In this week’s Daniel Isn’t Real, a college student attempts to cope with the trauma of his childhood by bringing back his imaginary friend Daniel. Unfortunately, our spectral companion doesn’t have good intentions in mind, and under his influence things quickly go from bad to worse. Imaginary friends have been a solid staple of movies in many different genres, from comedy to horror, because they’re a potent and reliable metaphor that can be used in many different ways. Here’s a playlist of 11 imaginary friend movies that approach the idea from all sorts of angles.
Harvey
One of the all-time classics in the imaginary friend genre, 1950’s Harvey stars Jimmy Stewart as Elwood P. Dowd, a cheerful but odd man whose boon companion is an invisible rabbit that stands over six feet tall. Harvey is an amiable barfly who is misunderstood by his family, and when his sister has him committed to a mental institution to cure him of his delusion it launches into an irresistible feel-good story about the power of imagination and kindness. Harvey is a landmark film that still holds up over a half-century later, with great performances and a cracking script.
True Romance
Before Quentin Tarantino had the juice to make the movies he wanted to make, he was a humble video store clerk doing script doctoring and writing for hire. 1993’s True Romance was directed by Tony Scott and captivated audiences with its gleeful amorality. When Elvis-obsessed geek Clarence Worley falls in love with a call girl, he sets forth to rescue her from her abusive pimp. Giving Clarence the strength to tackle the many dilemmas posed by coming into possession of a large bag of cocaine is the imaginary presence of the King himself, who appears in private moments to give Clarence guidance. At the end of the flick, his patience is rewarded when Clarence and Alabama name their child after him.
Fight Club
We’re loath to spoil even the oldest movie, but it’s impossible to grapple with Fight Club without admitting that it’s co-lead / antagonist Tyler Durden is an imaginary person summoned up from the depths of the protagonist’s troubled mind. When Edward Norton’s unnamed office drone needs a jolt out of his stultifying life, he “runs into” Tyler on an airplane and starts on a journey of self-discovery through parking lot fistfights. Things naturally escalate into global chaos, as often happens when you let a psychotic delusion take the wheel.
The Noah
This one is a little more obscure, but it’s worth tracking down. Robert Strauss gives his final film performance as the last living man on Earth after a nuclear holocaust. Being driven slowly insane by isolation, he invents an imaginary companion to speak to – and then a female mate for his imaginary companion so he doesn’t get lonely. It’s a subtle, complex and affecting work that explores the grieving process as Noah uses the greatest gift of humanity – our imaginations – to rebuild civilization within the palace of his mind, becoming a kind of God figure to this world he made.
Opal Dream
This 2006 Australian drama is a more grounded take on the concept, but it’s executed brilliantly. When a family moves to the south of the country to follow the dad’s dreams of finding riches as an opal miner, daughter Kellyanne retreats from reality with the aid of her imaginary friends Pobby and Dingan. Her parents, concerned for her social life, tell her one day that Pobby and Dingan left to go opal mining and never returned. She becomes distraught, her little brother sets out on a quixotic quest to “find” them, and the whole thing wraps up with a severely depressing ending.
Tideland
Terry Gilliam has always loved to peek into the unusual corners of the human brain, and one of his most interesting films is 2004’s grim fantasia Tideland. When a young girl is left alone in a decrepit Texas farmhouse after her father dies of a heroin overdose, she seeks companionship from a bevy of decapitated Barbie heads that she wears on her fingers and grants individual personalities to. As her dad decomposes, Jeliza-Rose starts to venture out into the world beyond the farmhouse, only to find that old family secrets are bubbling up to the surface. Deeply polarizing critics when it came out, Tideland is an uncompromising and deeply personal flick that’s well worth revisiting.
Cast Away
Somewhat similar to The Noah, this Tom Hanks vehicle opens with a man being washed up on a deserted island and having to struggle for survival. The rest of the human population hasn’t been destroyed, though, so it’s a little bit lighter an affair. Starved for companionship, the marooned FedEx employee rips a Wilson volleyball from one of the packages and draws a face on it in a bloody handprint. Wilson soon becomes our protagonist’s boon companion, giving him somebody to talk to as he builds a raft to make his escape. When the ball is torn away from his vessel during a storm, it’s a weirdly emotional moment.
Cloak & Dagger
80s kids might have dim memories of this oddball family-friendly spy movie about a kid obsessed with a video game that holds real-world spy secrets. The main character of the game, super-spy Jack Flack, manifests himself as an imaginary friend for young Davey, who is left alone by his air traffic controller father while he works. When actual enemy agents start chasing him, Davey must turn to Jack to survive and make some tough choices. There are some interesting concepts at play in this one, especially when Jack “tricks” Davey into shooting someone, to his horror.
Drop Dead Fred
It’s kind of a crime that British actor Rik Mayall never had much of a career Stateside – fans of The Young Ones know how much cringe he could wring out of even the most ordinary scenes. His only major role over here was 1991’s underrated Drop Dead Fred, where he plays the titular character, an imaginary friend who returns to bedevil Phoebe Cates as an adult. Although it was panned on release, this movie has aged surprisingly well, with its message of embracing the chaos and wildness of childhood as a path through emotional abuse and becoming a more complete person resonating strongly.
Donnie Darko
The titular character of Richard Kelly’s breakthrough film has a lot of problems. For one, he’s being visited by an enormous man-sized rabbit creature named Frank who tells him that the entire world has a little over 28 hours to live. It’d be easy to dismiss this as just a dream, but when a jet engine drops through Donnie’s ceiling it kicks off a mind-bending trip that makes you question everything you know about the teen movie. Frank begins influencing him while he sleepwalks to commit vandalism and other acts of chaos, but during the film’s climax we find out that his sister’s boyfriend – also named Frank – owns a rabbit costume. Or does he? We could argue about this all day.
Pin
The rare example of an imaginary friend having actual physical form, 1988 thriller Pin is one of the most unsettling films on this list. Leon is the son of a small-town doctor who uses Pin, a skinless medical dummy, to explain the biology of the human body to him and his sister Ursula. Unfortunately for everybody involved, Leon is also a schizophrenic who becomes convinced that Pin is a living thing. When Leon reaches adulthood and his parents pass away, things escalate extremely quickly as the artificial man becomes implicated in multiple very real murders.
