Plot
The movie is about a teenage girl named Frances Bacon McCausland (Erin Chambers), an intelligent and level-headed girl who is starting high school one year early. Strange things have been going on in the quiet little town of Middleberg: Dogs on people's roofs, alarm clocks going off three hours early, eggs all over a teacher's car, sweet gelatin in the swimming pool, and B's spray-painted all over town, including the lockers of the school—except for Frances' locker, which has a B inside it. All these weird pranks seem to point to Frances, but none of it makes sense to her.
The only person who can help her in this situation is a guy only she can see; Larry Houdini (Eric "Ty" Hodges II). Larry tells Frances that she's being framed by the Boogeyman, and he seems to know what's going on better than she does. Frances has a difficult time believing what Larry tells her, because she's always tried to look at the world like an adult, using logic and facts to explain everything, after her little brother, Darwin, almost died from a serious illness a few years ago.
Over time, the Boogeyman's pranks become more insidious and incriminating which further ruins Frances' life. Frances ends up losing her friend Joanne, making an idiot of herself when she tries to convince others of Larry's existence and having her family questioning her sanity. The two of them decide to put their heads together to get rid of the Boogeyman.
Then she learns that Larry was Darwin's imaginary friend. But, Frances convinced Darwin in the past that Larry was not real, so Larry starts to turn into a boogeyman himself which is the fate of all imaginary friends who get cut loose prematurely.
Finally, the Boogeyman performs such a crazy prank that the entire town is demanding answers from Frances and her family and turned Frances into an outcast in front of the town and her family. Then Darwin gets kidnapped by the Boogeyman, who hopes to kill him, and Larry and Frances must travel into the mysterious Boogeyworld under the bed to save him and restore her reputation.
For a few minutes, Larry turns into a complete Boogeyman and the real boogyman almost kills Darwin by throwing him over a cliff as Larry held Frances captive with a net. But Frances convinces Darwin that Larry is real and Larry reverts back to his normal self. After using a special machine on the original boogeyman, Frances realizes that it's her old imaginary friend, Zoe. Frances had turned her back on Zoe when Darwin became sick and she had decided that imaginary friends and flights of fancy were useless while family and reality was important, which she thought were the only things to save him. She apologizes to the boogeyman and Zoe returns to her old imaginary self.
They all return to the real world and Larry and Zoe have to leave. Frances, whose name was cleared and her life back in order, has become too old and they have to go to new children. Frances is distraught as it was not easy for her to believe in them again so, before Larry and Zoe leave, Larry kisses Frances as a way of showing her that childhood was great but, then, so is adulthood if she keeps a sense of wonder. But they still visit when Frances is sleeping.
Read more about this topic: Don't Look Under The Bed
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“The plot was most interesting. It belonged to no particular age, people, or country, and was perhaps the more delightful on that account, as nobody’s previous information could afford the remotest glimmering of what would ever come of it.”
—Charles Dickens (1812–1870)
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“There comes a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)