Why Are Imaginary Friends So Deeply Creepy?

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Why are imaginary friends so creepy? What is it that’s so unsettling about the sight of a child confidently babbling away to thin air?

Stephen King wrote, “The root of all human fear is a closed door, slightly ajar.” The things we can’t see that are almost always more frightening than those we can. The idea of a threat that the child can see but the adults around him can’t is recurrent in the horror genre because it’s so effective: think The Others, The Sixth Sense

My debut novel, The Woman Outside My Door, owes a lot to horror. It’s situated firmly in the psychological thriller and domestic noir genres, with themes of mental health, motherhood, and homemaking and dark threads of danger needling throughout. But despite the novel belonging on the psychological suspense shelf, my love of horror found its way onto the page. The Woman Outside My Door has a ghostly, Gothic feel that it wouldn’t have if I hadn’t grown up binge-reading Stephen King and watching movies like The Orphanage and The Shining over and over again.

There is so much about I adore about ghost stories. The dramatic, evocative settings, the big Gothic houses, the isolated locations and things-that-go-bump-in-the-night. The compulsive uncertainty—is there or isn’t there?—that’s introduced with the first creak in an empty corridor. If you’re watching a horror movie, you already know there is, by virtue of the story having been billed in that genre, but we watch anyway, the same way we watch romances for the will they, won’t they storyline even though we already know the answer. In The Woman Outside My Door, I introduce an is there or isn’t there question in the opening pages that isn’t answered until the very end—is there or isn’t there an “old lady” in the park who has been talking to seven-year-old Cody? It was only after I finished the book that I realised I’d been unconsciously echoing that ghost story structure.

One reason children make such fantastically frightening literary devices is their tendency toward bald statements. There’s a moment in Jordan Peele’s brilliantly clever second horror film, Us, that scared me half to death the first time I saw it. A young boy, Jason, approaches his parents just after lights-out and says to them, “There’s a family in our garden.”

Why is this so unsettling? Why is it so much more effective to have Jason deliver this line than any other member of the family? It was an undeniably excellent artistic choice, because neither the adults nor Jason’s teenage sister would ever describe what they saw in such a manner. An adult might say, “There are people in the garden.” An adult might add, “We should call the police.” But Jason doesn’t jump to that. Children don’t interpret what they see; they report it. There’s a family in our garden. There’s no analysis of the situation, no attempt to rephrase it into something that makes more sense. The end result is the kind of stark statement that make adults uncomfortable.

In the first chapter of The Woman Outside My Door, Cody’s mother catches him eating a lollipop and asks where he got it. He tells her, “The old lady gave it to me.” When she presses him, “What old lady?”, he replies simply, “The old lady in the bushes.” This was the first scene that formed in my head. I heard the conversational tone in which Cody delivered the line that made his mother turn cold. I saw the icy park where they stood, the deserted playground, the frost-tipped branches. I saw Cody pop the lollipop into his mouth and run off toward the playground, unaware that what he had said had shaken his mother to her core. Right from the beginning, Cody’s innocence and powers of imagination were core facets of the plot.

I’ve always been more frightened by the things that happen just off-screen. That which can be seen can be confronted. But the unknown—what’s behind that door? What was that sound?—can’t be faced head-on. Using children as a plot device allows us to play around with this. Kids see a slightly different world. We can’t always be sure whether they are reporting on something that happened in reality or on TV, if it was described to them by a classmate or even happened in a dream. There’s a family in our garden. The old lady gave it to me. What’s really there?

There is a scene in The Others in which Nicole Kidman’s character notices her daughter’s hand, playing with a toy, is not the smooth-skinned hand of a small child but the wrinkled hand of an old woman. The tension of that moment, as she crept up behind the small figure that sang in her daughter’s voice, stayed with me for a long time. The anticipation of the approach. A closed door, slightly ajar.

I didn’t intend, when I sat down to write The Woman Outside My Door, to use horror movie tropes to create a spooky psychological thriller. It was during the editing process that I became aware of how overtly eerie some of the scenes were, how creeping the sense of danger. That was when I realised that all the time spent re-reading Gothic novels and watching horror movies had all been part of a puzzle I didn’t know I was putting together, and it had all added up to this.

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