Don’t Look Under the Bed (1999) & The Monster of Disbelief
How a Disney Channel original movie kept my weirdness alive.
Back in the late 90s and early 2000s, Disney Channel put out a series of original movies that were arguably the best young adult cinema of the time. The movies from that era that stand out to me are all of the speculative variety (though not all; I love the rollerskating movie Brink!). There was a movie about a teenager who begins to turn into a mermaid on his 13th birthday (The Thirteenth Year), and another with the exact same premise except he turns into a leprechaun instead (Luck of the Irish). And a movie about a girl’s new stepsister who is a bubble alien (Stepsister from the Planet Weird). One of them, Smart House, about an evil AI-powered and operated home that turns on the family living inside, was even directed by LeVar Burton.
Disney released these movies every month or so, and I was always there to watch them. They were so thrilling because I had spent so much of my youth watching similar science fiction and horror movies over my dad and uncle’s shoulders. But these movies were made just for us kids, so while they were scary at times, they were never as scary as the movies they watched. Since I always went into these movies with an open heart and mind, they all had a deep impression on me, but none of them as much as Don’t Look Under the Bed.
Stephen Tobolowsky
Spoiler warning: I’m gonna talk A LOT about this movie and its plot so be warned.
Don’t Look Under the Bed follows teenager Francis as she is haunted by the boogeyman until an imaginary friend, Larry Houdini, appears to help her defeat the creature. That’s the short and straight of it. What actually took place for 9-year-old me over the one hour 40 minute movie, plus commercials, was a sort of rewiring or reframing of my mental psyche and understanding of self. In order to explain what it was like, I’ll have to go back and take you through what the movie felt like to me as a kid.
Frances Bacon McCausland is a smart, analytical teenage girl who finds herself in a world where things are strange and unreal: everyone in her town has their clocks set back three hours, forcing everyone to wake up in the early morning dark, confused and disoriented; dogs bark on the roofs of houses; and swimming pools are filled with jello. Francis, being the logical teenager she is, waves these away because even if they are notably weird, they aren’t beyond reasonable explanation. She goes on and on dispelling what she herself sees in front of her no matter how weird it is. Even when she starts to see a very cool-looking boy watching her.
This may be where you think I’ll say that I was the analytical girl like Francis, but no. I was the odd girl. I was the nine-year-old girl who had just spent a whole year watching So Weird and who grew up on Goosebumps and horror stories made real by way of my uncle. I was the exact opposite of what Francis is and as a kid, I was so ready to watch this girl get weirded out and changed by the peculiar.
As things in Francis’ town get ever stranger and weirder, she just goes about her life like things are normal. That is until people begin to suspect her of doing everything. We, the viewer, are privy to what the characters are not and know that there is some creeping, clawed villain doing everything as it growls, “Franny.” As she tries to ignore the unbelievable, she confronts the boy that’s been following her and learns that he is an imaginary friend named Larry Houdini who knows who has been doing everything and framing Francis. “It’s the boogeyman.”
After that, I was hooked.
Help support Darker Times–become a paid subscriber today!
When I was a kid, I knew all about the boogeyman from my uncle who told me how it lived in the dark and loved to scare children before devouring them. Don’t Look Under the Bed, however, gave me a soft teal, purple, and misty fever dream of a story about how imaginary friends become boogeymen once their human kids stop believing in them in the process of growing up.
That reveal hit me like a bean bag chair filled with bricks and not for the reasons that I think are easy to guess. As a child, I went in knowing that I wasn’t Francis, I was the imaginary friend, Larry Houdini. I believed in the boogeyman and the illogical nonsensical world of the imaginary. But I was on the brink of two digits and becoming a teenager. I was being asked by the world to let go of childish things in order to do things like wear pretty dresses and cheer on boys in sports. I was losing the magic of a childhood spent digging up bones, running in the woods, and trying to be a soul skater karate kid like all the coolest children on TV.
Like Larry, though, there did lurk a bit of darkness inside me, and the movie made me see that the key to that darkness could be found in disbelief. Not just in myself. No, like Larry, my darkness would be fully unleashed the moment others stopped believing in me, in the weird me I loved so much. Once that happened, I’d become a monster just as Larry begins to morph into throughout the movie. And the only thing that stops his transformation is his human child believing in him again and calling for his help, reminding him of who he is and his purpose. I couldn’t really picture then what that would look like for me as I grew up.
What I ended up doing was getting really good at hiding the weirder parts of me and carving out friendships with people just as weird or weirder. Which was not a solution but a survival tactic. It worked, though. I am still that weird girl. And I eventually figured out that the only real way to vanquish disbelief or the lack of faith from others was by trusting/believing in myself, doing what I loved, and supporting others.
And surprisingly, on a recent rewatch of the movie, that’s exactly the message the story ends on. All boogeypersons are changed back into imaginary friends after the children believe in them again. The imaginary friends walk off into the night to save another town from a boogey gone bad with a parting message that growing up isn’t so bad, and it doesn’t mean you have to lose the magic or become a monster. And of course, believing in yourself and others as much as you do the imaginary is how you keep the magic alive.
I may be the only person touched this way by Don’t Look Under the Bed. But the movie, I think, really shaped the way I see myself in the world and also the way I see storytelling. The scariest stories and the ones that leave a lasting impression are ones that feel real, even if not plausible. The realness of Don’t Look Under the Bed is that the creatures that spend their lives taunting, scaring, eating, and haunting children are the same creatures that those kids created to always be with them through the scary stuff. And that’s real. Just as real as kids learning to hate, hide, or fear the parts of themselves the world doesn’t understand. Even though my hiding tactic to survive a girlhood in New Jersey worked, I still wonder how weirder, stranger, more alive, and confident I’d be if instead of choosing to hide, I choose to believe.
Comments ()