It’s yet another sub-par day at the Blumhouse factory, production line operating at full, breakneck speed, yet machinery on the perilous verge of total collapse. The house of horror, behind hit franchises like Insidious, Paranormal Activity and The Purge, has become something of a franchise in itself, a branded string of low-budget films making a high profit, yet quality control has forever been an issue and in the last year or so, it’s barely existed.
On the first cursed weekend of January 2023, usually home to the most unintentionally horrifying horror films, M3gan upended critical expectations and scored reviews as impressive as its box office total. But normality soon resumed with a limp Insidious sequel, a junky time travel slasher, a loathed Exorcist reboot, an astonishingly dull video game adaptation and, most recently, a soggy haunted pool horror. Yet somehow, the very worst was yet to come and now here it is, crash-landing into cinemas with an embargo so late, some preview audiences will have already started watching it. Imaginary, teased by an audio-first, cinema-only trailer far smarter than the movie itself, is a shameless grab bag of stolen parts clumsily stitched together with such carelessness, it’s a miracle it’s even getting a theatrical release. The bar might have fallen to its lowest ever point for studio horror but it’s still a surprise to see just how bad things can really get.
I was kinder than most about writer-director Jeff Wadlow’s first Blumhouse offering, the gimmicky yet fun franchise non-starter Truth or Dare which worked just about enough in a low stakes kinda way, a Final Destination rip-off for the sleepover crowd. His follow-up Fantasy Island was a disordered mess, trying and failing to do far too much and there’s a similar level of unearned confidence on display in his latest, world-building done with an unsteady hand and an unfocused mind.
Things start off in familiar genre territory as a woman named Jessica (played by DeWanda Wise) returns to her childhood home with new family in tow, husband Max (British actor Tom Payne) and his two children from a former marriage. Both Jessica and Max have some sort of trauma in their past – her absent father, his mentally unwell ex-wife – and both are hoping that a new start will help them heal. But when youngest daughter Alice (Pyper Braun) finds an old teddy bear and claims it as her new imaginary friend Chauncey, their dream home becomes a nightmare.
While red flags start to fly pretty early on – some bad acting, some even worse dialogue – the build-up is at the very least competent, if entirely derivative, recalling the 2005 Robert De Niro thriller Hide and Seek as well as Poltergeist and M3gan, a child falling into dangerous fantasy dragged deeper by a nefarious presence. But like so many horror films these days, it’s a logline scrawled on a napkin rather than a fully-formed and fully thought-out script and so when the plot inevitably thickens, the cracks turn into chasms and a two-star time-waster descends into a one-star catastrophe.
Along with the year’s other Blumhouse misstep Night Swim, Imaginary feels like the sort of bottom-shelf shocker that would have littered video stores decades ago, modernised only by its almost parodic obsession with trauma, the word that has ruined many a horror film of late. The last act, as drip-drip creepiness turns into flash flood chaos, is a laughably incoherent string of question marks – how did they, how could she, what was that – which plays out as if it were being made up on the spot, sloppy enough for a refund, Wadlow and his co-writers Greg Erb and Jason Oremland in need of a stern sense-checker. There’s such lumbering gracelessness to how rules are introduced – characters stumbling over nonsensical realisations and reveals – and such shamelessness to how other, better films and shows are copied. There are too many to list but you can feel elements of It, Beetlejuice, Housebound, Come Play, Stranger Things and most obviously Coraline with a visual trick so brazenly similar, legal action should follow.
Wise can be a charming presence elsewhere but there’s only so much that can be done with the suffocatingly soapy dialogue she’s lumped with and she quickly gets lost in the murk surrounding her. Even the promise of Betty Buckley playing a mysterious neighbour frantically ranting about demonic mythology isn’t as much fun as it should have been.
Wadlow has spoken of his desire to make a four-quadrant horror intended for a broader audience, the likes of which audiences saw more of in the 1980s, operating like a roller coaster that’s exciting in the moment but unlikely to leave a mark. It’s an admirable mission statement and given how self-serious so many horror films can now be, aiming for more fun is no bad thing but Imaginary is far too dumb and ungainly to move at the pace required and bring the thrills it should, a theme park ride that should be closed for repairs.