Imaginary Director Jeff Wadlow Talks Big Twist, Making PG-13 Horror

ComingSoon Editor-in-Chief Tyler Treese spoke to Imaginary director Jeff Wadlow about the Blumhouse and Lionsgate horror movie, which is now available via VOD and comes out today on Blu-ray, DVD, and Digital. They discussed Chauncey’s design iterations, the movie’s twist, and making PG-13 horror movies.

“When Jessica (DeWanda Wise) moves back into her childhood home with her family, her youngest stepdaughter Alice (Pyper Braun) develops an eerie attachment to a stuffed bear named Chauncey she finds in the basement,” reads the movie’s synopsis. “Alice starts playing games with Chauncey that begin playful and become increasingly sinister. As Alice’s behavior becomes more and more concerning, Jessica intervenes only to realize Chauncey is much more than the stuffed toy bear she believed him to be.”

Tyler Treese: I spoke with DeWanda Wise and she brought up that you’re a very collaborative filmmaker. I really love seeing these films and talking to directors where you can see they clearly take input from their actors and they come up with ideas together. So can you speak to your mindset going in and wanting to be collaborative with all the members of your team?

Jeff Wadlow: I love filmmaking because it’s collaborative art. I teach short filmmaking in my hometown. I’ve been doing it for 20 years. I do it every fall. And one of the things I say to my filmmakers, I say, listen, you just wanna execute what’s in your head, then you should write a novel. You should be an oil painter. What’s amazing about filmmaking is that all these creative people come together and they all contribute things to this, this stew that we’re making. And my, the, the favorite, my favorite parts of the movies I’ve made are the parts that I didn’t plan that surprised me. That evolved organically out of a back and forth with my team.

And so I think you’d be crazy not to lean into it because you have all these creative people participating. Like, why wouldn’t you want the best ideas? You still don’t understand your roles. The way I describe my job as the director is I say, Hey, come, come to the party, contribute to the stew. I’ll tell you when the stew is done. I’ll tell you when it needs a little more pepper. But I want you all throwing in your best ingredients. Because that’s how we’re gonna make something that will be bigger and more interesting than any one single person could imagine.

This is a really fun psychological horror movie. In the last act, it definitely gets wild, but it starts out very grounded. You really get to see the family dynamic. Can you speak to just taking the time to establish their lives and making sure the audience connects with these characters? We’re all waiting for that horror to pop off, but there’s a reason for the wait.

Yeah. You wanna connect to the characters, you want to care about them. You have to have an emotional investment otherwise you’re making Jaws 2. I always talk about the difference between Jaws and Jaws 2. Jaws, you spend what, like 40 minutes, almost an hour on land before they head out in the Orca. Because you’re getting to know the characters. You’re spending time with them so that you care about the three of them when they’re at sea.

Another example, it’s not a horror movie, but I was rewatching Taken, the Liam Neeson movie the other day, and there’s 30 minutes before she gets grabbed, right? But the reason why Pierre Morel did that, [and] Luc Besson did that, is because they wanted to give the audience time to connect to the characters, to invest in the relationships. So when it does start to pop off, there’s emotional stakes.

You have a great twist in this movie. My theater was shocked when they found out the bear wasn’t being seen by everybody. When you’re doing like a big twist, that’s a risk. How was it when you first test screened it? Because you could easily see something where if the breadcrumbs weren’t laid out, or maybe it was made too obvious where it wouldn’t connect, but thankfully, it paid off here.

Honestly, the first test screening didn’t [go well]. There was too much information. I shot a lot of footage of the bear not being there. Like almost every moment when someone else was in the room and Alice had the bear, I would do a quick take of her mining holding the bear. So we had a lot more material and it was almost a little bit more like the end of the sixth sense. Like we had all these images of the bear not being there and it was just too much. You didn’t need it. So we pulled it way, way back, and that’s the version that’s in the film and it, and it worked better. I mean, it’s always this like weird balancing act. It’s like how much information do you give the audience versus how little because you want to be concise, you don’t wanna overdo it. And if we had given them nothing, you just said that, you know, the bear’s not there. And she’s like, what? And then she realized it and then we’re onto the next scene and think, going to be going like, “Huh? I don’t understand.” They needed some imagery of the bear not being there to put it together. They just didn’t need all the footage that I shot.

I love that you have the Chauncey behind you, the cute little teddy bear I wanted to ask about.

That’s the hero bear. That is the bear from the movie.

I like that you went with a cute bear because I could see you wanting to go in a creepier direction, maybe more tattered, but then I feel like the audience would be like, why is this little girl playing with this gross-looking bear?

We did a lot of iterations because we couldn’t go full Annabelle with the bear because they’d be like, why would a kid want to cuddle with that thing? I mean, the Annabelle doll is terrifying. You don’t wanna spend any time. Yeah. But at the same time, you know, there were definitely versions of him that were a little more like Winnie the Poh or Paddington and I was like, well that doesn’t really work as like a, is a horror icon. So where we landed was on, on this guy. Right. And the key to him, I mean, he’s not exactly new. I mean, he’s definitely tattered, right? He looks a little older. But the thing that makes him still work in the kind of the poor lexicon is the asymmetry. Right? Like see how off his eyes and his ears are [off], even though he’s kind of in a neutral position. That’s what creates the unease in the audience. That’s what gives you the feeling that something is not right with this thing.

You’ve done a lot of PG-13 horror, and naturally, that is restrictive in a way, but also, these types of restrictions encourage you to think outside the box, and you still have so many other ways to get scares. So how do you feel about working within the PG space because I often hear that any restrictions kind of make you more creative.

One thing I say to the film students when I’m teaching that class: “They say, when you’re in a box, the only way out is up.” So I don’t have a problem with constraints. I mean, the very nature of filmmaking is filled with, filled with constraints. You have limited budget, you have limited time. So it doesn’t phase me. I think ultimately the story dictates the, the rating. If you, if I were ever to make, you know, a Texas Chainsaw Massacre movie, it’s gonna be a hard R. I mean, how can you make that as anything other than a hard R It’s a guy running around with a chainsaw killing people. If I were to make a Halloween film, of course it would be an R because Michael Myers is, he needs to kill people with, with the butcher knife, and you need to see it in order to be terrified. But when you’re making a movie about imagination, it’s not hard to keep it off camera and keep a lot of the terror implied because you need to imagine it, and that just organically leads you to a PG 13 rating.

To end on a fun note, did you have an imaginary friend growing up?

I was a film nerd. All my friends were imaginary.

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