No one has mentioned the moronic John Cusack movie “Identity” yet?
I’ve never seen it, but there’s a French slasher film called High Tension that Roger Ebert said had a plot hole so big, you could literally drive a truck through it. This is because the killer who kidnaps the heroine and drives her away in a truck turns out to be imaginary.
In Happy, a wonderfully dark and insanely violent TV series based on a a comic by Grant Morrison, the policeman father of a kidnapped young girl is able to see the imaginary friend she sends to find him.
2 episodes of Elementary In eps 5.23 and 5.24 his stalker is actually a mainfesation of encroaching mental illness or or his worry about same
Cloak and Dagger (1984) The kid’s imaginary secret agent friend is the same actor as his father, but in his physical prime as opposed to 20 years older.
I’ve only spoilered the second one as the other two are not SURPRISE twists, you know them from very early on
There’s also that crappy Robert DeNiro/Dakota Fanning movie “Hide & Seek.”
The anime series (and original manga) School-Live! starts off as a fluffy slice-of-life show about a group of high school girls who for some reason have decided to live at school full time. However
the reality is that the girls have barricaded themselves into a section of the school to shelter against a zombie apocalypse. What we see at first is the viewpoint of one of them who snapped and lives in a delusional fantasy where everything is normal. The group’s teacher is part of the delusion; sharp-eyed viewers will notice that she doesn’t really interact with anyone else in the group before the reveal.
The horror movie Goodnight Mommy. Twin boys and their mom are in a car accident. The mom goes off to have plastic surgery. Is the woman who returns their real mother? She’s behaving very strangely…
She’s ignoring one of the boys, for one thing. That’s because he died in the car accident, and his brother can’t deal with it. The mom is real, btw.
The whole point of How I Met Your Mother is that Ted is narrating the story, years from now, to his kids in the future. And, from time to time, we get to see his children nod in agreement or ask their dad a question or whatever.
Anyhow, one change-of-pace episode had Robin doing that for her kids: telling them about her life back when, by specifically talking them through the day her apparent sudden pregnancy was the topic du jour. Except, as the episode goes on, we find out that, no, this is the day she learned she can’t get pregnant; she’s just been having a hypothetical conversation with the imaginary kids she’ll never have.
It was definitely the first episode.
In the TV movie Welcome Back, Johnny Bristol, it’s revealed that the home town Johnny remembered and wanted to return to after being a POW never existed.
I would count Harvey.
In Thomas Tryon’s book of The Other, the big question is which twin really died? Did Holland die, or did Niles die and Holland assumed his identity?
In Edward Albee’s Whose Afraid of Virgina Wolf? it becomes apparent that Martha & George’s son is imaginery.
I wouldn’t say it quite fits. Their son isn’t imaginary so much as made up. He’s just a weapon they use to hurt each other. They both have always known he isn’t real.
Hurley’s imaginary friend Dave, in Lost.
Murdock on The A-Team tv show in more than one episode at least pretended to have an imaginary friend or dog.
Ouch.
Interesting premise. This reminds me that there’s at least one exception to my general disdain for this trope: the TV series Awake, where a variant of this is part of the premise. The main character, played by Jason Isaacs, is a cop who had a loving family: a wife and teenage son. He lost one of them in a car crash, but he doesn’t know which one—because when he goes to sleep, he “wakes up” in a reality where it is the other one who has died. He sees shrinks (different ones) on both “sides”, and the teaser for the pilot ends with one of them assuring him that this is the actual reality and the other one is a recurring dream. “That’s exactly what the other shrink said”, he replies.
BAM.
Great show, sadly lasted only one season.