‘Imaginary’: Shouldn’t a Murderous Teddy Bear Be Much Scarier?

Onto the trash pile of middling killer-children’s-toy horrorshows one must now toss Imaginary, a lifeless hodgepodge of the hoariest cliches the genre has to offer. Lifting liberally from countless scary movies (with Henry Selick’s Coraline near the top of that list), this throwaway features creepy basements, harrowing nightmares, unsettling old ladies, fuzzy memories, bratty teens, helpful therapists, mentally unstable adults who can sense the supernatural, eerily bouncing balls, spooky shadow lanterns that play unnerving lullabies, foreboding kids’ drawings, uncanny family photographs, witchy magic rituals, secret doorways, inhuman specters, alternate universes, giant monsters, and M.C. Escher dreamscapes. Creakiest of all its hackneyed devices, though, is its villain: a teddy bear whose malevolent designs are about as routine as its appearance is mundane.

Directed by Jeff Wadlow (Truth or Dare), who co-wrote its script with Greg Erb and Jason Oremland, Imaginary, which hit theaters Mar. 8, revolves around Jessica (DeWanda Wise), an author of a series of children’s novels about a cheery millipede and her evil arachnid nemesis. Jessica is married to musician Max (Tom Payne) and is stepmother to his daughters Taylor (Taegen Burns) and Alice (Pyper Braun), the former a petulant 15-year-old who can’t stand Jessica and the latter a young girl reeling from the figurative loss of her mother, who suffers from some undefined psychological problems and is the apparent cause of arm burns that have left Alice fearful of fire. At the story’s outset, all of them move into the home where Jessica lived until she was five with her mom (who died of cancer) and dad (who’s now blind and in a nursing home). Still, she admits she can barely remember her time in the abode, for reasons that are quite obviously related to the forthcoming mayhem.

No sooner has this foursome established themselves in the house than Alice is venturing into the poorly lit, junk-filled basement to discover a tiny door, behind which sits a stuffed bear that tells her—in dialogue that only she can hear—his name is Chauncey. While this plaything hasn’t previously made an on-screen appearance, Imaginary has already depicted an identical door in an intro dream sequence in which Jessica flees an enormous spider and navigates a smeary blue hallway. Alice endlessly talks to Chauncey, who always claims to be very, very hungry, and Jessica and Max initially find this to be both cute and a heartening sign that the girl is getting over whatever (undescribed) trauma she suffered with her biological mom. However, it’s not long before Alice’s fun and games with Chauncey—highlighted by a scavenger hunt around their property—turns weird, what with the bear demanding that Alice hurt herself by slamming her hand into a rusty nail.

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