[Ad - Sponsored by Entertainment Earth] Film Brain clutches his teddy bear in this horror film about imaginary friends with an ironic lack of creativity, that sees Blumhouse recycle their tired haunted house tropes yet again.
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00:00 This video is sponsored by Entertainment Earth.
00:02 Hello and welcome to Projector, and on this episode,
00:05 Dewonderwise realizes that her stepdaughter's imagination is taking a serious a turn
00:10 in Blumhouse's imaginary.
00:13 [music]
00:29 Children's book illustrator Jessica, played by Dewonderwise,
00:32 moves back into her childhood home with her new rockstar husband Max,
00:36 played by Tom Payne, and his children Alice and Taylor,
00:39 played by Piper Braun and Teagan Burns, respectively.
00:42 Soon after, Alice finds hidden in the basement a stuffed teddy bear named Chansey,
00:47 who quickly becomes her imaginary friend.
00:49 But Jessica starts to become alarmed at Alice's unsettling behavior
00:53 and discovers secrets from her own past that make her realize
00:57 that the threat from Chansey is definitely not imaginary.
01:01 Blumhouse's low budget model has come to dominate the horror genre for the last decade or so,
01:05 and when it works, it can produce some great movies.
01:08 You think of things like Get Out or Megan,
01:11 and those hits allow you to overlook the plentiful misfires
01:15 that Blumhouse has released over the years.
01:17 But even many of those were quite commercially successful
01:21 because often the budgets for these films are so low
01:23 that they make their money back in the opening weekend.
01:27 That's pretty lucrative from a production point of view,
01:30 but in terms of the films themselves, Blumhouse has been on a bit of a cold streak of late.
01:35 First, there was the terrible Five Nights at Freddy's movie,
01:38 a massive disappointment given how long that was in development, how.
01:42 Then we had Night Swim back in January,
01:45 which almost functioned as being a self-parody of a Blumhouse movie.
01:49 Now we have imaginary,
01:51 and you don't need to have a vivid imagination to work out
01:54 what kind of Blumhouse movie it is,
01:57 especially when you look at the CV of who's involved with it.
02:00 The film is directed by Jeff Waddlow,
02:02 who for Blumhouse has directed Truth or Dare and Fancy Island,
02:07 and before that he also directed Kick-Ass 2.
02:09 So not exactly the greatest of CVs,
02:13 especially considering that Fancy Island and Truth or Dare
02:16 might be containers for some of the worst films that Blumhouse has ever released.
02:21 An uncredited writer on this movie, by the way, is Bryce McGuire,
02:24 who was the writer and director of the aforementioned Night Swim.
02:27 He was also a writer on Baghead, which I saw recently,
02:30 and I need to do a video on that
02:31 because that's a whole other can of worms right there.
02:35 But I bring up Night Swim because I literally watched that
02:38 the night before I did Imaginary.
02:40 Effectively, I did a Blumhouse double feature,
02:42 and watching the two movies back to back,
02:45 it's really striking how similar the two films are in many different ways.
02:50 It becomes clear that Blumhouse hasn't just got a formula for how they make the movies,
02:55 but often just what happens in them.
02:58 They've codified horror tropes to such an extent
03:02 that Blumhouse is just effectively making an assembly line
03:05 of PG-13 multiplex fodder horror movies,
03:10 and that's not good for anyone's imagination.
03:13 The frustrating thing about Imaginary is that it has a genuinely great idea at the centre of it.
03:17 A horror movie centred around imaginary friends?
03:20 You could do so much with that idea.
03:23 You could do a genre spin on Drop Dead Fred.
03:25 That was almost a horror movie to begin with.
03:28 There's literally no limits with it,
03:30 aside from the filmmakers' imagination and their budget.
03:34 And even with the realms of a Blumhouse budget,
03:37 they could still be off the wall and subversive,
03:40 really playful with it if they wanted to be.
03:43 But it's pretty clear watching Imaginary that the filmmakers didn't want to do that,
03:48 and instead took that idea and just fed it through the Blumhouse find and replace
03:53 in terms of its script.
03:55 And it's not like Night Swim,
03:56 which had an absolutely ridiculous concept of a haunted swimming pool,
04:00 and has to contrive ways of keeping people around it,
04:03 and takes itself so absolutely seriously.
04:06 There are moments where Imaginary, just for the bravest of moments,
04:11 almost shows some signs of life,
04:14 a sign of a sense of humour on occasion.
04:17 There's a moment where Dewanda Wise literally exclaims,
04:20 "I'm gonna have to kill that bear."
04:22 But the movie almost feels like it's refusing to have any fun with the central idea.
04:28 Unfortunately for Imaginary,
04:30 most of the funny parts are of the distinctly unintentional variety,
04:33 and will be coming from the experienced horror fans
04:35 that have seen a version of this movie six billion times before.
04:39 The film is so risibly cookie-cutter.
04:42 And I know that's a bit of a harsh criticism to make,
04:44 because often these Blumhouse movies are made for teenagers.
04:47 The PG-13 rating on them means that they can be the gateway
04:50 for those to get into the horror genre.
04:53 But even with that, I don't think that's an excuse for these movies,
04:57 because they're not good enough.
04:59 They're just not scary.
05:02 They're basically the horror genre equivalent
05:04 of walking into Nando's and ordering a mild.
05:07 Like, what's even the point of going in the first place
05:10 if you're not even getting a hint of spice with it?
05:13 Okay, here's a question for you.
05:14 Aside from being Blumhouse movies,
05:16 what do this, Five Nights at Freddy's, and Night Swim all have in common?
05:21 Don't know the answer? I'll tell you the answer.
05:23 It's that they all have long stretches of absolutely nothing happening in them.
05:28 And this isn't to be confused with building tension,
05:30 because this isn't that.
05:32 That would imply that there's a purpose to what's happening on screen.
05:35 The cheapest thing you can do is just have characters
05:38 wandering around and talking and expositing.
05:41 And guess what?
05:42 All three of these movies have long stretches where nothing is really happening.
05:47 They're just filling out time until the point
05:49 where they can actually start using up their budgets.
05:52 And it's really frustrating,
05:54 especially because in the case of Night Swim and Imaginary,
05:57 whole swaths of the movie take place in broad daylight,
06:02 which is one of the hardest things for a horror movie to build suspense in,
06:05 because there is so much natural light blasting in through the windows
06:09 that you can see everything.
06:10 You can't hide anything.
06:12 And so a lot of the time, the movie is literally trying to build suspense
06:16 with maybe a slight stinger in the soundtrack
06:20 whilst having a close-up of a teddy bear.
06:23 Like, a lost count of how many times Imaginary kept cutting to the teddy bear,
06:27 as if we were meant to be frightened just on sight by a teddy bear
06:30 that actually doesn't even look remotely sinister.
06:33 It just kind of looks vaguely sad-faced a lot of the time.
06:36 It's not even creepy.
06:38 It's just a teddy bear.
06:39 Much of what happens in the first half of Imaginary is just textbook stalling.
06:43 It's just delaying, delaying, delaying.
06:45 It's just holding back the flow of information just to make itself longer,
06:51 even though it's stuff that the audience would have already guessed.
06:54 Take, for example, the fact that Jessica moves back into her childhood home.
06:58 We know it's her childhood home.
07:00 She knows it's her childhood home.
07:02 But she doesn't remember actually living there
07:04 because she moved out when she was five,
07:06 and apparently that means that she can't remember anything of what happened there.
07:10 This is awfully convenient because that means that she doesn't realise
07:13 that the Imaginary friend that her stepdaughter is interacting with
07:16 is the same Imaginary friend that she was interacting with when she was a child.
07:22 And so this means that the audience is about 15 steps ahead of the movie
07:27 because the film tries to present this as being some kind of twist,
07:31 as some kind of big reveal in the narrative,
07:34 even though it is literally something the audience would have probably assumed
07:38 from about the split second she stepped in the house.
07:42 We know exactly where this is going to go,
07:45 and the movie refuses to offer any kind of real surprises on that front.
07:51 And instead, you end up just kind of waiting for the film
07:54 to finally catch up with where you were already at 45 minutes ago.
07:59 So what does a movie do when there's nothing scary happening on screen?
08:02 Cheap jump scares, of course.
08:04 In fact, that's the very note the film starts off with.
08:07 It starts off with a cheap fake-out dream sequence
08:10 that looks like the cold opener to a lot of these Blumhouse movies
08:14 that shows the previous victim of the film's central threat,
08:17 just to build them up as being a terrifying entity.
08:20 In this case, no, it's just a nightmare that Jessica is having,
08:24 and it's meant to set up these various different things,
08:27 like her institutionalised father, and then she gets attacked by a giant spider thing.
08:32 Except there's so little context for the audience that it makes no sense for them,
08:36 except retroactively when they think back upon the movie later.
08:40 That's always a great way of establishing things to an audience, I've found.
08:43 Likewise, there is also the stepchildren's birth mother,
08:48 who herself has also been institutionalised,
08:52 and there is a moment where her character breaks out
08:56 and just appears for a cheap jump scare.
08:59 And this is meant to set up for later.
09:01 The problem is, the movie didn't actually tell us what she looked like
09:05 until this moment we get jump scared by a woman that we've literally never seen before,
09:10 and then are meant to realise, "Oh, that was the birth mother."
09:14 You know, great way of conveying information to the audience.
09:17 You know, you couldn't have shown a picture beforehand so he knew who this woman was,
09:20 instead of me suspending a split second going, "Who the hell is that meant to be?
09:25 Where is this woman just suddenly materialised from?"
09:29 Great filmmaking right there.
09:31 But my personal favourite of these is the boy next door that Taylor,
09:35 the elder stepdaughter, brings round to the house,
09:37 a combination of empty padding and cheap jump scares.
09:41 The character literally only exists for a 10 minute sequence or so,
09:45 where he wanders round the house, occasionally getting jump scared by Chancy.
09:49 He uses the upstairs toilet, and while he's peeing,
09:52 the shape of the teddy bear appears in the towel, which distracts him midstream.
09:57 Then he gormlessly follows around the incredibly long pull string that Chancy has
10:02 to get jump scared again.
10:04 And then that character leaves the house, and effectively leaves the rest of the movie.
10:08 We almost never see him again, apart from one very brief moment
10:12 where Taylor is wandering around on the streets,
10:14 she sees him in his bedroom, and he just closes the blind.
10:18 That's the entire payoff for that character and that whole sequence.
10:22 Wow, this character didn't need to be in the movie in the slightest.
10:26 It's pretty ironic that a movie called Imaginary is so strikingly derivative.
10:31 In fact, let's do a list of all the things that Night Swim and Imaginary both have in common.
10:36 They both have characters moving their families into a new home,
10:41 which turns out to have a secret past.
10:43 For a time, it seems to be benign, and they think the supernatural entity
10:47 might even be helping them.
10:49 You've got Wyatt Russell's baseball character,
10:51 who thinks the pool is helping with his MS.
10:53 In Imaginary, Jessica thinks that the house is helping with her designing skills.
10:59 Although, in actuality, that plot point gets dropped
11:02 almost as soon as it's brought up to begin with.
11:05 But it turns out that actually it's targeting their children,
11:09 and wants to take them away to another realm.
11:12 And that applies to both movies.
11:14 But even weirder similarities, like in Night Swim,
11:18 there is a moment where a character draws a smiley face on a coin,
11:23 and that turns out to be a Chekhov's gun that comes back in the finale of the movie.
11:28 And now, in Imaginary, we have a character that draws a smiley face on a bouncing ball
11:35 that comes back at the climax of the movie.
11:38 It's very weird that that specific smiley face detail
11:41 has appeared in two Blumhouse movies released two months apart.
11:46 Often, Imaginary actually feels like a grab bag of a load of things
11:50 that Blumhouse has already done in many of their hit movies before.
11:55 The relationship with the younger stepdaughter, Enchancy,
11:59 is very reminiscent of the similar dynamic that was in Megan, only very recently.
12:04 But most striking of all is the similarities between Imaginary and Insidious,
12:10 in that both movies feature characters that move back into their childhood homes,
12:14 where they don't realise they had a supernatural encounter at a young age,
12:17 and then realise that same entity is targeting their children
12:21 and wants to bring them over to the other side,
12:23 or that never ever in the case of Imaginary.
12:26 In fact, Imaginary borrows so much from that movie,
12:29 it could almost be considered a loose remake in many ways,
12:33 right down to the fact that we have an expert character in that film
12:36 that was played by Lin Shay.
12:38 Here, it's played by Betty Buckley doing her best Lin Shay impression.
12:43 In fact, Buckley is probably best known to modern viewers
12:46 as co-starring in Split, another Blumhouse production that's far better than this one.
12:52 Buckley is clearly enjoying getting her 10 minutes of screen time
12:56 as the nosy neighbour who used to be Jessica's babysitter back in the day,
13:01 and since then has become obsessed with the world of Imaginary friends,
13:05 delivering absolutely ridiculous exposition.
13:09 There is a whole scene where she just comes out with utterly absurd nonsense,
13:13 and even the film has to lampshade it as basically making her character a kook.
13:18 Even so, Buckley is clearly enjoying getting to play this kind of offbeat character,
13:24 and again, if the movie kind of leaned into that sort of thing,
13:27 it would have been a lot more enjoyable than it is.
13:30 And there is a lot of non-Blumhouse movies that it's also clearly derivative of.
13:35 You think of things like Annabelle or Child's Play,
13:38 but the fact that Blumhouse is so obviously cribbing from their back catalogue
13:44 is actually really astonishing.
13:46 It feels like Blumhouse has actually managed to somehow cannibalise itself.
13:51 And it's not really the fault of the actors who are trying to do their best
13:53 with the often terrible dialogue.
13:55 I especially feel bad for the kid playing Alice,
13:57 who has spent a lot of her screen time doing her best Gollum impression
14:01 in her interactions with Chansey, which are more funny than scary.
14:05 I also feel quite bad for the one playing the elder stepdaughter,
14:08 who is just playing a stuck-up brat who hates her stepmother.
14:12 Never seen that in a horror movie before.
14:15 But it's one thing to be dull and derivative,
14:18 it's another to insult the audience's intelligence.
14:21 There's a twist at around halfway through the movie that is absolutely unbearable.
14:27 It's a twist that I didn't see coming because it's completely stupid.
14:32 It makes absolutely no sense and opens up a whole bunch of plot holes in the process.
14:38 It's also the kind of twist that, if you took it out of the movie,
14:41 it really wouldn't have mattered either way.
14:44 It adds very little to the film.
14:46 It's only in the final act, when they jump over into the Never Ever,
14:49 does the film finally show any kind of imagination.
14:52 And I actually found myself wishing that more of the film took place here,
14:56 or they actually jumped over an earlier point and actually took more advantage of it.
15:01 But even then, it's largely just a generic funhouse,
15:05 a cavalcade of doors that lead into rooms of very conventional varieties.
15:11 And that's a shame, considering the movie sets up that this is a world of imagination.
15:15 It sets up the possibility that the characters can generate scenarios out of their own minds,
15:20 and so you can have things that are both dreams and also nightmares simultaneously.
15:26 Again, you could do anything you want with this setup,
15:30 and mostly it's just generic horror stuff.
15:34 Worse still, the design of Chansey, the horror version of it,
15:38 feels like just a rejected Freddy Fazbear from Five Nights at Freddy's.
15:42 It feels like a reused concept design more than anything.
15:46 But even then, it feels like, again,
15:49 it's mostly just a mild horror movie riff on Coraline more than anything,
15:55 especially given the recurring image of characters with their eyes replaced
15:59 with teddy bear black eyes, which is very reminiscent of the black buttons
16:04 that the characters stitched in their eyes in that movie.
16:07 And it's really striking that a PG-rated film like Coraline actually feels more sinister
16:14 than a movie like Imaginary does, ostensibly aimed at adults.
16:18 I do have to give the movie credit for one thing, though.
16:21 It doesn't end on a stupid, nihilistic last-minute twist like so many Blumhouse horror movies do,
16:27 that just ends the movie on a completely sour note.
16:30 In fact, it actively subverts that.
16:33 It sets that up, and it looks like it's going to be the film's ending,
16:37 and then it turns out there's another 10 minutes of the movie to go.
16:40 And I actually give the movie points for not following through on that.
16:45 Unfortunately, it has the side effect of making it feel like the climax of the movie
16:49 is never going to end, because it has not just one, but two false finishes,
16:54 and it gets exhausting by the time the movie finally actually bothers to wrap itself up.
17:00 Here's a little tidbit for you.
17:01 Universal actually has a first-look deal with Blumhouse to distribute their movies,
17:05 and they passed on releasing Imaginary.
17:08 Imagine that!
17:09 That's the reason why Lionsgate is putting this out and not them,
17:12 and I think that pretty much says it all.
17:14 This is subpar by Blumhouse standards.
17:18 It is so formulaic and so derivative, even among the studio's back catalogue,
17:24 that it feels like a squandering of a great idea.
17:27 Even teenagers are going to think that this is an anemic horror movie.
17:32 It's not scary even once, and I think it's become pretty clear after the last several movies
17:38 that Blumhouse needs to tear up their formula and actually start trying to be creative again.
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