With the worrying proliferation of artificial intelligence now frequently implemented (or encouraged to be used) towards creative endeavors, we jest when we come across something ostensibly human-made that nevertheless feels born of AI. It’s a bleak, if facetious, admittance of our own potential incapability to distinguish what’s man-made trash and what’s robot-made. Case in point: While watching the new Blumhouse horror film Imaginary—directed by Truth or Dare and Kick-Ass 2 auteur Jeff Wadlow—the question around the extent to which AI was or was not utilized was constantly present in my mind, to the point where I felt I was legitimately going insane.
The screenplay of Imaginary is credited to humans. Three to be exact: Wadlow himself, Greg Erb, and Jason Oremland. And yet there is nothing in the film which doesn’t appear to be pulled from an algorithmic ether and designed to hit all the right buttons of what an audience would presumably want to see in a horror film…because they’ve already loved it in the past. Our story follows Jessica (DeWanda Wise), an artist and author of a popular children’s book series, who moves back into the childhood home after her deteriorating father has been placed in an assisted care facility. She’s accompanied by her tattooed hipster musician husband Max (Tom Payne) and Max’s two daughters from a previous marriage, mouthy teenager Taylor (Taegen Burns) and the much younger Alice (Pyper Braun). Unsurprisingly, this previous marriage was to a mentally unwell woman who went insane for undisclosed reasons and got herself locked up in an asylum. Also, unsurprisingly, she later escapes from said institution to warn her daughters of the impending horrors that await them, because neurodivergent people typically have the psychic ability to sense foreboding supernatural doom (we’ve seen this all play out before, of course).
While exploring her new home’s creepy basement, a basement that looks like every other creepy basement in a million other horror movies, Alice, a precocious girl who speaks like an adult in a child’s body trying to mimic how children speak, finds a hidden door which leads to a worn, abandoned teddy bear named Chauncey. Alice attaches herself to the toy and begins to manifest Chauncey as her imaginary friend. And it’s not too long before her behavior starts rapidly altering as she appears to be doing her new friend’s bidding—like embarking on an innocent scavenger hunt that requires Alice to slam her little palm into a rusty nail.
Jessica manages to stop this heinous act at the last moment, which is probably a more stressful time bonding with her stepdaughters while Max is away touring with his band (???) than she probably anticipated. Eventually, Jessica unlocks more of her traumatic past, and the strange puzzle pieces of the situation begin falling into place. When she was just five, she was sent to live with her grandparents after her father went insane following the death of Jessica’s mom. But Jessica realizes that this past involves the same Chauncey who Alice now totes around having full conversations with, who tells Alice that she’s going somewhere called the “never ever.”
Meanwhile, Taylor, incensed at the idea of having to kowtow to a fake mother, acts out by bringing a neighborhood boy over who promptly insults her younger sister and tries plying Taylor with molly that later turns out to be allergy medicine. While trying to manage the stresses of new motherhood and an encroaching and unknowable evil, it’s up to Jessica to unlock the repressed secrets of her past to keep Alice from being transported to the world of a malignant spirit that wants to play with her forever.
That aforementioned scenario with the neighbor boy and the fake drugs is just one of a seemingly endless supply of absurd, narratively jarring situations, conversations and plot points. Sometimes these scenes are downright laugh out loud, like the baffling introduction of an elderly woman referred to as “Old Bag Patterson” by the delinquent young neighbor, the teen drug bust, or when Alice’s therapist is so alarmed by a “conversation” she observes the child having with Chauncey that she gravely asks Jessica if Alice has taken up ventriloquism as a new hobby.
Imaginary isn’t “so bad it’s good” because it feels like an insult to intelligence and good sense, as if assuming we will be too stupid to pick up on its amalgam of unoriginality and thus it will sate our simple monkey minds. Still, I’d like to give audiences a little more credit, as it is helpful to remember that the studios, not audiences, have devolved any standards in film habits. But Imaginary is also far too boring to win over the general crowds, even if it does manage to garner points for hitting a bunch of horror sweet spots through the most donkey-brained means imaginable. The crass blatancy in its exploitation of tired formulae won’t manage to sneak past even the most eager and undiscerning horror fan
I was so totally baffled by the extent to which Imaginary feels cobbled together by tried-and-true tropes, and how unabashedly banal it is in nearly every aspect, that there was no other conclusion I could come to than to start my own little conspiracy that Imaginary is the first totally AI-generated screenplay. I know that’s not the case, but nevertheless, everything about the film feels off in a way that I’ve never experienced before—as if the entire film exists in the same uncanny valley as those demented Polar Express children. Every aspect feels tailored to meet certain horror movie quota. A creepy child talking to someone no one else can see? Check. A creepy toy possessed by something unknown and evil and can move on its own sometimes? Check. A female lead with a traumatic past? Check. A creepy old woman harboring secrets? Check. A creepy basement? Check. And about 50 shots of an entity lingering out-of-focus just behind our characters, after which the camera pulls away until it returns to the same spot with the entity now missing? Yes, even the camerawork appears to have been tested by a focus group.
Characters even speak in a way that’s less like a robot approximating conversation by attempting to mimic human speech, and more like a robot approximating how humans speak to one another in a movie. Nearly every line of dialogue reads like a slightly off-kilter cliché that was both said a million times in other films before and also said much better, by better actors.
There are few redeeming factors in Imaginary, except maybe the final boss Chauncey Bear demon, which looks so tangible I’d be shocked to find out it wasn’t a puppet. The design of the creature is genuinely frightening, and it moves in that slow, stilted way physical creations tend to in films, which filmmakers have since gone on to dismiss in favor of the uncanny, awful smoothness of CGI. If it is indeed a puppet, it’s a nice touch in a film which otherwise coasts on complete unremarkability. If it’s not, well, then I suppose credit where credit’s due to the VFX artists who managed such an affecting spectacle. Yet I still can’t help but view even this positive aspect with just a hint of suspicious cynicism due to all the other off-putting parts of the movie. If Chauncey’s presence is indeed tactile, maybe the choice to erect him as a real object was another cog in the algorithm machine; a choice made less out of reverence for tangible FX than one decided by the all-knowing AI gods deemed as more likely to appeal to audiences.
Regardless of whether or not Imaginary was created with the power of AI behind it, it’s still a clear reflection of the film industry’s emphasis on copying its own work. And to what end? So that we can have a horror movie so derivative that it becomes uniquely terrible? The desire to make AI cracks about slop like this comes, perhaps, from me having too much respect for screenwriters—how could years of cinema history lead to Imaginary without something dark, sinister and inhuman behind it? Human incompetence is more terrifying to me than artificial intelligence; we talk about our pressing existential fears around AI, yet we’re quite clearly capable of perverting our own art forms into garbage all on our own.
Director: Jeff Wadlow
Writer: Jeff Wadlow, Greg Erb, Jason Oremland
Starring: DeWanda Wise, Tom Payne, Taegen Burns, Pyper Braun, Veronica Falcón, Betty Buckley
Release Date: March 8, 2024
Brianna Zigler is an entertainment writer based in middle-of-nowhere Massachusetts. Her work has appeared at Little White Lies, Film School Rejects, Thrillist, Bright Wall/Dark Room and more, and she writes a bi-monthly newsletter called That’s Weird. You can follow her on Twitter, where she likes to engage in stimulating discussions on films like Movie 43, Clifford, and Watchmen.