When a child has a wild imagination or a friend we can’t see, we often assume that child is imaginative and may grow up to be an artist, sculptor, writer, or other creative type. But judging by the films on this list, perhaps we should instead be worried that imaginary friends are an indicator of grave danger. Read on for four examples of ‘imaginary’ friends with an appetite for destruction.
Hide and Seek
This thriller from 2005 features a traumatized young girl who seems to deal with her mother’s tragic suicide by inventing a new imaginary friend named Charlie. Her father slowly begins to realize that Charlie isn’t exactly what he seems when strange, violent events begin happening. The events only seem to escalate, and he begins to suspect that his young daughter isn’t as innocent as he’d like to believe. Surely the danger can’t be Charlie…or can it?
We’ve all seen the film about a writer who moves to the Overlook hotel where he’ll work as the caretaker over the long winter months. He intends to take his wife and young son, Danny along with him to spend the winter there. Oh, and he’ll also be taking Tony, the invisible boy who lives in Danny’s mouth. I repeat, the invisible boy who lives inside Danny’s mouth. Danny frequently talks to Tony and gets disturbing, ominous messages from his imaginary friend about what could happen if they spend the winter at the Overlook hotel. Clearly, someone should have found this imaginary friend’s warnings as disturbing as I do.
Mama
A man has a breakdown and kills his wife. He drives into the wilderness with his young daughters and finds an abandoned cabin where he hopes to kill them, but he is thwarted. The girls are left in the cabin for five long years until their uncle, their father’s twin brother, discovers them. He aspires to raise them as his own. As one would expect, the girls have been deprived of social interaction due to half a decade spent in the woodland cabin. Oddly, they claim that in the cabin they weren’t alone and were raised by ‘Mama’. Unfortunately for their uncle and his girlfriend, the girls didn’t leave ‘Mama’ behind in the woods.
The Amityville Horror
George and Kathy Lutz move into a new home in Amityville, New York. The year prior, a man named Ronald DeFeo murdered his family and claimed that he was persuaded to do so by a voice in the house. Shortly after moving in, George and Kathy’s daughter Chelsea begins to claim she has befriended a girl named Jodie. All would be well, except for the fact that Jodie is invisible and is also the name of one of Mr. DeFeo’s murdered children. This, for some reason, is not taken seriously until an accident causes Kathy to realize that there may be more to the house, and to Jodie, than she had originally believed.
