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.