Pure Imagination

The director of horror film Imaginary talks teddy bear scares

- JACK SHEPHERD

JEFF WADLOW'S RUNNING A FEW minutes late for our interview - and with good reason. The director behind Kick-Ass 2, Truth Or Dare and the upcoming horror Imaginary, about a young girl's terrifyingly real imaginary friend, has just been on the phone with the president of film at Blumhouse.

"We were talking about another imaginary friend movie that's coming out shortly, that just dropped its trailer," he tells Red Alert. The culprit is John Krasinski's If, about a young girl's real - but not terrifying - imaginary friend. The two similarly-premised movies are due to reach cinemas within months of each other, but Wadlow's not worried.

"It's like Volcano and Dante's Peak," he says. "There's an interesting Hollywood history of zeitgeisty movies hitting cinemas at the same time. [Imaginary friends] was one of those things that just hadn't been exploited in pop culture in a long time, probably not since Drop Dead Fred. So it was bound to happen."