…we didn’t really know what the first film would be that would be released. It’s certainly the first film that we took as a screenplay and began working on. So I think we assumed it would be, but because that was a film that had to be built from the ground up – from Eric Kripke’s screenplay – it was a slower process to get it to a point of production and shoot the film than it was doing a remake of an existing film. We could begin on that immediately. So it turned out that even though we were later along on the Boogeyman project, this film, the moment we saw it, already had a screenplay, already had a director, was already working. It just got jump-started and was in a position to hit the theaters at a much earlier date.

So when do you think we’ll get to see Boogeyman?

It’s whenever Screen Gem’s date is, and I actually don’t know what it is. I think it’s in February.

 

SC: Your first Ghost House production, Boogeyman, has recently been reported as going from a theatrical release to going direct-to-video. What happened there? 

SR: I’m not sure and I don’t know if it really is going direct to video. Someone else told me they read that somewhere. I was told that Screen Gems is releasing Boogeyman in, I think, February.
 

UPDATE: Sony Pictures has told us that the film will indeed go to theaters first on February 4, 2005!
Source: Comingsoon.net

The Boogeyman to Scare on Video
Source: Alex Bond October 3, 2004

Boogeyman, which was originally intended to be the first film for Sam Raimi's recently established Ghost House Pictures, will be skipping theaters and heading directly to DVD and video. Sarah Michelle Gellar horror remake The Grudge, opening October 22, will now instead be Ghost House's first feature.

Filmed in Auckland, New Zealand, Boogeyman was originally planned for a mid-2004 theatrical release but was forced to undergo reshoots in January, and has subsequently been pushed back to February.

Columbia Tristar Home Entertainment will be releasing Boogeyman, which has been rated PG-13 by the MPAA for intense sequences of horror and terror/violence, and some partial nudity. The film stars Barry Watson, Emily Deschanel, Lucy Lawless, Skye McCole Bartusiak, Charles Mesure, Tory Mussett, and Louise Wallace.