'Mother, do you remember when I was little, I had a friend, he was make-believe? '

Monday 9th June 2014 Rik Mayall is found dead at home. He died suddenly, and as of yet, mysteriously. Culturally this was a big event across the U.K. The many articles about him in the paper this week reminded me of his one Hollywood film Drop Dead Fred, not because of the title as such (although it doesn't escape your attention) but because it was on at the cinemas in the U.K. when I was working part-time at the Odeon cinema in Richmond. We used to get a long lunch (back when you still got an hour...) and I once went exploring in the basement under screen one. It was dark, I think I might have had one of those torches the ushers use. The building was old, completed in 1930, and the basement led to another, deeper and darker basement. On the second basement I started to become nervous, no one had been down here for a while I guessed, what it was originally used for I am not sure. Richmond is on a hill and you can see the rise of that hill from the front of the cinema. On the second basement I discovered stairs leading down to a third basement and there is where I left it, fear rising in me. I went back up.

Drop Dead Fred is about an unhappy girl's imaginary friend who appears from a jack-in-the-box to cheer her up. When she visits a world renown psychologist who specializes in children with imaginary friends, Fred gets to meet up with all the other imaginary friends who he, we presume, all know each other from the imaginary friend dimension.

Writing for Mystical Move Guide, Carl J. Schroeder states:
"The imaginary friend is cavortingly rude for a reason; he served to push the girlchild to do mischief for attention and as a cry for help. Now grown up, the woman has forgotten and is about to lose her soul, so events call for some kind of literal return of her demon to force the exposure of her pain. This psychic crisis is poignantly realistic... The creature who is visible only to the woman is like a poltergeist energy of her repressed self, a problematic ego container into which her powers of assertion and creativity were poured and stored. The movie's resolution is startlingly beautiful..."

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drop_Dead_Fred