Editorials
Horror’s History With Sinister Imaginary Friends
A casual Google search of the words “scary imaginary friends” results in numerous articles featuring terrified parents recounting real-life horror stories involving their child’s imaginary friend. Stories that quickly read like Creepypastas or ghost stories, which in turn would make excellent fodder for a horror movie. Of course, that’s already a thing, with the genre exploring various corners of the psychology behind imaginary friends.
Over the decades, horror’s long-running history with imaginary friends tends to most often fall into two camps: paranormal entities or manifestation of a broken mind. The former breaks down further, as some imaginary friends are harbingers of a looming threat, while others are the primary threat. The child exists as the conduit, either to foreshadow or to fall prey. While the supernatural explanation revolves around children, explorations of fractured psyches apply to adults.
In The Amityville Horror, both the original 1979 film and the 2005 remake, youngest child Amy immediately befriends an unseen presence upon moving into the iconic haunted house. In the original, it’s Jody, a malevolent pig that remains unseen for most of the film save for a memorable scare where its eyes are glimpsed through the window. In the remake, it’s Jodie, the ghost of a murdered DeFeo family member. Jodie also unleashes a significant scare when she reveals herself to the babysitter. Both are lesser supernatural entities meant to unsettle and forewarn that something is seriously amiss with the house. They’re merely pawns. The Conjuring also borrows from this trope when little April Perron begs to play with her new ghostly friend, a previous victim to Bathsheba’s curse.
On the other side of the same coin, films like The Exorcist, Sinister, Paranormal Activity 3, and Fragile feature children being preyed upon by an evil presence while their parents or guardians remain perplexed, oblivious, or helpless. The Exorcist saw young Regan MacNeil become a vessel for the devil when she befriended a seemingly harmless Captain Howdy through her Ouija board. Her mother, Chris, had her subjected to every possible medical test and painful procedure to understand her daughter’s malignant transformation. Here, Regan was the pawn used by the demon to strike at a completely different target.
With Sinister and Paranormal Activity 3, the youngest daughters in both films behave strangely thanks to their invisible pals – pals that happen to be kid-loving demons. Still, the adults don’t recognize the warnings until its far too late. In Fragile, it’s a ghost named Charlotte that haunts the children’s ward, inflicting pain and suffering upon the closing of the hospital. The lead protagonist, nightshift nurse Amy, successfully pieces the supernatural clues together because of the bond she forges with one of the children. It allows her to tap into that belief of fairy tales and supernatural.
In The Orphanage, Laura was adopted as a child. As an adult, she returns to her orphanage to reopen it as a facility for disabled children. Many of her childhood friends never left due to a tragedy, and they still haunt the place. It’s only when Laura taps into nostalgia and remembers what it was like to be a child that she finally sees the ghostly children. It’s a bittersweet reminder that as childhood wanes and adults mature, grown-ups cease to believe. The boundless imagination of a child’s brain makes them vulnerable to the supernatural. In contrast, grown ups can’t wrap their minds around any other possibility that a child could be talking into the ether than an imaginary friend. In horror movies, the scales between life and death become easily tipped by the power of observance and an open mind.
At the other end of the spectrum are films like Hide and Seek (2005), Donnie Darko, Session 9, and The Machinist. Perhaps tellingly is that the imaginary friends in these films gravitate toward adults. Rather than the supernatural, the eerie imaginary friends that haunt their hosts are figments of a fractured mind. Frank the Rabbit acted as a hallucinatory guide for the schizophrenic Donnie to thwart the apocalypse in Donnie Darko. Dissociative identity disorder causes auditory and visual hallucinations in Session 9, taking an atypical and ambiguous approach to the concept. Ivan is a figment of Trevor Reznik’s imagination in The Machinist, a representation of himself before a guilt-inducing accident.
The outlier here is Hide and Seek, in which Dr. David Callaway moves his young daughter upstate after the death of his wife. It’s there that his daughter, Emily, begins to play with imaginary friend Charlie. Naturally, her behavior becomes increasingly peculiar. Eventually, it’s revealed that Charlie is real – that Charlie is a split personality for David to act out his rage. The film creates misdirect by framing the psychosis around Emily, but the truth is that it’s a parent unaware of their dissociative identity disorder.
When exploring imaginary friends in horror, the idea of an adult bonding with a figment of his or her imagination becomes easier to swallow if said adult suffers a mental break. This is why the recent Daniel Isn’t Real feels so refreshing; director Adam Egypt Mortimer plays with both elements of the supernatural and psychological thrills when Luke reconnects with his childhood imaginary friend upon entering adulthood. Luke’s anxiety over inheriting his mother’s mental illness creates the expectation that Daniel is an affirmation of his fears realized, but the truth is something else entirely.
Another exception is The Curse of the Cat People. This sequel gives a supernatural twist to the nature of real-life imaginary friends, which tend to be fabricated by a child as a self-soothing or coping mechanism. After the events of the first film, cat woman Irena died, and her widowed husband remarried and started a family with Alice. At six-years-old, their daughter Amy is a distant introvert, unable to make friends easily. Dad grows angry over Amy’s new imaginary friend, who unbeknownst to him, happens to be the ghost of Irena. As a ghost, Irena does what good imaginary friends should do; she helps Amy through a rough transition in her life.
Imaginary friends make for terrifying representations in horror. Some as unnerving omens meant for closed-off adults, some as a symptom of emotional and mental duress, and some only as a vehicle to deliver supernatural frights involving humanity’s most vulnerable. While cinematic iterations tend to adhere to two styles of horror, there are many that break free from convention to offer something different. Films like the recent Daniel Isn’t Real and the upcoming Z (Shudder) indicate there’s still plenty of room left for exploration, too.
We’re now officially in the back half of 2026 now that July is here, but what a year it’s been for horror so far. The sequels and reboots are still holding strong at the box office with films like Scream 7 and Scary Movie, but it’s also been a year where new voices are shattering records in unexpected ways.
Markiplier eschewed conventional production and distribution channels with his feature adaptation of Iron Lung, for example. We’re also still in the midst of Backrooms and Obsession-mania, with the former back in theaters with bonus footage and the latter extending its box office reign. Liminal horror has exploded, and low-budget indie horror is seeing just as much, and sometimes even more, success as big studio-backed fare.
All of which to say that 2026 has been a hell of a year so far for the genre, and it’s only getting warmed up. Still on the way are Evil Dead Burn, Insidious: Out of the Further, Resident Evil, Clayface, Whalefall, and Werwulf, just to name a few.
Also catch up with the Best Horror Books and Best Horror Games of the year so far.
Here are the ten best horror movies of the year (so far).
10) Chime
Horror master Kiyoshi Kurosawa is back with one of his most haunting yet, though one that’d likely be higher on this list if it were more accessible. The 45-minute feature was initially produced and distributed as an NFT before receiving a theatrical run earlier this year, with no plans to distribute digitally or on home media. It spins a somewhat cryptic tale, introducing a culinary teacher, Takuji Matsuoka (Mutsuo Yoshioka, Never After Dark), whose classroom becomes disrupted by a strange sound that leads to violence. It’s a quiet but haunting unraveling, one that leaves no aspect of Matsuoka’s life untouched, in true Kiyoshi Kurosawa style. That it defies any easy explanation also ensures Chime embeds itself under your skin.
9) Send Help
Sam Raimi’s splatstick return to form is a delightfully deranged two-hander that doubles as infectious catharsis for anyone who’s ever had a bad boss. Rachel McAdams (Doctor Strange) and Dylan O’Brien (The Maze Runner) face off when their characters are shipwrecked on an island, prompting a bid for survival in more ways than one. While O’Brien often matches her, It’s McAdams who shines as she deftly handles everything that Raimi, working from a script by Damian Shannon & Mark Swift (Freddy vs. Jason), throws at her. Send Help is full of vibrant personality, packed with all of Raimi’s signatures, making for one of the most entertaining films of the year.
8) Mārama
New Zealand filmmaker Taratoa Stappard’s gothic tale begins in familiar fashion, with Mary Stevens (Ariāna Osborne) arriving in Yorkshire upon invitation to learn more about her parents, only to find the remote manor haunted. Just when Stappard’s period horror story feels doomed to succumb to familiar gothic trappings and jump scares, though, its true horror emerges. The more Mary uncovers about her heritage and her Māori culture, the clearer it becomes that this grim home is built on violence and exploitation. Stappard’s vision comes into its own when it leaves behind its gothic influences and embraces its Māori identity; few scenes are as powerful as when Osborne’s Mary performs a haka in response to her vile oppressors, heralding in a righteous bloodbath.
7) Touch Me
Writer/Director Addison Heimann draws from retro Japanese horror, exploitation cinema, and perhaps even hentai for his campy, psychosexual sophomore feature. A toxic friendship plagued by trauma, codependency, and addiction gets tested to the extreme when Brian (Lou Taylor Pucci), a hip-hop-loving, tracksuit-sporting alien, gets between them. Olivia Taylor Dudley and Jordan Gavaris have an easy rapport and play off each other well as directionless, depressed Millennial besties prone to ignoring their problems until they become insurmountable. But it’s Pucci’s inspired, childlike take on the chicken nugget-loving extraterrestrial with tentacled secrets of his own that steals the show. Heimann has a lot on his mind with his sophomore feature and neatly condenses it all into a quirky, eccentric psychosexual camp odyssey that leans heavily into humor.
6) Backrooms
Director Kane Parsons translates the vast liminal labyrinth of his web series to the big screen in his feature debut, one that instills existential dread with its atmospheric horror and narrative. The ‘ 90s-set horror movie introduces a protagonist with a serious chip on his shoulder over life’s many disappointments, who then discovers his furniture store harbors a hidden door that leads to an endless labyrinth. It’s not just the incredible production design that instills a disorienting sense of doom and terror, but the lead characters’ palpable and profound sense of loneliness and isolation. Parsons exudes impressive confidence and control as he methodically entrusts his quiet worldbuilding and talented leads to carry the dramatic weight. While Backrooms does deflate by the film’s cryptic, cliffhanger-y end, it’s arguably the most effective and scariest yet at capturing the uncanny valley of generative AI.
5) Leviticus
Writer/Director Adrian Chiarella uses an It Follows-like supernatural entity that relentlessly stalks its prey as a launchpad to immerse audiences in the horror of constantly living in fear for simply existing. A conversion therapy ritual among a deeply conservative community plunges a pair of erstwhile lovers into a nightmarish bid for survival when it summons a force that takes the shape of those whom the afflicted desires most. Chiarella refines the horror mechanics and metaphor with much sharper precision, ensuring that the scares and emotional gravity of the young couple’s terrifying predicament reach their intended impact. It’s the central layered performances by Joe Bird (Talk to Me) and Stacy Clausen (Thrash) that clinch emotional investment in their heartbreaking plight, ensuring that the social horror cuts deep.
4) Redux Redux
The McManus Brothers, writer/director duo Matthew and Kevin McManus (The Block Island Sound), dials up the intensity of a classic revenge story by setting it within a multiverse, where Irene Kelly (Michaela McManus) seeks to snuff out every single iteration of her daughter’s murderer, Neville (Jeremy Holm). The more she stalks and slays every world’s Neville, the more she risks losing her humanity entirely. Through a narrative foil in Mia (Stella Marcus), Redux Redux smartly bypasses repetition as it explores the moral complexities and vulnerabilities of Irene’s extremely violent quest. Holm becomes utterly terrifying in the climax, ensuring that no matter whether Irene loses herself to vengeance for good or not, it’s justified if it means ridding the world of this sick maniac.
3) 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple
Director Nia DaCosta takes the reins in the second entry in writer Alex Garland and original director Danny Boyle’s trilogy, picking up from the previous conclusion that saw Spike (Alfie Williams) fleeing from the infected straight into the welcoming arms of Sir Jimmy Crystal (Sinners’ Jack O’Connell). From here, DaCosta presents a stark contrast between humanity’s best and worst. The former sees the tender studies of Dr. Kelson (Ralph Fiennes) make poignant strides toward humankind’s future, while the latter unleashes more pain and bloodshed courtesy of the Jimmies. The dual paths of light and dark collide in one epic conclusion, an inspired confrontation between good and evil on a stunning set piece of heavy metal insanity. Yet it’s DaCosta’s handling of both extremes that impresses most, teeing up one epic conclusion to this trilogy.
2) Obsession
Sketch comedian turned horror filmmaker Curry Barker (Milk & Serial) wrings blood-curdling terror from a classic Monkey’s Paw wish fulfillment scenario in a way that no one could have ever anticipated. To say that it’s taken the box office by storm would be a massive understatement; Obsession is the top horror movie of the year in terms of gross. It’s not hard to see why, either. While Monkey’s Paw scenarios often yield predictable outcomes, and this outcome is practically telegraphed from the start, Barker manages to surprise with the journey itself. And it’s one insane journey paved with blood-soaked violence and no shortage of nightmare fuel. What truly sets it apart, though, is leads Michael Johnston and Inde Navarrette as the central pair undone by one vicious wish. Expect to see a lot more from breakout Navarette.
1) Hokum
A surly, traumatized writer must break free from his self-imposed shackles of guilt when confronted by a wicked witch haunting a quaint Irish inn in the latest by writer/director Damian McCarthy (Oddity). Adam Scott’s Ohm makes for an atypical but rewarding protagonist, and his complicated emotional journey gives way to a deeply moving story of a man so thoroughly broken by personal trauma that he constantly dwells in darkness. In true McCarthy style, expect the creepy as hell witch to dole out some supernatural retribution for crimes committed, but never in the way you’d expect. The filmmaker has a way of making whimsy pure nightmare fuel; Hokum distorts a kids’ show into eerie, uncanny valley-induced terror in its torment of Ohm. Channeling Stephen King, this creeper plays like a traditional campfire tale in mood and style, infusing genuine scares with a sense of magic and heart.
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