DIRECTOR EXCLUSIVE
The director of horror film Imaginary talks teddy bear scares
JEFF WADLOW’S RUNNING A FEW minutes late for our interview – and with good reason. The director behind Kick-Ass 2, Truth Or Dare and the upcoming horror Imaginary, about a young girl’s terrifyingly real imaginary friend, has just been on the phone with the president of film at Blumhouse.
“We were talking about another imaginary friend movie that’s coming out shortly, that just dropped its trailer,” he tells Red Alert. The culprit is John Krasinski’s If, about a young girl’s real – but not terrifying – imaginary friend. The two similarly-premised movies are due to reach cinemas within months of each other, but Wadlow’s not worried.
“It’s like Volcano and Dante’s Peak,” he says. “There’s an interesting Hollywood history of zeitgeisty movies hitting cinemas at the same time. [Imaginary friends] was one of those things that just hadn’t been exploited in pop culture in a long time, probably not since Drop Dead Fred. So it was bound to happen.”
Indeed, when Wadlow first had the idea for Imaginary, he was simply focused on making “a scary movie about an imaginary friend” with writers Greg Erb and Jason Oremland. “I’m really interested as a filmmaker in the idea of subjectivity,” Wadlow explains. “Like, just because I show you something, why does that make it real? I like the idea of playing with an audience’s perception of reality.”
Erb and Oremland added another ingredient to the mix: an evil teddy bear. “I started taking those two ideas and wrapping them together and coming up with different characters and scenarios,” Wadlow continues. “I was also thinking, ‘What is a Blumhouse movie?’ That led us to the idea of the home and a family trauma and we wrote it together, the three of us just riffing.”
The result is Imaginary, in which a mother, played by Jurassic World: Dominion’s DeWanda Wise, returns to her childhood home and discovers her long-forgotten teddy bear. Her stepdaughter, Alice, portrayed by newcomer Pyper Braun, becomes infatuated with the bear, but it quickly becomes apparent that something haunts the stuffed animal, as Alice starts to play games that grow more and more sinister.
“The original Poltergeist was a major touchstone for us,” Wadlow says. “It perfectly strikes the balance between scares and this benign sense of wonder and excitement and emotion that you get when you have a family that you care about. We try to do a modern-day version of that with our film, where the terror is coming from this unknown presence that has infected the safety of the family home. We also tried to lean into the Spielbergian aspects of that. What if this thing that you’ve always imagined was actually real? What would be t
