Imaginary and a Theory of Effective Horror vs. Good Horror

Sometimes bad movies get you thinking about how they could be good.

I recently watched the movie Imaginary, which is one of those horror movies that gets dumped in theaters in January. One of them may occasionally break through and grab people’s attention, like last year’s M3gan, but it’s more likely that everyone will forget about them a month later. That seems to be the fate for Imaginary, and probably rightfully so.

However, I was struck by how the movie has a few moments where it comes to life, and the scares really work. It has scenes here and there that are very effective, evoking chills and providing a sense of lingering creepiness that sticks in the mind. But overall, the movie just doesn’t work. So what went wrong? How could it have been made better? I got to wondering what exactly causes a horror movie to rise from the level of “occasionally creepy” to “actually good.” And I think I have a bit of a theory about that.

So, here are a few rules that I’ve come up with for movies like Imaginary. I’m not exactly breaking new ground here, and much of what I’m saying may be kind of obvious, but I still thought it was interesting to consider. Oh, and if you care about spoilers for Imaginary, I’m going to go ahead and discuss the entirety of the plot, so don’t blame me if I ruin it for you.

First, some background: Imaginary follows Jessica (DeWanda Wise), a woman who moves back to her childhood home with her husband and his two daughters. There’s some standard stepmom stuff, with the younger daughter, Alice (Pyper Braun), starting to bond with Jessica but the older daughter, Taylor (Taegen Burns), distrusting her. Soon after they move in, Alice finds an old teddy bear and starts carrying it around everywhere, naming it Chauncey. But is this imaginary friend actually…sinister?! And is there a connection to Jessica’s own childhood? Yes. The answer is obviously yes.

Sure enough, Chauncey starts doing spooky stuff, and Alice starts acting creepy too. And before we know it, she’s having emotional breakdowns, getting upset at Chauncey, apparently trying to physically harm herself, and making comments about Chauncey taking her away to a magical kingdom or something. And while we’re pretty sure that Jessica also had a sinister imaginary friend when she was living in the house as a child, the movie waits until the final act to give us the obvious reveal that yes, Chauncey is the same monster that caused problems for her in the past and made her dad go insane. And he’s back for more!

I probably made that all sound pretty lame, but it’s not a terrible setup for spookiness. And the movie occasionally pays off on the promise, with the bear seeming to move around on its own when nobody is looking and Alice seeming to hold conversations with it, switching to a creepy version of her voice whenever Chauncey talks. We also get some glimpses of freaky supernatural creatures lurking in the shadows, making us unsure about whether the house is haunted or when monsters are going to grab characters in the dark. Not bad, but it’s not enough, especially when the rest of the movie gets filled up with stuff that ends up being dumb.

So, what are the rules that this movie could follow to be better? Here’s what I’ve come up with:

1. Ground the scares in real, relatable emotions.

One of the main problems with Imaginary is that the scary stuff is mostly unrelated to any of the characters’ real-life emotional concerns. We learn that Jessica’s childhood imaginary friend problems happened around when her mom died of cancer, and after her experience with Chauncey caused her dad to go crazy, she was left in the care of her grandmother. But there’s little indication that her experience arose out of the trauma of losing her mom, and the separation from her dad happened after it was all over. It’s possible that we’re meant to infer that her mom’s death led to an emotional crisis for both Jessica and her dad, but we only get glimpses of what happened, so it mostly seems like there was something bad that happened, and then she pretty much just forgot about it.

Even if Jessica’s childhood experience is meant to just be background info setting up the present-day scariness (which isn’t true, because one of the movie’s twists reveals that Chauncey was Jessica’s childhood imaginary friend, and he is only menacing Alice so that he can lure Jessica back into his clutches), it would still be more effective if it was more closely connected to her actual emotional trauma. That could also better connect it to what Alice and her family are also going through.

And that’s where the movie fails a second time to connect the scariness to the characters’ actual emotional concerns. There’s a weird scene that comes out of nowhere soon after the family moves in to the house where it seems like Alice is having a tea party with Chauncy, but Jessica hears a woman’s voice talking to her. Turns out it’s Alice and Taylor’s mom, who is apparently insane, and she had tracked down her ex-husband so she could see her daughters. She gets hauled away by the cops or orderlies from a mental institution or something, and she’s never heard from again. It seems like this was all a misdirect, meant to make the viewer think that Alice’s imaginary friend was a ghost woman or something, but why would you introduce a plot point that must have caused a great deal of emotional trauma for Alice and her family and then just ignore it for the rest of the movie?

Again, this could have been a chance to integrate actual emotions into what is going on. Alice could have begun spending time with an imaginary friend as a way to cope with the abandonment by her mother and the inability to understand what was happening with her. Or she could have shown that she was struggling to get used to having a stepmom and was seeking an escape. Instead, it just seems like she found a neat toy, but then it turned out to be a monster, with all of this not really being connected to any relatable emotional concerns.

2. Be Consistent About the Nature of Spooky Stuff

If you set up a monster as behaving in one way, and then it acts a different way, that inconsistency can pull viewers out of the story and make them question why they should care, since anything can happen. This is one of those complaints that might seem pointless in horror movies, since there has to be some unpredictability, but if a movie goes against the rules it has created, then that’s just a plot hole, not something scary.

In Imaginary, one of the most effectively scary scenes takes place when a delinquent neighbor boy comes over while Taylor and Alice are home alone. In addition to offering drugs to Taylor, he behaves a bit rudely to Alice, apparently enough to get Chauncey mad at him. So when he goes upstairs to get some towels to clean up some alcohol he spilled, all sorts of creepy stuff happens.

It’s actually a pretty good scene, the kind of thing where there’s a monster lurking in the shadows, ready to jump out at dumb characters. Chauncey has a pull string that plays a jaunty little tune, and the kid sees the end of that string just sitting there in the middle of the floor, but stretching way too far and into the shadows down the hallway. The string slowly starts to retract and play the tune in an especially creepy manner, leading toward the shape of a stuffed bear under a blanket. When the kid steps on the ring at the end of the string, suddenly the bear starts moving toward him, before seeming to jump out at him in a monstrous version of the bear, giving a brief glimpse of a huge creature with tons of fangs.

This is all good stuff, staged and edited for maximum creepiness. But why exactly did any of it happen? We learn that Chauncey is only menacing Alice to attempt to draw her into his realm, with the real goal of capturing Jessica instead. Why does he want to creep out this random teenage boy? I guess you could reason that he’s being protective of Alice because he has plans for her, but it still seems like a pointless endeavor.

However, the real problem is that we learn, in one of the movie’s many twists, that only Alice and Jessica actually see Chauncey as a stuffed bear. To everyone else, he’s just an invisible imaginary friend. So if the boy didn’t know that Alice thought Chauncey was a bear, why would he see the bear and be afraid of it? Apparently, nobody involved with the movie thought this through.

3. Don’t Get Too Bogged Down in Mythology

Exposition is another killer of scariness in bad horror movies. You don’t want things to get explained too much, because then spooky stuff won’t seem as weird and unexpected. Unfortunately, Imaginary commits the cardinal sin of having a wise elderly person show up to explain what’s going on. In this case, it’s a neighbor lady who used to babysit Jessica and became obsessed with the types of supernatural forces that nearly took her away forever.

You see, imaginary friends are actually supernatural creatures that bond with children, and they’re recognized by cultures all over the world. But if they get separated from children unnaturally rather than letting children outgrow them, they turn evil, and they occasionally abduct children and take them back to their magical realm. Or something like that. It’s a bunch of pointless explanation that nobody should care about, delivered awkwardly by a character who brings nothing of value to the film. All we need to know is that there’s a spooky monster who wants to abduct Alice, and Jessica needs to figure out how to stop it. Instead, we get another dumb twist in which the neighbor lady thinks she’s on Chauncey’s side or something, just in time to get dragged away and killed.

4. Don’t Show Too Much

This is one of those classic maxims that people say all horror movies should follow. If you see too much of a monster, it loses its scariness and just seems fake. Monsters that are kept in the shadows and barely glimpsed are much more scary. I don’t think that’s always true, but it definitely applies here.

When we get glimpses of Chauncey’s monstrous form, it’s pretty striking. It’s a 10-foot-tall bear monster with weird proportions and masses of sharp teeth. When it’s standing still, barely visible in the shadows, it’s creepy as hell. However, once it starts moving, it just looks kind of goofy. And when it seems to attack characters without doing any harm and can be fended off by simply swiping at it with a sharp implement, it pretty much loses all menace.

Would These Rules Actually Work?

These rules may be pretty obvious, especially the last two, since everybody knows that what you don’t see is often scarier than what you do. I do think there's something to the first one, although I know I’m not blowing anyone’s mind by stating that movies should have well-developed characters that need to deal with real emotional stakes. However, that aspect of writing often gets short shrift in horror movies, even though it’s the core of some of the best and most memorable entries in the genre, ranging from The Shining to The Ring and even less prestigious films like the aforementioned M3gan. Giving a movie some real emotional weight grounds it and makes it relatable, and it makes scary stuff hit harder. Without that, you just have spook-em-ups and jump scares happening to characters you probably don’t care about.

Thoughts? Feel free to leave a comment and share your own rules or thoughts about what can be done to take a basic scary movie to the next level and make it a classic, or at least more memorable than Imaginary.